I get asked this too often. I guess many people know how to take care of their cars, wash and wax, rotate tires, change oil, etc. Well, with laptops it’s remotely similar. There is not much to change, more so there are few preventative tips.

What not to do

By now, if you have a laptop you know not to spill stuff on it, right? Well, same goes for eating above it. It wont hurt the laptop, but typing with crumbs underneath the keys is no fun.

Performance and longevity tips

First of all, do not bump, shake or rapidly move your laptop. Why? Most of you have a regular HDD in your laptop. HDD spins and uses an arm, imagine vinyl players, that arm can get damaged, knock the sensors out so the geometry is wrong (had a case like that), or just plain corrupt data.

Heat

Meaning, do not put your laptop in your lap or on covers of your bed!!!! This is the easiest way how to say goodbye to your laptop in a matter of few months, if that.

What’s the solution for this?

Actually, it is easy and cheap! Laptop cooler is the answer. Refer to the picture bellow. What it is is a piece of plastic with 1 or up to 3 fans in it. Blows cool air into your laptop’s air intake, so the CPU gets cooler faster, also blows air onto other parts, which helps tremendously.

Screen cleaning.

How to clean the screen? Buy one of the kits for LCD screens, or just get distilled water and really good microfiber towel. Do not use paper towels or swiffer! You should not spray or use any chemicals on the screen because they have the glossy film on it, which is very sensitive to chemicals.

General Cleaning

Track pad, what do I use? Diluted rubbing alcohol or some degreaser, which is also diluted, gently apply with microfiber cloth and wipe off. You will see a huge difference with your track pad. For tight spots use toothpicks and Q-Tips, they work great.

Protection

How do I make my laptop protected and shiny? Try keyboard covers, some can get used to it, some can’t. Just google it or check out ebay. I use car wax or sealant on my laptop, makes it shiny, deep gloss, and bit more protected. I also have neoprene case, which except for the seams is water proof, I put that in my bag when I travel. The case is also squishy, so it kind of protects the little bumps from damaging the laptop.

Other tips:

1. If you use laptop once a week or so, take out the battery, it will last longer.
2. Try to completely discharge your battery as often as you can, somewhere around once every few days, even once a week.
3. Get a spare charging cable/cord if you use laptop frequently or it is your only computer. Why? Majority of cords get damaged within a year, either they suck or you damage them. Ebay has plenty of cheap ones for around 12 to 20 bucks. Imagine no power cord, or paying $80 for a new one. Besides, if you like to be in more than one place around the house, it’s nice not to drag the cord around.
4. Don’t be in/near/around dusty areas as the heatsink will get clogged, and your laptop will bake itself.
5. If you have more, post comments

There you have it, follow these suggestions and your laptop will last lot longer.

What I mean by that? Finally, some high up CEOs of big cellphone companies have decided to standardize phone chargers. I hope that they will wind up using Micro USB, since it is useful in being able to connect and charge phone into my computer or laptop at the same time. With USB 3.0 released the transfer speeds will be very fast, easily above 50 MB, basically limited by the device not the technology.

A dual-module/quad-core Bulldozer will not make Intel`s Sandy Bridge quad-core run for its money, but it could likely smoke any Intel dual-core processor. AMD has a brilliant marketing idea, and that is to market processors for the general “I can definitely afford $100 quad-core” market. Intel is by far faster and more productive, yet AMD is enough for most of the public needs. However, now the fight between the two depends on how a one AMD core will compare against one core from Intel. Single Core performance, not sure, but Multi-Core AMD really should have the upper hand Big Time. AMD contends that SMT technologies like Hyper-Threading overload a single-core

architecture are by far faster, while true multi-core processors would waste resources. AMD’s senior vice president says that multi-level, multi-core processors may be the wave of the future. AMD’s dual-core design has a technical elegance that Intel’s can’t match, and that design brings superior performance, but if this new design performs like the Intel Core i5 or i7 line then I’ll bet they will sell quite well. Yes, a 12-core combination of Quad+GPU known as Bulldozer and Octal-Core on a single die could be achieved under this plan. On top of that, the additional integer core on each Bulldozer module doesn’t cost much die area; however, AMD is now stating that the additional core in Bulldozer requires approximately an additional 50% die area. AMD Bulldozer CPUs will also feature SSE5 instruction set. The biggest problem for AMD now is to engineer its six-core CPUs into a 130 W TDP using 45 nm lithography.

Last thought:

In the future I can foresee a regular dual CPU, not dual core, but actual 2 CPUs on the motherboard, like some servers. It would definitely be interesting to be able to buy one CPU for $100, and the when you are ready to upgrade to just buy another. Basically this concept is same as NVIDIA`s SLI or ATI`s CrossFire, just not as simple.

Sandy bridge is Intel’s 2011 performance mainstream architecture refresh. It has been wrestled into a new LGA 1155 socket. Also, Sandy Bridge will support OpenGL 3.0, DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1. Sandy bridge is a vast improvement over the previous Clarkdale/Arrandale-based Core i3 and Core i5 chips. Its performance will be increased without a core size increase. Sandy bridge is the code name for the latest generation of Intel mainstream processors, the successor to the Nehalem micro architecture. It was once known by the code name Gesher, meaning bridge in Hebrew.

Sandy Bridge is the first Intel processor to feature integrated graphics directly in the CPU die. It is very much like Tunnel Creek Atom-based SOC, with integrated graphics and memory controller. It will be the first high performance monolithic CPU/GPU from Intel. Sandy bridge is an impressive micro architecture to say the least. It has a high-bandwidth last-level cache and an embedded display port. It is also fast, crazy fast in fact.

Sandy bridge will also have a new extensible VEX opcode prefix . Intel focused even on power efficiency. It seems that SB is just a ploy by Intel to cut off competition from GPU manufacturers. Sandy bridge will be offered for the mobile segment, and marketed into two CPU lines. Sandy bridge is launching with no less than 29 different SKUs, which is a lot. I think that laptops having SB will be very good and crazy fast, as long as there are no problems with the GPU. Come to think of it, the next generation of console could have Sandy Bridge in them, which would make them screaming fast. I think that the Kinect and whatever PS3 has would definitely be more enjoyable. Also iPad with SB would still keep the competition miles away. With that being said, Sandy Bridge will be a welcome addition to my home soon.

Apple has decided not to wait that long to release iPad number 2. The Ipad 2 release date seems to be between

February up to June. Who knows when the iPad 2 release date will be, but one is for certain, I can`t wait because I am going to grab one. I was going to wait for Android tablets, but since Apple is so far ahead with their technology, I am not going to suffer with less able devices. Sadly, not knowing when the iPad 2 release date is, I might even consider, if something cheaper and similar quality comes out to test it. I hope that before iPad 2 release date, there will be a official list of upgrades, the most important one so far would be a USB port. Given the earliest iPad 2 release date is in February, there are no confirmed speculations about the USB port.

Ipad 2 release will also bring many differences between the first iPad and iPad2.
For example iPad 2 has only 7″ screen, but the original iPad has almost 10″ screen.
Ipad 2 will have a better and clearer resolution.
Ipad 2 will have a video camera and similar to Apple Face Time app.
Ipad 2 will also have the same functions as the first iPad.
The dimensions, other than the display size, have not yet been released, nor the official iPad 2 release date.
However, Apple will have between 400,000 to 600,000 units on the iPad 2 release date ready for the shoppers. The price on the iPad 2 release date was not released yet, let`s hope for low $400 since the screen is smaller, but honestly I doubt that. The first iPad was sold at starting at $499

There are also rumors that iPad 2 will have a camera

iPad2 Release date is between February and June 2011,

Honestly I have been looking for something to put in my friends computer, a typical budget build, and I found a GTS450 from EVGA for some nice amount of 68 after mail-in-rebate. That was a great buy just because, the cheapest possible, not counting black Friday,

gts460 was around 130 after rebates. I got the deal for almost half the price next best up. This is just a short post, but an advice for all, get gts 450 for now and see how the new series from NVIDIA and ATI affect the market. Also, don` forget to beef up your ram, some places are around $10 bucks per gig of ddr3 1600, name brads of course.

Merry Christmas, enjoy the snow!

ATI is rebranding their new cards, well just switching the numbers from 5xxx to 6xxx. It is crazy because it is already confusing trying to figure out if I want 58xxor 57xx or 47xx, and then there is NVIDIA with their 2xx or 4xx or 5xx.

Prices are the best way figure out what you might get out of the card. I have few advices for fellow confused friends, cpubenchmark.com has a section with GPU and their scores. Of course I did not forget about tomshardware, where you can find comparison charts and useful reviews. However, there are benefits to this confusion. The market will be saturated with tons of cards, and if you are not in the market for the best GPU performance-wise, you might be able to get some nice performing cards. If you are worried about investments, the 450, 460, and even 470 series have been getting cheaper day-by-day. I have snagged 450gts (nothing powerful) mainly used for high definition playback and occasional games, but when in the future if I feel like upgrading, I can just SLI (Nvidia) or crossfire (ATI) them for more power and cheaper price. In conclusion, I advise you to upgrade before the year is over. There are many good deals including Mail In Rebates, discounts, sales, etc.

Good Luck

-Dave

The idea is not to destroy it or burn it or harm it in any other way. Instead use your iPad as an informational screen.

Make the iPad post RSS feed, weather, maybe play news etc. BUT while it`s hanging on the wall. I would be scared too, to hang $600 piece of electronics on the wall, well not including my TV, I would be. However, Yanko design had solved this, or so they say.

Imagine a cellphone display, MP3 player display just as simple as a bracelet. The information scrolls around on it. I can see this being useful to runners because who wants to run around with iTouch or any other big screen sized device.

Get a small cellphone, bluetooth, and the bracelet, and voila as compact as possible. I would get one just for the sheer annoyance of looking at my cell or MP3 player to see what`s going on, who texted me, what`s playing etc. If it had OLED screen, which I am sure that in future it will, then we are in for some crazy inventions, but for now this will have to suffice.

I came across this cellphone, well iPhone maybe even an iTouch, holder. Pretty cool, hope it will be on sale somewhere soon.
Made by Yanko Design