Posts Tagged ‘Laptops’

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Improve your laptop’s battery life

April 4th, 2012
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Longer battery life: Every laptop user wants it, but few know how to get it without buying a new machine. Though laptop manufacturers have made great strides over the past few years in increasing the efficiency (and thus the battery life) of their products, even the most efficient modern machines don’t last long enough for many users. What you may not realize, however, is that your system is probably loaded with integrated peripherals and bloatware that you’ll never use but that consume resources and reduce battery life.

In this guide, we’ll look at ways to reclaim those resources and maximize your laptop’s battery life. Some of the steps may require venturing into the BIOS or UEFI of your notebook, while others are simpler software tweaks.

Know What Kills Your Battery

Before diving in, review why notebook batteries die in the first place. From the CPU to the trackpad, every component in a laptop consumes power. The amount consumed varies from component to component and also fluctuates in response to environmental conditions such as temperature and system workload. The greater the number of components or peripherals attached to your laptop and the more work you do with it, the quicker the battery will drain. Every program, driver, or service that loads, every background task that runs, and every electronic circuit that fires up saps a tiny bit of battery life. Consequently, reducing the number of attached or active peripherals and minimizing the load placed on the notebook will prolong battery life.

Unfortunately, some of the burdens that the manufacturer or vendor places by default on your laptop’s battery may not be easy to track down and eliminate. As a result, you have to make an effort to minimize resource consumption and maximize battery life.

Try These Quick Fixes

Keeping your laptop cool, dimming its display, and enabling system hibernation are all good ways to prolong battery life; but in this guide we’ll be focusing on hard numbers that illustrate the potential benefits of certain modifications.

Tweak Your Hardware and Software

You can make a number of hardware and software changes to prolong your laptop’s battery life. However, some of these tricks might cause your laptop to function poorly or even to cease functioning entirely, so please be careful. Though we tested all of these tweaks on our own laptop, we can’t guarantee that they’ll work with your unique hardware; recognizing this, PCWorld cannot be held liable for any deleterious changes that might occur as a result of following this guide. When in doubt, make a backup.

On the hardware side, disabling or disconnecting unused components and peripherals will go a long way toward improving battery life. On the software side, disabling or uninstalling unnecessary (but resource-hungry) services and applications will help minimize power consumption. In addition, updating drivers–video drivers in particular–sometimes helps by enabling the system to optimize or offload certain processes, such as video encoding/decoding, from the CPU to relatively power-efficient dedicated hardware in the graphics processor.

Since every program or service that loads in Windows consumes system resources, you should disable the ones you don’t need or want. Start by launching the Windows System Configuration utility MSCONFIG: Click the Start button, type MSCONFIG in the Search field, and press Enter. In the resulting window, click the Startup tab to see all of the programs that start with Windows. You’ll probably see a number of programs that you won’t mind disabling. Our project notebook (an Acer Aspire) listed eight items as automatically starting with Windows: antivirus software, Steam, QuickTime, three Adobe Acrobat-related items, Skype, and Trillian.

Having your most frequently used applications start with Windows can be handy; but if they’re not vital, it’s best to disable automatic startup and just start them manually when you need them. On our project system, we disabled everything but the AV software. To disable items in MSCONFIG, simply untick the box next to each program, apply the changes, and restart the system.

You probably also have a handful of Windows Services that you can disable to conserve system resources. To see which services are launching automatically on your laptop, click the Start button, type SERVICES.MSC in the Search field, and press Enter. The services management utility will open and you’ll see a huge list of services installed on the system.

The vast majority of services listed in the management utility are vital to the operation of your OS, and you shouldn’t touch them. But if you scrutinize the list carefully, you’ll undoubtedly find a few services that you can safely disable. We recommend going through the list one by one, reading the descriptions (performing Internet searches for research if necessary) and disabling only the services you’re absolutely sure you don’t need. On our project notebook, we found a handful of services that we could safely disable, including the tablet PC input service, remote desktop-related services, the BitLocker drive encryption service, and a Qualcomm Gobi Download Service associated with an integrated 3G modem that we had never used. Bear in mind that our specific decisions may not apply to your situation; if you use BitLocker or if your laptop is convertible into a tablet, you’ll want to keep the related services enabled.

To disable a service in the manage utility, double-click it in the list and in the subsequent window that opens, and then change the startup type to Manual in the associated drop-down menu.

Disabling unused hardware or integrated peripherals is another great way to conserve resources and maximize battery life. If your notebook comes with integrated Bluetooth or a cellular modem, for example, or even a wired ethernet port that you never use, disabling the hardware will reduce power consumption and prevent their drivers from loading every time Windows starts.

You may be able to disable integrated peripherals in your laptop through the system BIOS or UEFI, or through Device Manager. The preferred method is to use the system BIOS, but many laptops don’t provide the necessary options to take this route. To see whether your laptop does, power it off, turn it back on, and during the POST sequence (before Windows begins to load) press the necessary key to enter the BIOS or UEFI (it’s usually DEL or F2). Once you’re in the system BIOS, navigate to the Integrated Peripherals menu (if it’s available) and see whether the piece of hardware you’d like to disable is listed there. If it is, select the item and disable it.

If your system BIOS doesn’t provide the mechanisms necessary to disable unused hardware, you can disable them instead through the Windows Device manager. Note, however, that disabling hardware in Device Manager doesn’t power it down; instead, the operation prevents the hardware’s driver from loading with the OS. Though not an ideal method, preventing the driver from loading does saves memory, as well as preventing the hardware from initializing.

To disable a piece of hardware in Device Manger, click the Start button, type Device Manager in the Search field, and press Enter. In the resulting Device Manager window, expand the tree to find the appropriate piece of hardware, right-click it, and choose Disable from the menu.

Another quick and easy hardware tweak that can save significant energy is lowering your notebook’s screen brightness. We’d suggest reducing the brightness to the lowest level that is still easy to read and comfortable for your eyes.

Putting the Tweaks to the Test

To gauge the improvement in battery life that our test laptop achieved as a result of the software and hardware-related modifications described in this article, we ran Futuremark’s PowerMark utility on our Core i3-powered Acer Aspire test laptop before and after making the tweaks. We tested the laptop in three different configurations: unmodified, with maximum screen brightness and all hardware and software enabled; modified with software tweaks to disable unnecessary startup items and services, but with no hardware tweaks; and modified with both software tweaks and with unneeded hardware disabled and screen brightness lowered to 75 percent.

In its unmodified state, the laptop delivered a respectable 3 hours, 16 minutes of battery life, according to PowerMark. After we performed a few simple software tweaks, the tested battery life rose to 3 hours, 28 minutes. But the biggest gains came after we fully tweaked the notebook and disabled unneeded hardware. With both the software and hardware-related alterations in place, the laptop’s battery life improved by more than an hour, to 4 hours, 16 minutes; that’s a battery-life increase of better than 32 percent.

In addition to maximizing battery life, correctly performing these system tweaks may increase your laptop’s performance. Disabling unnecessary hardware and software also reduces boot times and frees up CPU resources and memory, all of which should increase overall system performance and enhance your computing experience. May your laptop live long and prosper!

Source:http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/420467/improve_your_laptop_battery_life

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A Decade of Free Laptops to Students in Assam – Reality Chec

March 7th, 2012
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A decade ago, when the Tarun Gogoi led Congress State Government in Assam announced the Anundoram Borooah Award for meritorious students where all students scoring above 60% in HSLC (10th Board exam) were to be rewarded by a high notch PC (changed to Laptop few years thenceforth), there were few who complained.

The optimists saw it as one good chance to boost the education sector, to develop the growing human resource index in the state and to attract huge IT prospects and development. The old educationalists, with mere cautions, welcomed it.

The opportunists, quite obviously the Government and the layers engulfing it saw it as a chance to milk money on the book. Writing in black and white the numeric digits and zeroes racing behind them were commissions and shares apart from the profit of the sellers and distributors of the hardware. it was one good way to use the funds of the centre, a way no one in the Governing body needs to use brains much about policies and stuff. Most importantly, it served the politics perfect,- the 16 something’s winning the laptops from Government are the young and new vote bank in next elections.

The pessimists only complained that students, till a year ago, had to wait for years and months to get a small scholarship of few thousands and now the game is unfair! Yes, scholarships till then were meant only for the deserving meritorious ones scoring high marks or from poor economic backgrounds. Ones who scored above 90 or 80 deserve scholarships or rewards and not any Nodai or Bhodai for just making it to 60 out of 100, they argued. Soon most neighborhoods in the state saw at least one grinning teenager who could display his or her computer which was rewarded to. The pessimist had to shut up least he would be tagged as a Stupid, Just-Jealous person in his place.

The realist either did not exist then or simply did not show up anywhere.

Now that a decade has gone by and the first batch of students who got computers are definitely either working or sitting idle awaiting a job interview to apply for, it is time for the realism.

There is no sign of an IT industry taking shape in Assam yet and other states that do not spend croroes in laptops to students are just racing ahead. Tens of thousands of young IT professionals from Assam and other North Eastern states are working with MNCs in other cities in India or Abroad, yet no scope for an entrepreneur to set up an IT industry on own. Rate of unemployment, even after Education Minister’s Great stunt with TET teachers remains record high. Few Engineering or Higher Education Colleges makes the flow of students to Delhi’s and Bangalore’s even the more.

Shankar Bhuyan, from Golaghat district says, my son got a computer three years back. Since me and my wife have no idea how to use it, he used it alone or with friends. Few months back, I caught him and his friends watching a bad (porn) CD and then I have asked him to stop using it.

Bhupen, 27, says that he used his younger brother’s laptop for this thesis work in his PHD. It’s a pity, he said, that Government could gift thousands of laptops to 16 year olds for scoring 60, but could not help with a single laptop for those who actually need it, such as those pursuing higher education like PHD or MBA in the state.

Sikha, who got a computer in 2005, is now a housewife and her computer was sold off. I used it only to listen to songs, she said with a smile to our correspondent. I had 80 GBS of only songs, mostly Assamese and Bollywood, she boasted.

The Government gave away lakhs of laptops and never cared to maintain any data for the future such as what career path did those student take up, – how many became engineers, doctors, teachers, bankers, IT professionals, Sales and marketing, journalism, arts, entrepreneurs and assuming very few would have become farmers. There is no way to track effectively whether the laptops helped them in their career, but from the word of the mouth and if you do a public polling, I am sure we would find the gifted laptops as useless from a career point of view.

There is no comprehensive training module or methodology set up by the Government anywhere in the state that could help the students get properly trained in computers and its functionalities. Most students end up using that laptop as a library for playing games, music, watching videos and those with an internet connection,- Facebook and Porn. When there is no effective training and utilization methodology, the students, all teenagers are left with nothing but to use the laptops for everything except academic purpose. They get exposed to all the dirt of internet which shapes their growing minds and the fact their parents usually knows nothing what happens when you click the mouse does not help. Needless to say, we have more number of spoilt teenagers now than ever before. A spoilt, materialistic new generation who does not care about ideals is being nourished and brought up by the carrot of free gifts thrown at them for minimum hard work.

Worse, now laptops would be given to students scoring just 50%! Can the Government or the Education Minister justify how a student’s effort in scoring a 90% and one who merely gets a 50% be treated equal. All that it explains is that now the share of Commission from each laptop would be more,- more money in the pocket at the expense of Center’s funds. From the very beginning, the Anundoram Borooah Award laptops are accused to be used as a scheme of milking money by current Education Minister Himanta Biswa Sharma (who is also the Minister for IT Development) along with the Heads of Assam Electronics Development Corporation Ltd(AMTRON). Dipping further, there are even claims that the laptops used in this scheme had LINUX operating system because AMTRON had a good share of money from Free Software Foundation personnel. Linux computer operating system though assembled under the model of free and open source software needs a lot of supporting software and add-ins which are mostly not available for the Personal Computers. With WINDOWS ruling the market, it was a good marketing strategy to reach out to young students and make them habituated to LINUX and thereby reap off profits through its other associated software in the future. It needs to be mentioned that while LINUX is being used as SERVER Operating System as for it’s security ties, WINDOWS have always been a dominator over LINUX in regards of Personal Computer’s Operating System. Laptop with LINUX is simply worthless to the HSLC passed students who are always changing their operating system to WINDOWS once they receive the Anundoram Borooah Award. It does not need mentioning what kind of shares and commissions goes to the top of the Government Layer who sees through these things before implementing the process with a green signal.

It is high time we came out of the dreamy reward scheme that helps no one in reality. The same money could be far better utilized if it was used in schemes for development of the students. Why not use that money for free coaching to meritorious students who wants to compete in national level Exams such as the IIT or PMT. Why not coach and mentor deserving IAS aspirants with that money, why not sponsor the smart ones with all expenses to study in excellent educational institutes abroad and then mandate them to return and use what they learnt there for our state’s development.

The idea of rewarding students for passing a 50% does not make any sense in this competitive world today. Especially in that Assam, where no IT Loan for unemployed youths carrying higher ability to IT skills has been yet naturalized neither by the Govt nor by the Govt undertaken banks. If we have to create academic envoys of our state, it has to be meaningful, one that will be rewarding to our people and state. Spending crores in Laptops for students is just making money fly away outside of Assam to the sellers and we are not getting anything out of it. If indeed the Government is serious, why not give low interest loans to the students instead, help them get properly educated, help them with jobs and get the returns back. Or better, identify potential leaders amongst meritorious students, groom them up as future entrepreneurs and develop the state’s economy. It is such things that can be called a scheme or a plan, not distribution of useless free gifts spending croroes of public money that only imparts the urge to make easy-living or easy-money amongst students.

Source:http://www.timesofassam.com/headlines/a-decade-of-free-laptops-to-students-in-assam-reality-check/

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Windows Laptops Redefined: Everything You Need to Know About Ultrabooks

September 19th, 2011
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The Ultrabook, a new class of ultraportable laptops defined by Intel, has been making waves lately as the next major step in laptop design. These ultraslim and lightweight laptops promise to combine the conveniences of tablets with the functionality of larger notebooks. If Intel and Ultrabook manufacturers can get the design and technology right, Windows users may finally have relatively affordable and varied alternatives to the reigning ultrathin laptop, Apple’s MacBook Air. In addition to the much thinner and lighter laptops we’ll see this fall, you can expect combo devices with sliding or removable multitouch screens for true all-in-one versatility. Here’s what you need to know about Ultrabooks and whether you should prepare to purchase one.
What Are Ultrabooks?

Ultrabooks are laptops based on reference designs that Intel announced at the Computex trade show in May. Although Intel makes computer chips, not entire laptops, the company has provided the Ultrabook specification (five different ones, actually) to laptop manufacturers so that they can produce a new army of “thin, light, and beautiful” portables.

Intel defines Ultrabooks as having Intel Core processors, a thickness under 21mm (0.8 inches), and a long battery life (initial Ultrabook models are rated for at least 7 hours). They also share 11- to 13-inch displays, a weight under 3 pounds (closer to 2.5 pounds), and a near-instant resume from sleep, thanks to their solid-state drives. Ideally–and this is the kicker–Ultrabooks should be priced at under $1000.

In short, Ultrabooks are designed to be inexpensive, high-performance, and svelte laptops.
Ultrabooks Are Like the MacBook Air…But Not

In concept, Ultrabooks aren’t really new: After all, the MacBook Air meets the criteria, and Apple revealed it in 2008. And the laptop industry as a whole was already racing to thin-and-light long before the MacBook Air made skinny popular; five years earlier, for example, we had the 2-pound Sony VAIO x505.

Some people might argue that the MacBook Air is an Ultrabook, but “Ultrabook” is also a marketing term that Intel trademarked this year–a term that describes the laptop PC’s comeback attempt in a world of rising tablet and smartphone fame.

To date, if you wanted a well-designed, high-performance ultraportable laptop–something that you could easily carry everywhere without having to worry about looking for an outlet every couple of hours–and specifically one that cost about a grand, you’d have to turn to the MacBook Air. As PCWorld laptops editor Jason Cross has pointed out, Windows laptop makers haven’t been able to keep up with Apple in its innovation, marketing, and pricing for the MacBook Air.

Ultrabooks, however, may be the first worthy MacBook Air rivals, machines that can compete on all levels: design, hardware specs, and price. And Intel is pushing for innovation beyond the MacBook Air model.
The First Ultrabooks

The first Ultrabooks are coming this fall, from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba. (You might also consider the Samsung Series 9 to be an Ultrabook, but it debuted before Intel announced the Ultrabook concept.)

Asus UX21: The first Ultrabook to be introduced, this 2.4-pound laptop has an 11.6-inch display, a 0.66-inch thickness, and an Intel Core i7 processor. It’s expected to start at under $1000 and launch this month.

Toshiba Portege Z830: Billed as the “world’s lightest 13-inch laptop,” the Z830 starts at just under $1000, is 0.63 inches thin, and weighs under 2.5 pounds.

Acer Aspire S3: Launching at 799 euros ($1134) and promising to capture the MacBook Air feel, the 13.3-inch Aspire S3 offers a Core i3, i5, or i7 processor and a choice between a traditional hard drive or an SSD.

Lenovo IdeaPad U300s: This 13.3-inch Ultrabook is expected in November starting at $1200. The U300s will be available in Core i5 and i7 models, and will have a Clementine color option.
The Future of Ultrabooks: Laptops Meet Tablets

Intel has indicated that the potential of Ultrabooks exceeds what we’ve seen in current ultraportable laptops. After the initial Ultrabook models (the Windows MacBook Air clones) come out this year, we should see a second wave based on Intel’s next-generation Ivy Bridge chips–systems with touchscreens that swivel or slide out of the way. In other words, they’ll be superthin, convertible tablets. Intel is calling Ultrabooks a “new category of what promises to become the must-have, most complete and satisfying computing devices over the next couple of years.”
Should You Buy an Ultrabook?

This year’s Ultrabooks are truly attractive laptops–for both business and personal use, and especially for travel. They’re powerful, flexible, incredibly thin, light, and durable. If you need a laptop right now, these are among your best options.

However, at the moment Ultrabooks aren’t the great value we first envisioned (due to manufacturers’ issues with high costs and limited supplies), and laptop makers are taking a wait-and-see approach to this new portable category, despite Intel’s $300 million investment in the project.

If you have a couple of months to wait, you could see these Ultrabooks drop in price and become even more attractive. Alternatively, you might prefer to get in touch with Windows 8 Ultrabooks next year, or hold out for Ultrabooks with 24-hour battery life, which are due in 2013.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/240164/windows_laptops_redefined_everything_you_need_to_know_about_ultrabooks.html

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Windows 8 won’t work on desktops, laptops and tablets

June 2nd, 2011
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Stuart Turton, bring that maniacally-follicled, weirdly shaped head over here so I can slap you round the back of it for praising Windows 8.

I’ve just watched Microsoft’s Windows 8 reveal and it’s clear that Messrs Sinofsky, Ballmer et al have not so much jumped the shark as chucked the whole company into the aquarium.

Let’s start with the quite bad news before moving onto the really dismaying stuff. From this (admittedly early) video, the heart of Windows 8 looks much like Windows 7. Once Jensen gets over the exciting slidey touchscreen features of Windows 8, the same Start menu and Windows furniture is lurking beneath. Skip to three minutes through the video – that’s Windows 7, and it looks exactly the same as the operating system I’d be running right now if I didn’t like OS X more.

This consistency is broadly good news for PCs. Windows 7 is a great operating system and doesn’t need too much tinkering. The bad news is that with a full-blown desktop operating system at its heart, Windows 8 is still going to need decent hardware.

It’s an assumption to say that Windows 8 on a tablet will be a chuntery, grinding experience, but I’m going to say it anyway. A full-blown desktop operating system like Windows requires too much power to run properly on an ultraportable, low-power processor, which is why Apple only brought the barest bones of OS X to the iOS platform, and why any tablet PC running a full version of Windows 7 is absolutely doomed.

I remember watching Ballmer announce a sensationally boring set of tablets at CES in January and thumping my head against the desk, along with everyone else who’d ever tried to use a Windows 7 tablet. Windows 8 can be a desktop and laptop operating system, or it can be an operating system for tablets. It cannot be both.

Stuart’s right about Microsoft and touch when he says Microsoft hasn’t cracked it, but he’s wrong about why the company has struggled. Microsoft’s problem isn’t that it cannot design a touch UI; it’s done a great job with Windows Phone 7. The company’s problem has been trying to shoehorn touchscreen devices into markets that don’t need or want them.

Like a showhorse with a handgun, a touch interface on a desktop makes no sense. Once you’re sitting in front of a computer with a keyboard and mouse, the screen’s either too far away or at too oblique an angle to be reasonably used as a touchscreen, and why Microsoft thinks everyone wants to get fingerprints all over their desktop screens is so beyond me it’s in danger of colliding with the International Space Station.

A desktop operating system that integrates a huge swathe of touchscreen features is a waste of time, and before you argue with that, how many times have you used Windows 7’s touch features, or even been tempted to buy the hardware to use them?

Let’s head for Stuart’s main contention, though, which is that Apple is too big a threat for Windows 8 to be awful. I don’t disagree that Microsoft can ill-afford to have a Vista-style misfire with Windows 8. But Windows 8 already looks awful, and the person who decided that a loud, purple/orange/vomit colour scheme would make a good first impression needs to visit the opticians.

Second, remember Vista? When it came out, Microsoft was feeling the squeeze from a resurgent Apple, XP was well and truly on its last legs, and Microsoft badly needed to pull something great out of the bag. The result? An operating system that cost the better part of $6 billion to develop, gave a sensational first impression, and then spent the next five years annoying users until they gazed wistfully at their XP disks and reinstalled that. The idea that Microsoft will respond well to the threat of Apple is unproven at best; the only exception I can think of where the company has truly risen to a challenge set to it is Windows Phone 7, and that arrived no fewer than three years after Apple set the bar. As for its decision to spend $8.5 billion on Skype? All I can say is that the money could have been better spent on splitting Windows into two streams, one for traditional computing and one for touchscreen devices.

At the end of Microsoft’s teaser video, Harris says: “This is the new version of Windows. It’s going to run on laptops, it’s going to run on desktops, it’s going to run on PCs with mouse and keyboard, it’s going to run on touch slates: it’s going to run on everything.” All well and good, but the danger – if not the flat-out likelihood – is that if Microsoft designs Windows 8 to run on everything, it may not run well on anything.

Source:http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/06/02/windows-8-wont-work-on-desktops-laptops-and-tablets/

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Tablets will not kill desktops and laptops: Google’s Sundar Pichai

May 26th, 2011
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Despite iPad’s growth taking the sheen off PC sales and Gartner forecasting an uncertain future for laptops vis-a-vis tablets, Google stays focused on its Chrome operating system, designed for desktops and notebooks.

“We do not see the computer going away anytime in the near future. We want to remain committed to the Chrome project, and believe that desktop computing will essentially move to the cloud,” says Sundar Pichai , senior vice-president for the Chrome product range at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pichai, an Indian, is one of the top people in Google CEO Larry Page’s management team.

Pichai leads the product management and innovation efforts for a suite of Google’s search and consumer products, including Chrome, Chrome OS , Google Toolbar and Google Pack.

With more than 12 years of experience developing high-tech consumer and enterprise products, Pichai has turned out to be a key person in research and development in Google.

“We would instead see a number of devices coming into the market, which is good for internet penetration and Google’s growth,” he says. Apart from Chrome, Google has the Android operating system for the tablet PC and mobile devices.

THE PRODUCT

The Chromebook targets both individuals and corporates with most applications hosted on the cloud. “People today live on the cloud and hence we have designed everything based on that. Though Chromebooks are not for people who use very heavy applications. It’s for the lay consumer,” says Pichai.

While most applications will be on the cloud, some of Google’s popular features like Calendar and Google docs will be available in an offline mode.

Pichai sought to bust some myths about the Chromebook. One of it is about the dependence on good net access. Since all the data is in the cloud, the common belief is that Chromebook users will need very good internet connectivity.

Sceptics have said this would make it difficult for Google to make Chromebook popular. Pichai said: “If you can access Gmail and Facebook , then that level of connectivity is good enough to access Chromebook.”

FOCUS INDIA

India is one of Google’s strategic bets as the a lot of development in the enterprise features happen from India. Pichai says a large part of the application development for the Chrome project was taking place in India, though low.

MACRO PICTURE

But the future growth numbers aren’t rosy. IT research firm Gartner has predicted that PC shipments for 2011 will grow by a modest 10.5%, a sharp downgrade from its earlier forecast of a 15.9% annual growth.

Even as hardware majors like Dell , Acer and HP are laying big bets on the tablet and mobility devices, Google wants to sell Chromebook in many markets — European and Emerging markets included. “Our goal is to redesign end-to-end desktop computing. We are excited about Chromebooks. It is a new way of web based computing with under three minutes of boot,” says Pichai.

Some experts however predict that demand for personal computers will grow as the classification gets more structured.

“The market is getting structured and more devices are becoming more fit-to-purpose. Tablets did kill the netbooks but I don’t think they can kill the laptop market in the near future though they have dented their sales,” said Akhilesh Tuteja, executive director at consultancy firm KPMG.

Source:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/tablets-will-not-kill-desktops-and-laptops-googles-sundar-pichai/articleshow/8576025.cms

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HCL Infosystems organizes ‘HCL Grand Computer Carnival

May 24th, 2011
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HCL Infosystems Ltd, India’s premier Hardware, Services and ICT System Integration Company, announced a special consumer campaign, ‘HCL Grand Computer Carnival’ in association with Intel Corporation. The carnival featuring exciting offers on HCL’s range of desktops and notebooks is on from May 10 till May 31, 2011.

As part of the campaign, with every purchase of select models of Intel powered HCL ME laptops and desktops, the customers will be entitled to exciting offers. Purchase of HCL Notebook will make the customers eligible for an additional 2 years “Return to Bench” warranty worth Rs. 4999; a Tata Photon Plus data card worth Rs. 1799 at an attractive price of Rs. 899/- only; HCL ME Backpack worth Rs. 799, 3 years McAfee antivirus worth Rs. 1999, and EC2 – a unique data recovery software – absolutely free.

Every HCL Desktop is coming bundled with an additional 2 years warranty worth Rs. 2999; a ‘Wiz Pack – a unique education pack for students from KG to 12th class worth Rs. 14,000/-; EC2 – a unique data recovery software absolutely free; and Tata Photon Plus data card worth Rs. 1799 will be available at an attractive price of Rs. 899/- only.

Besides these, HCL Infosystems also provides the customers a chance to buy HCL notebooks and desktops in installments by paying 6 EMIs with no extra cost involved.

Source:http://www.indiainfoline.com/Markets/News/HCL-Infosystems-organizes-HCL-Grand-Computer-Carnival/5161252712

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HP unleashes new ProBook, EliteBook business laptops; starts at $799

May 10th, 2011
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Hewlett-Packard has been on a mission to revamp its business computers this year. Today the computer maker is introducing two new EliteBook models (including one that doubles as a tablet) and the ProBook 5330m.

Starting with the smallest of the bunch, the 3.68-pound EliteBook 2560p (pictured below) is the most travel-friendly for professionals on-the-go with its 12.5-inch diagonal HD display. HP boasts that this computer is the “only notebook in the industry with an integrated optical drive in this form factor.”

Like some of the other redesigned HP business laptops released earlier this year, the 2560p has a sophisticated brushed aluminum exterior and a rubber grip around the inside bezel to protect the monitor.

This EliteBook and the EliteBook 2760p tablet PC (pictured above) share several customizable features including second-generation Intel Core i7 or i5 dual-core processors with vPro and Turbo Boost 2.0 technologies. Buyers can opt for full-size 7,200 RPM hard disk drives or solid state drives for longer battery times.

But the EliteBook 2760p stands out on its own as it doubles as a business notebook or as a writing tablet with either a stylus pen or finger touch. As the screen rotates, the picture toggles between landscape and portrait views with the built-in accelerometer. It will also roll out first on May 9 with a starting price of $1,499. The 2560p will follow on May 23 for a bit less with a $1,099 starting price.

Finally, there is the new ProBook 5330m (pictured right), which is the touted as the “first business notebook to offer HP Beats Audio.” HP is integrating Beats Audio on several of its new business and consumer laptops this season.

The ProBook 5330m isn’t that much different from the EliteBook 2560p except that it’s slightly bigger with a slightly smaller price tag. Starting at $799 (and available immediately), the 5330m sports a 13.3-inch diagonal HD screen and that same modern brushed aluminum finish. Processor options are a bit lower with second-generation Intel Core i5 and i3 dual-core CPUs with optional vPro technology. The 3.9-pound machine is also ready for secure traveling with a fingerprint sensor and TPM for enhanced hardware-based data security.

Source:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/hp-unleashes-new-probook-elitebook-business-laptops-starts-at-799/48342

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