Kids Laptops

Before you buy your kid a laptop ask yourself: what are they going to use it for?

Chances are you want them to use it to help further their education. Your kids can use the laptop for education in many ways.

1.They can use the internet to research school work.
2.They can research topics that interest them like math and science, beyond that which is available to them through school and the library.
3.They can use the laptop to write their projects and then print out professional work.
4.They can keep in touch with friends through email, much cheaper than being on the phone.
5.They could learn how to edit video and photo content and share their creations online through sites like youtube.

Those are just five possible uses, off the top of my head. With younger children you might want to keep them away from certain web pages and restrict the amount of time that they can spend on the laptop, on any given day. For tips on how to do that read our review of internet filter software.

If your child is reasonably young, I would go for a budget model. The older your child the more power they will need in their laptop. As they will want and be able to do more with it.

Deciding what laptop to buy, really depends on what your child wants to use it for. Below I have written down some common sense guidelines, to help you find the right laptop for your kid.

What to look for in kids laptops:

• The laptop should be cheap, a good laptop for a kid runs in the area of £300.
• It should be small and light.
• It should run Windows XP or Vista. Realistically considering that you want to keep the price down, you are looking at Windows XP home edition. The problem of Vista is not only the cost but the increased hardware requirements that it has.
• It needs to be powerful enough to run Microsoft Office 2007 Student and most other educational software packages.
• The laptop should be age appropriate.
• It should have an internal wireless network card. This allows the child to connect to the internet on a wireless network. Your child can use this at school or wherever a wireless network is available.
• It should have more than three hours of battery life. If it has less, mobility can become a big problem.

I would recommend that you get some cheap insurance for the laptop, against theft and accidental damage. You know how kids can be.

Why not leave a comment and tell us how your purchase worked out. Were your kids able to use the laptop successfully, was the laptop powerful enough for them to do their school work on?

Best Gaming Laptop

Over the past couple of years the cost of laptops have fallen dramatically, while at the same time becoming much more powerful. This has led to an increase in the use of top end laptops for gaming. But, just which one is the best gaming laptop. In my opinion it’s the Aspire 8930G from Acer. We will look at 2 configurations of this gaming laptop, one retailing at £1,200 and then a slightly more realistic one at £820. These where both released in the UK on September 2008.

Touch pads are terrible for gaming, read our review to find the right gaming mouse for you.

Aspire 8930G High End

• 18 inch High Definition LCD
• Nvidia GeForce 9700M-GT 512MB
• Intel Core 2 Duo T8600
• 4GB RAM (2*2048MB Configuration)
• 320GB SATA Hard Drive
• Vista Home
• Integrated 1.0Mp HD Acer Crystal Eye webcam
• Blu-ray Disc/DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive

Aspire 8930G

• 18 inch High Definition LCD
• Nvidia GeForce 9600M-GS 512MB
• Intel Core 2 Duo T5800
• 3GB RAM (2*2048MB Configuration)
• 320GB SATA Hard Drive
• Vista Home
• Integrated 1.0Mp HD Acer Crystal Eye webcam
• Blu-ray Disc/DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive

It use to be that Laptop screens came in between 14 and 17 inch sizes. So the high definition LCD monitors are larger than just about any laptop screen out there.

The SATA drives are a new development in hard drive technology. It resolves the bottleneck caused by the older interface between the motherboard and the hard drive, with the new SATA connection.

If you are going to get a high end laptop you might as well get one of the new disc drives. They can read conventional DVDs as well as the double sided ones. The double sided DVDs carry about x2 the capacity of the old DVDs. Also, you can watch blu-ray discs on this, which is a nice feature.

You can’t drag a clip on webcam around with a laptop, besides those are pretty fragile. So the built in webcams are good to have.

The differences between the two laptops: The higher end model has 1 extra Gig of RAM, a better Intel CPU and a slightly better Nvidia graphics card. The truth is both these laptops will run any game on the market and run it very well. You will only see the difference one year down the line when more resource hungry games are released. The difference in price is substantial at £400. So I guess it’s up to you which gaming laptop is best for your needs.

Consider a gamepad instead of a mouse: A gamepad, also called joypad or control pad, is a type of game controller held in the hand. This means that you don’t need a surface to use it on, like you do with a mouse. If you need to be very mobile with your laptop and you hate using the touchpad as much as I do the gamepad could be the right solution for you.

Gamepads generally feature a direction controller handled with the left thumb and a set of action buttons handled with the right.

Best Flash Drive

The USB Flash Drive has come along a few years back and rendered the Floppy Disk virtually extinct. The Floppy disk was a horrible piece of work: always letting you down when you could least afford it; corrupting your work the day before a deadline; spreading viruses like the plague; running out of space; generally being annoying and slow; the list could go on. The point is the arrival of the USB flash drive thankfully got rid of all this and we should be very grateful.

What is a flash drive?

USB flash drives are small devices that can easily be used to carry data, where ever you go. A flash drive has a USB plug which means you can plug it into any PC or laptop and the drive will be picked up as if you put a DVD into the drive. Flash drives are solid state drives, this means they have no moving parts like DVD drives or hard drives. That makes them a lot less prone to breaking, if for instance you drop one. Instead of electromagnetically storing data like a hard drive, flash drives use semi-conductors to store data.

If you are looking for the best flash drive, you need to consider capacity and function, speed, price, design, extra features, and sturdiness. Metal encased flash drives may cost more than its plastic encased ones but are more sturdy. Other flash drives also have pre-added extra functions for MP3 listening or even FM tuning, while others offer useful applications such as e-mail browsing and file synchronization. Because flash drives are used to connect with a lot of computers,  some of them now come with password protection. Recently bootable flash drives have also entered the market, they are great for testing broken PCs.

Capacity

Flash drives use to hold a maximum of 1 Gig a couple of years ago. Today a bottom of the line model holds 2 Gig and a top of the line one holds 32 Gig. So the technology has improved greatly in a very short time. I would say the most flash drives sold to day are of the 8 Gig type.

Speed

The current generation of USB flash drives use USB 2.0 which means they are much faster than the older USB drives. There are some super high speed drives entering the market at the moment. Generally USB flash drives get all their power from the host connection. But these high speed USB drives may require more power than provided by the bus powered USB plug.

Gaming Mouse

Each of the big gaming mice makers have put out a new mouse for 2008. Below we will review the top 3.

Important concepts

These are just some terms that you need to understand before we can discuss the pros and cons of the different mice.

IPS (Inches per Second)

Mice have a maximum speed at which you can move them before their sensors start having problems. Mice that with low IPS fail to track the motion, when you move them quickly and your cursor starts jerking around the screen. As long as you use them on a good mouse pad this is not an issue with any of our top 3 gaming mice.

DPI (Dots per Inch)

This is a measure of the sensitivity of your mouse. The higher the number the higher the maximum sensitivity. Some of the better gaming mice will let you toggle your sensitivity while you use it. This is real handy for swapping between sniping and normal rifle use.

Memory

Some mice have memory that stores your user settings. It is only an issue if you are at an event where you move around and play on multiple PCs with the same mouse. In that case the memory is very usefull.

Polling

When you use a mouse, your OS sends a message to the mouse every so often and the mouse then sends a message back, letting the OS know what it is doing. This will generally happen between 500 and 1,000 times a second or at 1,000 hertz. Faster is better, but you wont feel much of a difference above 750 hertz.

Weights

These gaming mice tend to be pretty light. Some of them come with weights that you attach to the mouse. This adds weight as well as customizable balance to the mouse.

Razer Lachesis

Vital stats

• 4,000 max dpi
• 1,000 Hz max polling
• 60-100 IPS
• Retail UK £45

The good

1. It is ambidextrous so good for right or left handed gamers.
2. The body is very supportive so good for long game time playing.
3. It has the highest dpi - so you can set it to be very sensitive.

The bad

1. I have to move my hand to reach the side buttons.
2. The dpi settings can be a little confusing.

The mouse is very broad, so very comfortable to use. There are 2 side buttons on each side, but they aren’t very sensitive and I found them a little difficult to use. The dpi can only be increased in increments of 125, so you may not be able to fine tune the mouse as much as you would like.

I would recommend it for MMORPGs but not for shooters.

Logitech G9

Vital stats

• 3,200 max dpi
• 1,000 Hz max polling
• 45-65 IPS
• Retail UK £40

The good

1. Best software of all the mice.
2. You can set it up to automatically switch to a profile when a game launches, so say one for shooters and another for strategy games.

The bad

1. You get the feeling they tried to put too many features into it.
2. It is a little small, not everybody will like that.

It is a very small mouse. I move my mouse around with my fingers so it’s fine for me, but some people like to use their palm and they may run into problems with this one.

The G9 comes with 2 grips the Wide Load, which has a slightly more curvy left side to rest your thumb on, and the more sleek Precision.

The mouse comes with 4 weights totaling 28 grams that you can use to adjust the mouse’s balance. It works really well and makes quite a difference.

Of the 3 mice reviewed this one is my favourite, if you liked the G5 you will love the G9.

Microsoft SideWinder

Vital stats

• 2,000 max dpi
• 500 Hz max polling
• 45 IPS
• Retail UK £32

The good

1. It’s the largest of the 3 and fairly comfortable to use.

The bad

1. The dpi and IPS is much lower than that of the competition.
2. You can’t disable the lights on it.

The mouse has 30 grams of addable weight.

It also has different mouse feet that you can attach to the bottom. If you go with this mouse make sure you have a low friction mouse pad or the feet will give you problems.

The Sidewinder is a fairly bare bones solution. It’s slightly cheaper than the other options and a fairly decent effort. I won’t be buying it though.

Gaming Graphics Card

Your graphics card is the most important factor in determining what games you can play, how good they’ll look, and how well they’ll run. The other 2 important factors are your chip and your memory.

The performance of your gaming computer is especially critical when playing online games. In a fast action online game you will not be able to compete without a decent graphics card.

You can expect to upgrade your graphics card every 2 or 3 years to maintain support for all the latest graphics advancements. New games tend to take advantage of the features and extra processing power introduced by the latest graphics cards. With an older card you might have reduced graphics quality or in extreme cases be unable to play the game.

The table
These are the top 5 cards for 2008. The one on the left is the best and they get weaker as you move to your right.

Every graphics card has a GPU, which is the main processing chip on a graphics card. The Geforce 9800 GX2 and the ATI Radeon HD 3780 X2 has 2 GPUs. The chips work in parallel to try and get more performance out of the card. From there they get their 1 Gb memory, each GPU has 512 MB.

Who makes these graphics cards?
The Geforce cards are make by Nvidia which is owned by Intel. The Radeon cards are made by ATI which is owned by AMD.

Watching HD DVD and Blu-ray
You can hook a HD screen to any of these cards. They will process HD DVD and Blu-ray discs no problem.

XFX GeForce 9800 GX2

No doubt this is a super card, but it does come with a super price tag.

As you can see from the picture below the card is physically large. So make sure that it can fit into your box before you buy it.

The GX2 probably has more power than you need. But I bet next years games will make full use of it’s awesome power.

The card gets it’s power from a single 6-pin PCI Express to single 8-pin PCI Express adapter.

GeForce 9800 GTX

Wit a slightly lower cost, but with plenty of power the GeForce 9800 GTX is a very good gaming graphics card.

GeForce 8800 GT

Of the 5 cards the 8800 is probably in the widest use. It is the workhorse of serious gamers everywhere. The 8800 is tried and tested technology.

With this card you will get very good performance on just about any game on the market.

ATI Radeon HD 3780

If you are on a tight budget, the Radion HD 3780 is the card for you.

Best External Hard Drive

Why buy an external hard drive?

You may simply have run out of disk space. Buying an external backup hard drive can solve this problem cheaply and easily. You might be concerned about the loss of data from a catastrophic hard drive failure. If this is the case, read our review of backup software. Those programs can automatically backup your whole hard drive, at preset times.

The types of backup drives
1.High capacity: These hard drives are about the size of a notebook. They have better capacity and performance than portable hard drives and you can play media, like sound and video files, directly off them. When you drop these they break.
2.Portable: These drives are about the size of a deck of cards. They generally use a USB cable for power and data transfer. Dropping a portable drive shouldn’t break it.
3.NAS(Network attached storage): These drives plug into a network just like a PC.

Below we review the top external drive of each type.

A word about cables
You will probably mostly be using a USB cable. These cables come in 2 versions, version 1.1 and 2.0. Version 2 is faster than version 1, but backwardly compatible so you don’t need to worry about it. Firewire is about the speed of a USB 2 cable, but it is more of a MAC solution. eSATA cables are very fast, but unless your PC is new and top of the line, you probably don’t have a port for it. If you want the extra speed you may need to buy a card with a eSATA slot.

Buffalo Portable USB 2.0 Hard Drive/TurboUSB

These come in 80 to 500 GB sizes. If you just need to backup 10 GB or less then I suggest a portable flash memory stick. This is a plug and play device, so your PC should pick it up right away. Just like putting a CD in a drive. I tested it with Vista and XP and no problems. It comes with functional but basic backup software.

Seagate Freeagent Pro

These hard drives come in 320, 500 and 700 GB sizes. They run at 7200 RPM and have a 16 Meg buffer, which as the top end of the scale. They do suffer from the same problems as all the external hard drives. They come with only basic software and they do sometimes break down. To counter this Seagate gives a lengthy warranty. We recommend you buy backup software separately and don’t keep your only copy of valuable data on any one disk.

Buffalo LinkStation Live

This is a NAS(Network attached storage). It attaches to your business or home network with a Gigabit ethernet port. It is very fast and quiet, comes in 320, 500 and 750 GB and it works fine with Vista. It has multiple level security, so you can store sensitive data on there. The drive is suitable for shared files and backups.