Tablet Laptop

I know it has been awhile, over a year in fact! Wow, it does not seem like that long. Anyways, today I am going to talk to you about tablet laptops. I am attending Virginia Tech as an engineering student, so I was required to purchase a tablet laptop. For those of you who don't know, a tablet laptop is a laptop with a touch screen. I don't think anyone will debate the fact that a touch screen is very cool. Another nice feature of the tablet is you can rotate the screen so that when you close the laptop, the screen is facing up. then you can write on the screen with the stylus(or your finger), and take notes or write or whatever you want. Windows even has a nice little virtual keyboard that will show up on the edge of your screen if you are in tablet mode so you can still type stuff if you want. This little virtual keyboard is very slow to type on though, so I only use it for short little thing like entering user names and passwords. Windows also has some pretty cool handwriting recognition software that will allow you to write in a box and then paste what you wrote as text into other programs. If you are a college student, then the Windows Journal program comes in very handy when you want to take notes. Especially in classes that have odd symbols like math or chemistry. If you were to try to take your notes in
Word or Notepad, it would take either a lot of effort to make those symbols show up correctly. When you are using Journal and a touch screen, it is just like writing on paper. Ok, so it's not just like paper, but it is pretty close. If you have Microsoft OneNote from the Office package, it works pretty well with tablet mode as well.

Enough with the advantages of a tablet, let's talk about the disadvantages. One major disadvantage is the cost, tablet laptops are very expensive for what you get. The one I am using is pretty good, but it was also over $2000. That price tag alone will drive most people away from these devices, and I don't blame them. If I was not required to have one I defiantly would not have spent the money to get one. Another disadvantage is that virtually all tablet laptops have no graphics cards what so ever. Now days, they use the integrated card on Intel's core i3, 5, or 7 processors. These integrated cards are fine if all you want to do is watch movies or surf the web, but if you want to play any modern games, you are screwed. My laptop is only 3 months old and it cannot play Call Of Duty 4 online without massive lag. That is even with all of the settings set to the minimum. So basically if you want to play games, then forget tablet laptops all together. The finial main disadvantage is that tablet laptops seem to only come is relatively small screen sizes. This is probably because touch-screens are so expensive that any larger screens would only make the price even more outrageous, but none the less, a 13 inch screen on a $2000 laptop is some-what annoying.

In conclusion, tablet laptops are nice to have, but if you want to do anything other that take notes and surf the web, then you may want to look into USB touch-pads instead of going all the way to touch screen.

Thanks for reading and please comment.

PC vs MAC (The way I see it)

You may or may not be familiar with the constant debate between fans of the Windows based PC and the Macintosh based MAC. Both believe that their computers are the best. Personally I am a PC guy. Why you ask? Because I am one of those people that wants to have a computer that is much more powerful than what I really need. Also I want to customize the hardware specs of my computer so that there may not be another one just like it out there. (Well... there probably is another with the same stuff in it but not that many.) When you go to buy a MAC desktop, they will show you eight options, no more, no less. Eight options total, you can go to any Bestbuy and find 15 to 20 different PC computers, then go to Walmart and find 5 to 10 more. If you go to the gateway or dell website, they will let you customize your PC. This gives you 100's of different combination's. The absolute floor price for a MAC desktop is $600, which is not but until you consider you get a 2.0Ghz Core2 Duo (Not too bad), but only 1gb of RAM and a 120gb hard drive. That is somewhat pricey for what you are getting but not too bad. For a long time you could not get a Quad Core Mac, it just was not available, but just recently Apple released the Mac Pro. The cheaper model is a Quad Core Xeon box with 3 gb of RAM, its CPU runs at 2.6 Ghz. I'll admit that is quite an impressive machine until you consider it costs $2500. My computer is a PC that I built, it has an Intel Core2 Quad running at 2.5 ghz and 4GB of RAM, and it only cost me about $900 and that was roughly one year ago. That is a huge difference. I don't know why the MAC people persist to say that MAC's are better when performance wise they are not and price wise the certainly are not. I'll admit they are pretty cool with the MAC OSX but it is just not worth the price, not to me at least.

Laptop Buying Guide (Derek Style)

Today I am going to provide some insight into the world of laptops. There are a few basic criteria that I look for when I am deciding whether or not to recommend a laptop to a friend. First and foremost, is the processor. The processor is, in my opinion, the most important component of any computer. For any laptop the first thing I look for is does it have a Core2 Duo processor? If it does not it is almost immediately disqualified. Why? Because in my opinion any computer bought in this day and age needs to have a dual core cpu, but not just any dual core. Intel has a budget dual core line known as the 'Pentium Dual Core'. I do NOT like these processors at all. In my experience with them they have always seemed slow. To bring the price down Intel cut some corners on some crucial specs like Front Side Bus, and architecture. I would say for nine out of ten people a Core2 Duo CPU will serve them great. The Core2 Duo runs like a champ and is relatively power efficient. Intel did not cut any corners on the Core2 Duo, and thus it will lead to a happy laptop owner. The next major thing I look at on a laptop is the screen size. Personally I prefer a screen size of 16" or greater. This subject is really a matter of opinion, some people want an even bigger screen, some don't mind a smaller one. The next critical spec to look at on your next laptop purchase is the amount of RAM. RAM is Random Access Memory and it is the next most important internal component after the CPU. For any computer running Vista, laptop or desktop, I believe that you should get no less than 2 GB of RAM. 4 GB would be optimal, but 2 will suffice. Beyond 4 GB I don't believe that it makes much difference at the time being, but in the future more will be necessary. For the operating system, I would say that one should get no less than Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate. If you are an anti-Vista person then XP Professional is also fine, but make sure that no matter what OS you get, you must get the 64 bit edition if you have 4 GB or more of RAM. If you get the standard 32 bit with 4 GB of RAM, the computer will not be able to use all of the RAM and some will be wasted. You paid for 4 GB you might as well get the full benefit of 4 GB. As far as hard drive goes it really depends on what you plan to use the computer for. If you are only going online and reading e-mails then even something as small as 80 GB will be just fine for you, but if you plan to install a lot of games or store lots of video on your computer you may want to consider something in the neighborhood of 500 GB to 1 TB. A Terabyte (TB) is 1024 Gigabytes (GB). Other than what has been listed here, everything else is just personal opinion, I would prefer a laptop with a full number pad and a webcam, but neither of those are completely necessary to have a good computer. I hope this guide helps someone, thanks for reading.

The Intel Core i7

I think that a processor review is an appropriate place to start off my new blog. I have always been amazed by the growing power of computer processors and the i7 is no exception. The i7 is the most amazing processor to ever grace this earth. With four cores and two hardware threads per core, the i7 is capable of processing 8 instructions at the same time. The i7 comes in three different models, the 920, the 950, and the 975. The 920 runs at a core frequency of 2.66 ghz while the 975 extreme edition operates at a blazing 3.33 ghz. Rather than using a front side bus to communicate with the rest of the computer, the Core i7's use a QPI or QuickPath Interconnect. Both the 920 and the 950 have a QPI speed of 4.8 GT/s. GT/s is gigatransfers per second. The 975 Extreme edition has a QPI of 6.4 GT/s. All of these CPUs use the new LGA 1366 CPU slot so any motherboard you buy for them is built specifically with them in mind. All in all I am quite impressed with the computing power of these three new processors. Unfortunately the price tag on these monsters is quite hefty. (The 920 is the most reasonable retailing for $280, while the 975 retails for $1000). Once the price on these CPUs comes down, I will be converting to one of them at the first chance. Thanks for reading.