The Laptop review

The HP 6715b Notebook PC is just £440.49 inc VAT until the 31st December at Cheap Laptops

The HP laptop 6715b dual core laptop for the power user on the go, packed to the brim with features such as a 15.4"tft, dual core processing, hours of battery life, 160GB hard drive and a massive 2GB RAM! This laptop will allow you to take your office with you where ever you go. Enhancing all this powerful hardware is Windows Vista Business edition to aid you in smooth and reliable operating on the move. For storing all your data an ample 160GB hard drive will suffice any medium office user in tandem with its DVD recorder for burning data onto DVDs.







This Notebook comes installed with a free 60-day trial of Microsoft® Office Professional 2007and some great features

• Get better results, faster with a new, intuitive user interface
  
• Easily find, create, and manage business documents and data
  
• Manage all your contact information and sales leads in one place
  
• Create, publish, and manage professional quality publications in-house
  

Purchasing an "OFFICE READY" Notebook entitles you to buy a Microsoft Office 2007 suite at a reduced price from
Cheap Laptops

Here's the lowdown:

• AMD Turion 64
  
• DDR2 SDRAM (fast)
  
• DVD Burner and 160 GB Serial ATA-150 hd (sadly only 5400 rpm)
  
• Biult in Wireless LAN and Bluetooth
  
• Microsoft Windows Vista
  
• 1 Year Warranty
  
• It's pretty light at just 2.6Kg
  

Visit Cheap Laptops for more information.

The stylish, Toshiba L40-14I laptop offers great value for the home user at just £399. It includes aDVD SuperMulti drive and widescreen which is great for watching DVDs over Christmas!

Here's the lowdown:

• Intel Celeron M 530 Processor
  
• (1.73 GHZ. 533 MHz FSB, 1 MB Cache)
  
• Genuine Windows Vista (R) Home Premium
  
• 1 GB Memory
  
• 120 GB Hard Drive
  

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Going on the experience of sales at Cheap Laptops and immediate colleagues, friends and family ACER are a real contender for affordable but capable laptops.

But why is that? Well, for just £352.49 (we musn't forget the obligatory 49p...) you can get your hands on an Acer Aspire 5051WLMi. Now, that's an ACER laptop with economy in mind - ie. you might "aspire" to upgrade to a Travelmate, Lamborghini etc.

What do you get?

For the price it is an impressive package powered by a powerful 2GHz AMD Turion 64 low power processor supported by 1 Gb RAM. Unusually for laptops it also has a 120 Gb hard drive and a built in DVD +/- RW. Not bad eh? Well, that's the one reason why ACER seem to be killing off Toshiba's long term domination of desktop replacement notebook PCs.

I like to call these laptops "tabletops" because they have quote high end processors and aren't ideal for travel / mobility but can still be popped away in the drawer once you've finished doing your online shopping from Tesco, ordered your wife (or partner!) some sexy lingerie to keep you out the doghouse and poked fun at friends on Facebook.

All of which moves us swiftly on to display.

Can I watch DVDS?

Well, this little laptop has a 14.1" WXGA monitor. That's Wide screen XGA in English and yes, good for personal DVD viewing but perhaps you would fork out for a 17" if you want to share. ACER laptops are alway fully featured and the cheaper models are no exception. The Acer Aspire 5051WLMi has a 5 in 1 card reader to make it easier to grab photos from a digital camera.

The laptop comes with Windows Vista home and a built in wireless interface.

HP will offer solid-state drives (SSDs) in all of its professional series notebooks, according to Dan Forlenza, vice president of HP's business notebooks.

SSDs offer several advantages over traditional hard disks, being lighter, quieter, less power-hungry and more robust because they contain no moving parts. Most of all, solid state drives are FAST. That is VERY FAST. Why is this?

Today's hard drives are advanced and theirin lies the problem. They are complex and can (as we all know) go wrong. This is because they use old electromechanical and magnetic technology. Inside a hard drive a disk (or plate) spins round by a servo motor and data is read from the magnetic tracks on the disk by a head. Sound familiar? Yes, this is how the almost extinct floppy drives of yesteryear worked.

Over time, the capacity of hard drives has increased (120 - 300Gb is standard and 500Gb - 1Tb is not uncommon now). At the same time, the rate at which data can be transferred to and from the drives has increased. After many years of slow advances with parallel ATA, data can now can be read from disks extremely quickly using the serial (SATA) standard(s). These higher transfer rates make is easier and quicker to load large files such as audio or video. But they are still not great for work such as editing or for running lots of applications at the same time on your computer (multitasking). This is because the read head has to be continuously repositioned to read data from different areas of the hard drive and moving between these can take a long time (in computer terms). Lost? Read on...

To put this in perspective, your computer (the microprocessor) only has to wait for a few microseconds (= millionths of a second) to read data from your memory (the RAM). To read some data from the hard drive typically takes milliseconds (= thousandths of a second) because a motor has to spin a physical disk round to get to the location where it can read data from the disk. The "seek time" is one technical term that relates to this delay, which is caused my the intertia of moving around mechanical parts (as opposed to "solid state" meaning nothing moves). SCSI drives used in servers and multimedia machines have been faster for some time, one reason for this is that they have a faster interface with the computer but the other reason is that they are designed to spin round faster than old IDE drives. That's why a 7,200 rpm drive beats a 5,400 rpm drive - it finds the data you want more quickly.

Finally! I hear you moan. Dell">Solid State Drive (SSD). Well, you could just call them "giant memorysticks". I have been waiting for decades (I know, it's pathetic) for these drives because I'm fed up waiting around for 1000 times longer than I have to and I am fed up of the death rattle from a dying electro-mechanical hard drive. Whilst it is not pointless spending your hard earned cash on DDR memory, dual core processors and the rest in an effort to increase performance - you are "wasting away" the dynamic performance of the system by plugging the kit into a "chug-chug" electro-mechanical drive!

This makes them an ideal upgrade for notebook manufacturers, but until recently they have been prohibitively expensive.

A 64GB NAND flash drive will be an optional upgrade for the Compaq 2510p and 2710p series, available in the UK from November. The exact price of the upgrade has not been released, although US reports suggest it could cost as much as £500.

In the meanwhile, Dell">Dell are offering solid state drives with laptops. For example, a 30Gb solid state drive is optional with the very affordable but high performance Dell XPS M1130">XPS M1130 or you can get a 32Gb SSD drive to plug straight into you current laptop for £446.68. Yes, they are still expensive but they are at least getting cheaper... this drive was £524 last time I looked.

Fujitsu Siemens has announced a partnership with mobile network operator T-Mobile UK. Under the terms of this partnership, Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ AMILO Pro V3525 series will feature T-Mobile’s web’n’walk mobile broadband service enabling users to connect to the Internet out of the box.

This combination of Fujitsu Siemens Computers’ hardware and T-Mobile mobile broadband service will offer professional, SME and home-office users alike a complete package, capable of replacing traditional desktop-bound end-user experiences. The optimized V3525 will feature an embedded SIM delivering both security and connectivity.

George Sebastian, head of UK mobile PC marketing, Fujitsu Siemens Computers explains: “This new package offers broadband connectivity straight out of the box – the laptop will even walk new users through getting connected. Combining the competitive pricing of the AMILO Pro series with T-Mobile’s proven offering this makes it incredibly easy for users to get active online quickly and easily. For business users the broadband speeds means mobile workers can access VPNs or applications over the web with confidence and ease, improving productivity.

“For those consumers looking to upgrade to wireless technology as part of a digital lifestyle, or those professional users looking to harness mobile broadband and work from home or on the move, this is a winning combination. Embedded SIMs offer improved connectivity, performance and security.”

Adrian Williams, Head of Indirect Business at T-Mobile UK, comments: “The benefits of mobile working are numerous. The ability to connect to the internet, email and office systems on the move, at broadband speeds, allows people to make effective use of the downtime on the move out of the office, and can give companies a competitive edge.

“T-Mobile’s national mobile broadband network gives customers high-speed access the internet. Combined with access to over 2,000 wireless HotSpots in the UK, which the AMILO Pro will be able to exploit, this is a compelling package for Fujitsu Siemens Computers and T-Mobile customers who embrace a flexible working lifestyle.”

The Fujitsu Siemens Computers AMILO Pro V3525 with embedded T-Mobile web’n’walk connectivity will be available from July and cost from £599 inc VAT.

www.fujitsu-siemens.co.uk