The Laptop review

Lenovo's N200 Lenovo laptop comes with an integrated fingerprint reader for extra security - perhaps something the Governmnet should consider in light of today's latest personal data leak. Novelty or not, this notebook has buckets of features in a small package for just £446.49!

Wired or wireless network?
With this affordable laptop you can connect to either with the Lenovo N200 Core 2 Duo, which works with 802.11g, 802.11b and 802.11a protocols for wireless access, and Ethernet and Fast Ethernet access for wired networks. The laptop combines smooth and fast performance from the 1.5ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and backed up by a substantial 1Gb of operating memory - and it's DDR2 memory so it's fast.

The 24-bit colour WXGA TFT display offers a rich 1280 x 800 resolution with amazing colour depth lets you enter a world of superb graphics and fast video. Integrated stereo speakers with high definition sound make for a stunning combination to deliver a portable audio visual experience. A built-in microphone and camera provides communication and fun factors to the Lenovo N200 Core 2 Duo notebook PC. DVD writing facilities come as standard, with a drive that handles recordable DVD and CD media to play and write with.

Features

• Intel Core 2 Duo
  
• 120 GB Serial ATA-150 (5400 rpm) hard drive
  
• DDR II SDRAM
  
• 15.4" TFT active matrix
  
• 5 in 1 Card Reader
  
• Fingerprint Reader
  
• Integrated 1.3 Megapixel camera
  
• DVD-Writer
  

If you want to be on the bleeding edge of technology get a Vista upgrade.

This Lenovo notebook PC weighs in at just 2.8 kg with a full load of features, take a look at Lenovo laptops for more details.

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.