How to Wrap Your Laptop's Power Cable Without Damaging It

Published on 20 Feb 2013 : You could probably even coil it a little tighter than this, we were just being conservative for the sake of time.

Microsoft Surface Window RT / 8

OVERVIEW

Surface with Windows 8 Pro is Microsoft's bold attempt to take on not just the iPad and Android, but the entire laptop market, and bring desktop-strength tablets — a niche-product for decades — to the masses. In doing so, the company has built on its years of experience with pen and touch interfaces, and created a tablet that offers multiple input methods — including fingertip, stylus, and keyboards — right out of the box. Running on Windows 8 Pro, this tablet will be able to run all Windows desktop applications. Microsoft says it will be priced to compete with Ultrabooks, and will also be able to take them on when it comes to performance and versatility.

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Published on Oct 23, 2012 by ABCNews : Microsoft Surface RT Video Review  Does Microsoft's first Windows 8 tablet live up to the hype?

AppleMacBook Pro 13-inch with Retina display (late 2012)

OVERVIEW

Just like the 15-inch version Apple has upgrade the popular 13-inch model to support its Retina display technology giving it 227 pixels per inch for a 13-inch display. At a mere 0.75 inches and 3.57 pounds, the remarkably portable 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is 20 percent thinner and almost a pound lighter than the current 13-inch MacBook Pro. The base model will have a 2.5GHz processor, 8GB of memory and 128GB of storage with a starting price of $1,699.

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m6 : HP Pavilion

The good: The HP Pavilion m6 adds some high-end details from HP's more expensive laptops, while keeping the price down. This is a highly configurable system, with options for discrete graphics and fast CPUs.

The bad: This is just not as solidly built as HP's Envy laptops. The keyboard isn't great, and the low screen resolution feels clunky on a 15-inch laptop.

The bottom line: This near-ultrabook packs in processing and graphics power, along with an optical drive, at a reasonable price. The only real knock against the Pavilion m6 is that some of HP's higher-end systems hardly cost more.

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HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook

One thing nearly every PC maker has in store for the launch of Windows 8 is a touch-screen laptop. That's apart from all the hybrid and convertible laptops we've seen, which will also be nearly universal. Those hybrid systems have a screen that either flips around or snaps apart from its keyboard, while touch-screen laptops are traditional clamshell systems, just with a touch-enabled panel added.

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Acer's ultra-affordable Timeline U M5-481TG ultrabook - First Look

Published on Aug 8, 2012 by CNETTV : For under $800, this 14-inch ultrabook packs a Core i5 processor, Nvidia graphics, a DVD drive, and a backlit keyboard. It's a back-to-school special that's extremely tough to beat.

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Mossberg Reviews New Lenovo and H-P Laptops

Published on Aug 8, 2012 by WSJDigitalNetwork ; The relatively pricey Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Ultrabook and the much cheaper H-P ENVY 6-1010us "Sleekbook" powered by an AMD chip both have their strengths, says WSJ's Walt Mossberg. But neither has very impressive battery life.

     

Toshiba Satellite U845-S406 review

The Satellite U845-S406 does have a backlit keyboard and all the basic ports (Ethernet, HDMI, USB 3.0, SD card slot), plus a slightly larger-than-average 14-inch screen, but it weighs more than a Toshiba Portege R935 (the CPU-upgraded update to the Portege R835 CNET has reviewed), even though the Portege R935 also includes an optical drive and a faster processor. Even more oddly, some models of the new Portege are more affordable.

 

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

Simply put, Toshiba has too many laptops, but that's an argument for a different day. The Satellite U845-S406 offers what amounts to, for mid-2012, a solid, standard set of ultrabook specs and features, but in a rather generically designed package, and not at a standout price. It doesn't stand out from its peers. I'd try to get one for as little as possible and pay down for the entry-level model. This type of laptop should cost $750, not $879.

Starting price / Price as reviewed	$749 / $879
Processor	1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U
Memory	4GB, 1,600MHz DDR3
Hard drive	500GB, 5,400rpm + 32GB SSD hybrid
Chipset	Intel HM77
Graphics	Intel HD 4000
Operating system	Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
Dimensions (WD)	13.4x9.1 inches
Height	0.8 inch
Screen size (diagonal)	14 inches
System weight / Weight with AC adapter	3.7 pounds / 4.3 pounds
Category	ultrabook

31 July 2012 |  read more

MacBook Pro With Retina Display Can Cost $9,000 With All Of The Accessories And Add-Ons.

The Retina display on Apple's new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro is eye-popping. So is the price, if you want all the fixings.

The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro --unveiled by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday-- starts at $2,199. That's the price for the most basic configuration, with a 2.3GHz processor and no upgrades in storage or any accessories. As an experiment in excess, I decided to find out how much money I could hypothetically spend on the new MacBook Pro, if I upgraded every spec, purchased every accessory, and turned down no augmentation, embellishment, or anything, really, that Apple offered me during checkout.

It was a little like the Jim Carrey movie "Yes Man," if "Yes Man" followed a character who couldn't say no to any internal hardware enhancements.

So how much money would you spend on a new Retina MacBook Pro if you upgraded everything and bought every accessory offered to you in the shopping process? Turns out: About $9,000. For a new laptop. You could buy a perfectly lovely two-bedroom house in Stockton, Calif., for that much cash.

Anyway, here's how I got to the $9,000 MacBook from the advertised $2,199 starting price:

Original report here :

Big-screen ultrabooks: The first wave

Larger, thinner...better? Check out the first 14- and 15-inch ultrabook-type laptops we've seen at CNET and decide for yourself.

What's an ultrabook, exactly? Is it a slim, portable 13-incher, or any laptop that's thinnish and cool-looking? The latest confounding trend in Intel's "ultrabook" brand creep has been the rise of 14- and 15-inch laptops boasting thinner designs and those same low-voltage CPUs that smaller ultrabooks have. Call them the return of the thin-and-light laptop, if you will, but ultrabooks have finally gotten supersized.

We've seen several of these already here at CNET Reviews: the HP Envy 14 Spectre, the15-inch Samsung Series 9, the Samsung Series 5 Ultra, and the Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3. The confusing thing about these larger ultrabooks is that some are heavier than others. Some have optical drives (the Acer Timeline Ultra, Samsung Series 5), others don't (the Spectre and the Series 9). One even has dedicated Nvidia graphics.

Some aren't even formally called ultrabooks at all, like Samsung's laptops -- which is confusing, because they certainly look the part in terms of size and processor. For all intents and purposes, I'm calling all of them ultrabooks here. Does bigger equal better for a class of laptop that prides itself, paradoxically, on being thin and compact? So far, two winners seem to have emerged: the HP Envy 14 Spectre and the Samsung Series

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Samsung Series 9 NP900X4B-A02 (15-inch)

Well, first, the price: the 15-inch Series 9 NP900X4B-A02 will cost $1,499 when it debuts in late April. That's less than the $1,600-plus for last year's Series 9 13-incher, but it's still way up in the stratosphere. It's not unreasonable for a larger laptop, provided it also has better specs and performance than a tiny ultraportable computer.

That's problem No. 2: under the hood, the 15-inch Series 9 is really just the same as its soon-to-arrive 13-inch sibling. It has a Core i5 processor and a 128GB solid-state drive (SSD), and even that big screen has the same 1,600x900-pixel resolution. An included 8GB of RAM is the only notably lofty spec. There's no optical drive (of course), and there aren't even any extra full-size ports like Ethernet and HDMI; you'll need dongles or special cables, and only the Ethernet dongle comes in the box.

Still, there's no denying that the larger Series 9 is a beautiful computer. However, is it worth the $1,499 price, especially when even a MacBook Air costs less, and perfectly capable if slightly less sexy full-size laptops can be had for half of that? That's up to you. After all, Samsung makes a less thin but equally powerful Series 5 Ultra that's still reasonably slim but costs over $500 less. Also consider that, for $100 less, the next-generation 13-inch Samsung Series 9 will offer much of the same functionality, in a smaller size with half the RAM. I certainly would love a 15-inch Series 9 if it fell in my lap, but it's a lot of money for what you get. In this instance, you're truly getting a super-size ultrabook. You're paying for thin.

Larger-screen ultrabooks will be a trend throughout 2012, but I'm still not sure I get the motivation for larger, thinner laptops...even though this Series 9 is probably one of the best of them, if you're judging purely on style and feel.

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Asus N53SV LAPTOP

The N53SV is the laptop to get if you want power, but you're on a budget. We'd love a higher-quality keyboard, but this only a small bugbear in an otherwise excellent laptop.

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It's surprising the sort of quality that you can get on a budget these days. Take Asus' AU$1299 N53S — while the grey wrist rest with wood-grain pattern may be a matter of taste, the laptop is well constructed and of higher quality than you'd expect for the price bracket.

It still falls into the extremely common trap of providing a 1366x768 screen, though, something that with a screen size of 15.6 inches always seems a little too low. Still, the screen is reasonably bright, and the colour is just fine.

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