If video is your thing, try to steer toward a laptop that offers resolutions capable of widescreen 720p video. (Hint: If the screen has a resolution above 1280 by 720, it could technically give you a 720p picture, so long as the laptop has the horsepower. For example, the Samsung R610, which has a 1366-by-768-pixel resolution, can handle the job.) Most notebook screens should be able to do that now, but you also need to consider whether the laptop’s graphics processor is capable of producing the optimum picture.
Its Intel dual-core processor is older, but its performance still holds up against its low-cost competition from AMD as well as Intel. While it doesn’t blow away the entry-level competition in this roundup, Dell Vostro A840 battery,you can see from our test results what an extra 1GB of RAM does for a system in this class. Especially when you factor in that 128MB of the system memory is being shared with the integrated graphics. Also, though we didn’t run gaming benchmarks on these notebooks, it handles casual gaming without a problem.
The K50IJ ran for 2 hours and 44 minutes on our video playback battery drain test, using the included six-cell battery, putting it at the top for Gateway SQU-517 battery life in this roundup. A little power management and you can easily get more than 3 hours of time away from an outlet. Plus, our battery drain test is especially grueling, so you can expect longer life from casual Web surfing and office use.
Alongside PhysX in the Nvidia corner is CUDA, which is Nvidia’s general purpose GPU computing platform. CUDA is seeing decent support and may be of interest to videophiles, Uniwill 255-3S4400-G1L1 battery,where GPU-accelerated video encoding can produce healthy performance gains in CUDA-enabled applications. That said, I edit video on my desktop and have yet to have seen a need for a CUDA-enabled application. More than that, CUDA’s shelf life may not be that long with the OpenCL standard beginning to surface. OpenCL is similar to CUDA, except that it’s platform-independent. I can’t imagine developers playing the vendor lock-in game and only using CUDA when OpenCL (and even Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 Compute Shaders) can run on either company’s GPUs.
Many netbooks and laptops have small screens, at least compared to the monster display on your desktop. So it’s helpful to give Word documents,Sony VGP-BPS5 Battery , Web pages, and other files all the space they need. One way to do this is to move the Windows taskbar, which normally lives at the bottom of a screen, off to the side. Rick Broida offers step-by-step instructions.
But instead of going shopping for a specialized system with instant-on software, users could opt for a system with the Linux-based Android OS, which boasts a start-up time of up to 10 seconds. Users could even buy a netbook with an Ubuntu Netbook Remix OS, a specialized Linux distribution for netbooks, Toshiba PA3383U-1BRS Batterywhich comes with an advertised boot time of up to 15 seconds.