Contributed by Joey Pomerenke
The IBM Thinkpad, now produced by Lenovo, has continued to enjoy its status as a standard notebook choice among corporations and businesses worldwide. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Lenovo indicated it had no intention of letting up the slack in its efforts to stay current with the latest notebook technologies. It has continued to roll out updates to its flagship Thinkpad line, and in recent months, the Thinkpad T410 received several significant upgrades, including addition of the latest Core i5 and Core i7 processors by processing giant Intel. As a result, the Thinkpad line, known for its ruggedness, reliability, and unassuming black exterior, has received significant speed and power boosts to keep it in the competition among the latest offerings by other business laptop manufacturers. The T410 looks and feels like a Thinkpad. It comes in matte black styling, it feels rugged and resilient, but it has numerous and notable changes under the hood. Essentially, the outside looks old, but the inside feels new. The specifications of those insides will be discussed below.
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Archive for Reviews – Page 2
By Nadav Snir
HP has introduced HP Envy 17 and HP Envy 14 almost simultaneously. These two laptops have features that are revolutionary in the laptop market and the Envy 17 could be the laptop to beat.
For people who are fond of big screens, the Envy 17 would be ideal. The screen is 17″ and the laptop is packed with a host of powerful features. For starters, the laptop’s configurations use HP’s core i3 and i5 processors. In addition, this laptop has a DVD burner and an HDMI port and allows for the expansion of RAM up to 8GB.
An in-depth tutorial. Highly readable.
A review by Bill Coan, Microsoft Word MVP
Some people think there’s only one Matthew MacDonald who writes books about Access, but I know better: I’ve read “Access 2010 The Missing Manual,” and I’ve seen for myself that there are two Matthew MacDonalds.
The first Matthew MacDonald is a good one, the one who rejected the too-easy idea of merely writing a survey of database concepts or merely writing a survey of the Access user interface. This Matthew MacDonald insisted on writing an integrated presentation of database concepts and associated Access procedures–a presentation perfectly suited to readers building their first serious business database in Access.
It seems that ever since Microsoft Windows appeared, there has been Windows-based utility programs claiming to do what Windows doesn’t and to
improve your computer’s speed. As Windows evolved over the years, Microsoft incorporated utilities in the OS itself, such as Disk Cleanup and an improved defragmenter, just to name two. What third-party utility suites, such as the original Norton Utilities, did was to go beyond these rudimentary tools (and the missing ones) to provide an arsenal of tools to keep your PC running fast and clean. Often, though these large suites of utilities would bog down the system, so rather than speed up your PC, they had the opposite effect.
Now, the PC Pitstop company has been around for about a decade and all that time they have been producing PC utilities to optimize your PC. In fact, “Optimize” is the name of their best-selling product. Click here to learn about Optimize 3.0.
Recently, PC Pitstop released their comprehensive utility suite, PC Matic, which is the collection of all of PC Pitstop’s technologies under one hood and integrated into an easy to use interface. This is a utility suite that is definitely not overwhelming to the new PC user and is robust enough for the most experienced Windows geek.
Let’s take a closer look. Read More→
How many bookmarks (or Favorites) have you acquired over the years? Would you like to have them all neatly organized, categorized and safely backed-up? What if you use multiple browsers, such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Chrome or Opera? Do you have different bookmarks stored in all of them? What would be nice to have is a browser-independent program that you could save all bookmarks to, yet have them handy in a fully search-able place.
This is where FruitfulTime’s Bookmark Manager comes in. Bookmark Manager works independent of any browser by employing a global ‘Hotkey’, such as CTRL+Shift+B. This opens the Add New Bookmark window where you can edit the name and assign a category for the bookmark. Now, no matter what browser you are using, the bookmark is available through Bookmark Manager.
To download a free copy of Bookmark Manager just click here.
The first task for me, however, was getting all my bookmarks together so that I could get them organized. To begin, you should use your browser to export your current bookmarks/favorites to an HTML file. In Internet Explorer, hit the ALT key to get the menu bar to display. Then click File>Import and Export…and click Export to a file. Check ‘favorites’ then click next and next again to choose the location of the file to be created. Choose a location you will remember! In FireFox, you need to go to ‘Organize Bookmarks’ under the Bookmark label in the file menu, choose Import and Backup and then Export HTML.
Now, you can use Bookmark Manager to import these HTML files so that you can begin organizing your bookmarks. depending on the amount of bookmarks you have, importing may take some time. I have over 1300 bookmarks and I would say it took about 3 to 5 minutes to get them imported:
Once the importing is completed, you can start organizing. You will note that the folders you had set up in your browser are now categories in Bookmark Manager. This makes it easy to assign/unassign a category to a particular bookmark or a bunch of bookmarks at once.
It would be nice if Bookmark Manager had a drag and drop feature (within the categories) to make the initial organizing go a bit faster, but this is a minor annoyance at best. I like the fact that you can assign multiple categories to a single bookmark. For instance, you likely have some bookmarks you visit often. You could store them in a category such as ‘Faves’, but also have the bookmark categorized under ‘technology’, ‘news’ or some other heading of your invention. Now you are beginning to see the real strength of Bookmark Manager!
You can also install Bookmark Manager on a USB stick to carry with you to work, or another location so you have your bookmarks with you. Alternatively, a USB stick is a good place to backup your bookmarks to and Bookmark Manager will assist you to do this easily with the options under the File menu:
Here are some of Bookmark Manager’s other features:
Conclusion:
FruitufTime’s Bookmark Manageris a must for those that have collected may bookmarks over the years and want a good, safe way to organize them and most importantly, back them up. There are a few features that I would have liked to see such as a broken link checker and a favicon fetcher, but perhaps a future version may incorporate these extras.
To download a free copy of Bookmark Manager just click here.
Photography is probably one of the biggest fields to be impacted by technology. For instance, when I was very young, the Kodak Brownie camera was the all the rage. Then, the Polaroid Instant camera. Then came the pocket camera in which the film came encased in a cartridge that just dropped in to the camera. Replacing this was the 35mm automatic camera with auto-focus & auto flash, which meant that everyone could take high quality pictures with a greater degree of knowing your pictures would ‘turn out’.
Of course, photo processing has greatly improved as well. No more dropping off your film at the local drugstore and waiting a week or two to find out if your photos were any good. And if they were not-so-good, there was nothing much you could do to improve them anyway.
By William Glatnik (Contributed)
The iPad is a brilliant concept: a computer driven solely by your touch. Since the announcement of the iPad on January 27, 2010, no device has generated so much hype. iPad rumors ranged from running Mac OS X to having a built-in camera. This article will provide facts and dispel rumors. And with all the Internet Hype going on you sure will need to have the rumors dispelled and the facts outlined.
The iPad has a 9.7 inch multitouch LED (backlit) display, a pixel resolution of 1024×768, an A4 processor, 16-64 GB of flash storage, 802.11n Wi-Fi support and Bluetooth 2.1. The iPad comes in 2 flavors: a WIFI only version and a WIFI+3G version. The iPad weighs roughly 1.6 Lbs. Like its predecessors it has an accelerometer and runs on iPhone OS (albeit a slightly modified version). The iPad claims 10 hour battery life although the settings used to achieve that are not known. There are several criticisms with these features. Why was iPhone OS was used instead of MAC OS? Mac OS is not optimized for the multitouch display like the iPhone OS. Another criticism concerns the A4 processor. The A4 processor contains the same graphics chip as the iPhone 3GS, yet its only 400 mhz higher. Will the A4 processor support the higher resolution without bugs or crashes? The iPad is running on a 4:3 aspect ratio. This aspect ratio is great for reading books and browsing the web, yet it will be problematic for watching movies — the letter boxing would be too big.
By Vinnit Alex (Contributed)
The Dell Studio 15 is the new notebook that fills in the gap made by the Inspirion laptops and the XPS series. It is focuses mainly on the design oriented and multimedia user. The Studio 15 has got the fundamentals of both the XPS and the budget and robust image of the Inspirion ranks. The Dell notebook provides widespread configuration possibilities including the software and the hardware and also the appearance. You will find 11 different designs to choose your favorite. The entire Dell Studio 15 is structured in plastic but is a high quality product with no creaking noise. You will find a sturdy magnesium frame to handle the good performance at the bottom of the unit.
I’ve never been one to recommend or even post much about beta releases, but this is one I feel may be of interest to my readers here at WindowsTalk.
If you are already using Google’s Chrome browser, you likely know how speedy it is compared to Internet Explorer and Firefox; at least I notice the difference on my Windows 7 laptop.
It was with great pleasure that I accepted a review copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Unleashed from SAMS Publishing. I am a big fan of the ‘Unleashed’ series, going back all the way to Windows 3.1 and even OS/2 Warp. I read them all voraciously, and here is where I learned my way around an operating system (OS) like Windows throughout the years. Retail software no longer come with hundred-page manuals like they did in the ‘old days’, so it is up to third-party publishers to pick up the reigns and produce the ‘how-to’ type of manual that many folks can read and appreciate without being pandered to like a ‘Dummy’.
Paul McFedries is the author here and he does a masterful job of looking under the hood of Windows 7 and making it easy for the intermediate to advanced PC user to familiarize and customize Windows 7 to their liking.
This book has over 700+ pages (and 30+ chapters) of information that anyone can use to install, set up, network and secure Windows 7 on their PC.
What I like about these books is that you can pick it up and open it to any chapter and begin using the information immediately. You don’t need to start at chapter one, although the book progresses in ‘difficulty’ (for lack of a better word) as the chapters advance. For instance, chapter one is entitiled “Customizing Windows Explorer” while chapter 31 is “Scripting Windows with Powershell”, so you get an idea of what I mean.
One nice added value with this book, is that while the author wrote this book based on an early unreleased version of Windows 7, you can register to get a free download of an updated copy. I did this mayself, and now I keep a shortcut to the PDF version on my desktop.
From time to time, I will be sharing some tips from the book here at WindowsTalk.org, so be sure to subscribe (see upper right corner) to get all the updates and other tips!
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