laptop

LAlarm – Laptop alarm security software – sounds loud alarm on theft of laptop

3 Comments / Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Portable, Software / By /

Worried about your laptop getting stolen when nature calls and you’re at a Starbucks chugging coffee and working? LAlarm (laptop alarm) semi-solves that problem by equipping your laptop with a auto-style alarm – loud and annoying!

If you have the LAlarm software installed, you simply plug your computer into a power outlet or plug in a flash drive and lock the computer. If the flash drive is disconnected, or the laptop is unplugged from the power, then the theft alarm goes off. A nice feature is that the theft alarm is audible and loud regardless of the mute status or volume level in Windows.

LAlarm has 2 other useful features – an auto-destroy folder and an e-mail-on-theft function. LAlarm will delete any data in the auto-destroy folder upon theft detection. The e-mail on theft function will send you sensitive files before wiping them.

LAlarm also has a number of additional alarms to help you be more productive: battery life, disk health, your health (time of use), mobile phone alerts and more.

Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: Free for personal use; $50 for a business license
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Dell Latitude Z is thin, light and packed with new features

Computers, Portable / By /

Dell has a new laptop line – the Latitude Z, which touts thin and light along with its standout feature: wireless charging.

Currently, only 1 model is available, the Z 600, but it is chock full of cool features. For starters, this a 16″ 1600×900 screen and the claim is that at 4.5 pounds, the world’s lightest 16″ – not hard to believe. It is just over half an inch thick (or should we say thin?) at 0.57″ to be exact.

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NY indie coffee shops probably driving customers to Starbucks

Miscellaneous / By /

In what I think is a bad move by these independent coffee shops in NYC, they’re shooing their laptop-wielding customers who camp out and buy very little in the way of coffee.

Enter Starbucks, who saw an opening and jumped into the conversation saying that their customers can stay as long as they want. See what just happened there? We blogged about it too, and now Starbucks has just a little more publicity.

So now you know where to get that caffeine hit and hang out with your ‘puter.

Google Android Operating System – Linux Competitor?

Computers, Software / By /

Android

They were always 3 choices in the operating system market – MacOS, Windows or Linux, with the latter being free but not much good for those who struggled with technology, and the others being quite pricey. Now Google have added Android to the mix, offering a free operating system that (hopefully!) will be easier to use than the Linux base – ironic, isn’t it? Android is built on a Linux operating system and now could possibly replace it.

Android was released in late 2007 as an open source software platform for phones, and contributed to Google’s sector entrance with the G1 which has become quite popular. Google are now hoping to pass on this popularity and familiararity to persuade users to adopt this OS for their computers, and manufacturers are looking to cash in on this to provide low cost laptops with the new operating system without having to resort to XP or a rather more complicated operating system.

Review: Laptop Lifts – legs for your notebook/laptop

2 Comments / Computers, Miscellaneous, Reviews / By /

If you are one of the ever-growing number of laptop users, you will have noticed that you continually need to take your laptop off your lap to let your legs cool down or place something like a book or magazine underneath it. Well, laptops are not about to get any cooler, or be made with any kind of heat buffer, because that would just spoil the thin and light sexiness that so many of them sport now.

So what to do? Well there have been numerous ‘lap cooler’ type products for years now, but nothing that really becomes a permanent addition to your laptop (my current fav so far has been the simple Lapworks Laptop Desk). Enter Laptop Lifts, a product that falls into the “why didn’t I think of that?” category.
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CES 2009: NVIDIA Ion platform makes for smallest PC

CES, Computers, Portable / By /

NVIDIA is touting its new Ion platform as they’ve demonstrated how it can be used to make the world’s smallest Vista capable premium PC. By plugging the Ion board into a case that is just slightly larger than the board and adding a hard drive, the PC is complete.

What’s more interesting is that the Ion with its GeForce 9400 (with built-in North- and Southbridges) coupled with an Intel Atom processor can be used to power even smaller netbooks that can push 1080p HD video and 7.1 surround sound audio via HDMI.

This video shot at CES shows how small the board is:
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New Apple 13-inch MacBook Air

Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Portable / By /

Here’s the other new Apple laptop refresh, the pricey, but oh so light MacBook Air. The new Airs feature beefier graphics cards like their larger MacBook brethren, in the form of nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics cards with 256 MB of DDR3 SDRAM. They have larger hard drivers (120GB SATA or 128GB solid state), faster CPUs and faster memory.

The new MacBook Air also features Mini DisplayPort instead of the DVI on the previous version. CPU: 1.6 or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn, 1066MHz front-side bus and 2GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM. All of this and it still weighs in at a featherweight 3lbs. Sweet.

Gimme!
More info from the manufacturer

Price: $1799/$2598 depending on configuration
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Cheapest Laptop – now at $130

Computers / By /

Taiwanese company, Carapelli Ltd., is selling what is currently being billed as the world’s cheapest laptop. The Impulse NPX-9000 laptop is a tiny guy in more than 1 respect – 7″ screen, 500Mhz CPU (brand?), 128MB RAM, 1GB flash storage. It naturally comes with Linux and a bunch of (probably open source) productivity software. Just one caveat – you need to buy at least 100 to get it at the $130 price.

Despite the fact that Linux can run pretty nicely (without a window manager) on 128MB of memory, running a GUI and a modern browser will probably result in a slow crawler of a machine. We recommend you look to spend north of $400 to get a decent machine that you wouldn’t want to toss out the window on day 2.

HP Mini-Note 8.9″ Aluminum Laptop

Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Portable / By /

Finally, the US gets it! Geeks are moving from the high end performance (and heavy) laptops to the ultra-portables in droves. While this market has been hot in other countries throughout Europe as well as the Asian markets including Japan, it took the Asus Eee PC to ignite the passion for ultra-portables here.

While the Asus Eee PC is definitely a rocking ultra-portable, the resolution of the monitor and the small solid state hard drive were an inhibitor for me and others. HP has answered with a tiny laptop called the HP Mini-Note Laptop which comes with a high-res 8.9″ 1280 x 768 display, a 120GB hard drive and a 92% of full-sized keyboard in cased in an all-aluminum case.

This particular setup includes the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 version of the Mini-Note. If you’re into Windows you have to go to Vista though because HP hasn’t released XP drivers.

The dimensions of this ultra-portable is 1.05″ thick x 10.04″ x 6.5″ and weighs in at only 2.6 pounds.

Gimmie!

Suggested Price: $549.99

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