HP Pavilion g6 Battery - marilynkimi's diary

When it comes to laptops, and really many other products, there are people who care more about value and getting the job done than looks and bells and whistles — and vice versa. The Dell Inspiron 14 7000 Series aims to satisfy both groups and, for the most part, hits its mark.

Design

Maybe it's just that we've seen a fair share of Dell's more budget-focused laptops over the years, but the Inspiron 14 7000 certainly looks the part of an upper mid-range mainstream laptop. There's no plastic lid with too much flex or polycarbonate bottom with multiple access panels. It's all aluminium save for its plastic hinges, and it feels sturdy enough to stand up to a daily commute. HP EliteBook 2740p Battery

The laptop is 15mm thick and measures 345mm wide by 239mm deep, making it small and thin enough to quickly slip into a shoulder bag. However, while it's not exactly heavy, at 1.86kg (2.13kg with its power adapter), you won't exactly forget you have it with you, either.Lift the lid and you'll see a backlit chiclet-style keyboard and a reasonably large clickpad. With the laptop being so thin, there's minimal key travel, so if you tend to hammer hard on your keys, you might find typing uncomfortable.

The 14-inch, 1920x1080-pixel-resolution screen is nice overall, but it doesn't get terribly bright. If you need something that's easily visible in bright office lighting or daylight outside, you might struggle with the Inspiron 14 7000. Also, the Gorilla Glass might be nice for extra screen durability, but it doesn't do you any favours when it comes to glare.The 14 7000 Series is more about portability than being a desktop replacement. The port assortment is lean with just two USB 3.0 ports and not much else. If you need things like Ethernet or more USB ports, you'll have to move up to larger-screen Inspiron 15 or 17 7000 Series models or step down to the Inspiron 14R. HP COMPAQ 2740p Battery

There are currently only two configurations available for the 14 7000 Series. Reviewed here is the AU$1099 base model, which includes a fourth-gen Intel Core i5 processor; 6GB of RAM; a 500GB, 5,400rpm hard drive; and Intel HD Graphics 4400. For AU$1499, you can bump the processor up to a Core i7-4500U processor and get 8GB of memory, as well as a 256GB SSD.

With the AU$1099 configuration, you should expect to get through daily tasks and entertainment with relative ease. It can handle multitasking like streaming music or video in the background while you do basic photo editing or web surfing without feeling sluggish.That said, the slow-spinning hard drive doesn't do it any favours when booting up, loading software or opening large files. Again, it's not exactly slow, but compared with the solid-state drive (SSD)-based laptops I've tested, you can feel a difference. Fortunately, it does wake from sleep in just a couple seconds.

The integrated graphics are good enough for casual gaming and viewing Full HD video. For more demanding PC games, you'll need to reduce settings to get playable frame rates. There is no option for discrete graphics with the 14 7000, but a mid-range 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 750M is available on the Inspiron 15 7000 and 17 7000 models.HP Pavilion DV7 Battery

Dell quotes a battery life of up to eight hours and 52 minutes for the Inspiron 14 7000. In CNET's video playback drain test, it reached six hours and 28 minutes, which is good, but behind some similarly configured laptops we've tested.

Conclusion

Super-thin, aluminium-clad laptops tend to be up around the AU$1500 mark right now. The Dell Inspiron 14 7000 comes in a bit under that, while giving you a 1080p touchscreen, backlit keyboard and good performance and battery life. All things considered, it's well priced for what you're getting, I enjoyed using it and it's small enough for travel, even with its larger screen size.Summary: A snapshot of the U.S. commercial sales channel for the first 11 months of 2013 shows a big shift in the marketplace for computing devices. Windows PCs are flat, Apple PCs are down, and tablets of all kinds (including Android and Windows devices) are way up. But the big winner is the Chromebook.A new study released just before Christmas by The NPD Group paints a vivid picture of how the marketplace for PCs and tablets shifted in 2013. It also offers some clues about what to expect in 2014. HP Envy 17 Battery

According to NPD, in the 11 months from January through November 2013, 14.4 million desktops, notebooks, and tablets were sold through U.S. commercial channels. That total includes only preconfigured notebooks and desktop PCs, and it doesn’t include direct channels. As a result, the number of devices sold represents only a fraction of total sales in the U.S. By way of contrast, IDC’s most recent Quarterly PC Tracker report shows that 16.4 million notebook and desktop PCs (tablets not included in the total) were shipped in the U.S. in the third quarter alone.

So the NPD number offers a snapshot of what American businesses and institutions are buying through the commercial channel, which includes large distributors and resellers. To summarize: Simpler and cheaper is better. Windows-based desktop sales increased by about 10 percent and Windows notebooks stayed flat, while sales of Apple notebooks and desktops combined fell by 7 percent, NPD said.

Meanwhile, tablets of all kinds and Chromebooks showed the greatest year-over-year growth.

Android tablet sales grew more than 160 percent, accounting for 8.7 percent of all sales in this channel.
Windows tablet sales nearly tripled during that period, off a very small base, reaching 2.2 percent of all devices sold through the channel. HP Pavilion g7 Battery
The iPad slipped in share year over year, although it still commands 59 percent of all tablet sales in this channel.Chromebooks were the big winner, according to NPD. The cheap devices from HP, Acer, Samsung, and others “accounted for 21 percent of all [preconfigured] notebook sales, up from negligible share in the prior year, and 8 percent of all computer and tablet sales through November, up from one tenth of a percent in 2012.”
While those are impressive percentage gains, it’s too early to declare any of the products on that list a hit. Unlike PCs and notebooks, Chromebooks are sold almost exclusively through the retail channel and into education markets. Some quick calculations from the NPD figures suggest that a total of 923,000 Chromebooks and 836,000 Android tablets were sold to U.S. buyers through these channels over the first 11 months of 2013. During the same period in the same channel, more than 1.5 million iPads were sold, while Windows tablet sales went from practically zero to approximately 317,000 in the same period.

The mostly flat sales for Windows PCs reflect a tepid response to Windows 8. That should change in 2014, as new products that were introduced with the launch of Windows 8.1 on October 26 reach the market. Windows 8.1-based hybrids like the ASUS T100 Transformer and smaller tablets such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro have been selling well and getting good reviews. Microsoft has struggled to keep its new Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 devices in stock, a welcome change from last year, when it had to take a massive writedown on unsold devices. HP Pavilion dm4 Battery

“The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change,” said Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis. The winners this year, he noted, were brands that focused on alternative form factors and operating systems. Baker cautioned against declaring the death of the PC, however: “[T]he Windows PC in commercial channels is clearly not dead, and its biggest brand proponents, HP and Lenovo, remain deeply committed to that product. However, as businesses upgrade from older machines and operating systems in the year ahead, the long-term trend is clearly towards greater hardware diversity, which all manufacturers will need to embrace in order to continue to grow.”Recently, I wrote about Intel’s efforts in developing a processing platform that could turn Android into a mainstream desktop platform. This will clearly capitalize on a low-power architecture, while still delivering the performance requirements that desktop-bound computing will require. This points to one thing of course: notebook computers, or at least tablets that are also notebook hybrids, like the Microsoft Surface, Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga and Asus Transformer Pad.

The question here, of course, is whether Android will be a capable operating system for notebook computers. HP Pavilion g6 Battery Android has already proven its worth in smartphones. And even while it had a rough start with tablet computers, Android has also proved its mettle in tablet computing, especially with popular devices like the Google Nexus 7, Kindle Fire series and a host of inexpensive tablet computers from various brands. But how about actually using Android as a platform for running notebook computers? How will the likes of the Lenovo IdeaPad A10 work, for instance?

The clear precedent here is Google’s own efforts with its own Chrome OS, and with Chromebooks that are now supposedly best-sellers on online retailers like Amazon. The premise is that Chrome OS is based on the cloud, and all the apps you need should already be available on the cloud, including email, file storage, document processing, spreadsheets, presentations and the like.

Before jumping onto the Android bandwagon, there should be a few considerations you might want to keep in mind.

Stand-alone vs. always-on connectivity. Cloud computing has clearly shifted power away from desktop software developers toward cloud service providers. Web-based email services like Gmail are clearly dominant. Browser-based document editing platforms like Google Docs are now increasingly popular. HP Pavilion tx2000 BatteryBut even if you can get connectivity through mobile data, this is still a limitation that cloud-based operating systems have. Cut off the Internet connection for any reason, and you’re cut off from your data also.