HP Pavilion dv6 and Pavilion dv7 review: first look

Monday, May 16th, 2011

It’s not often we get too excited about mid-range laptops, but HP’s makeover of its Pavilion dv6 and dv7 series laptops has just made our hearts skip a beat. With its all-new brushed aluminium chassis and a selection of Sandy Bridge processors, the Pavilion takes more than a little inspiration from HP’s Envy series.

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Apple MacBook Pro 13in: where’s the Turbo Boost?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

The Apple MacBook Pro 13in is a glorious laptop. It’s thin and light, gorgeous both to look at and to use, and it packs no small amount of power in its tiny chassis. Yet our tests have uncovered a performance issue that will affect every user.

We ran our new Real World Benchmarks on the top-end model, with a dual-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-2620M processor, 4GB of DDR3 and a 500GB hard disk. It’s a very fast laptop for its size, as a final score of 0.70 shows – that’s only around 20% slower than the top-end quad-core 17in model. Yet it’s not quite as fast as it should be. (more…)

Sony VAIO F Series 3D laptop review: first look

Friday, January 7th, 2011

Sony may have waited longer than Dr Livingstone for his friends to arrive before releasing a laptop capable of 3D playback, but it’s taken the plunge with gusto at CES this year. The VAIO F Series isn’t just for playing back pre-created 3D content: it can instantly transform 2D video into 3D too.

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Toshiba Portégé R700: first-look review

Monday, June 21st, 2010

While the Toshiba Libretto W100 and AC100 are both radically different products to what has gone before, the R700 treads more established ground. This is the successor to Toshiba’s Portégé R600 and R500, both of which were targeted at top executives from generously endowed companies.

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Toshiba AC100 mobile internet device: first-look review

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Toshiba has just announced the AC100 mobile internet device, and we were fortunate enough to grab one for an extended test over this weekend. While Tosh’s implementation of Google Android is still in development – the AC100 will be released in August – the hardware is final and we were able to get a clear idea of what the AC100 would be like as a day-to-day companion.

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The £12 laptop with the solid state disk

Friday, June 4th, 2010

The more seductive the toys they put in front of me, the more devious I get at strategies to avoid their siren call. Flying in and out of Zurich airport, I developed the Red Watch Excuse: I only buy watches with red faces, which are very rare, therefore I can merrily ignore all the very sexy, very expensive watches with non-red faces.

I wrote here about upgrading my old (and horribly unreliable, until it was repaired) MacBook Pro laptop with a solid-state drive: this was another Red Watch trick, to stop me looking at other, later, sexier MacBooks. Now, I’m carrying an HP nc4400, because it’s small enough that I can ignore pretty piano-black netbooks, and it runs Vista, which hasn’t done anything nasty to me yet and helps me to avoid buying one copy of Windows 7 per laptop… You begin to see the pattern here.

So when the iPad seemed imminent, I went back to my basic principles. I had already rescued my oldest laptop with a Compact Flash disk upgrade, after being obliged to fall back on it because it has a genuine, no-messing 9-pin serial port. Lots of switches and routers use a serial connection as part of the “I’m a brick, fix me” mode they occasionally enter: so replacing the 13GB rotating iron platter drive (c. 1997) with an 8GB solid state Compact Flash made perfect sense. However, for blog purposes this job is low on good evidence, because Tecra 8000’s put their disks inside dent-prone alloy carrier shells, so you can’t easily see what I was up to.

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Apple iPad in depth: the travelling experience

Friday, May 21st, 2010

I have a large laptop bag that will probably look rather familiar. It’s black, well padded, has more pockets than I know what to do with – but I’ve been very happy with it for the year or so I’ve had it. In this bag I carry my laptop, spare battery, charger, assorted paperwork and a plethora of other stuff. Fully loaded it weighs about 7.3 tonnes and, after a day lugging it about, leaves indents in my shoulders.

And since my Apple iPad arrived I’ve only taken the bag out once. (more…)

How (and why) Sony designed the new VAIO P Series

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Contrary to the beliefs of the rest of the PC Pro team, I didn’t spend all my time while stuck in Japan drinking sake and impersonating Elvis in debauched karaoke bars. Along with going behind the scenes to see the VAIO testing setup, I had the good fortune to hear directly from the chief project manager behind the Sony VAIO P Series – both the original and its successor – on how exactly this innovative laptop came into being.

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Toshiba Satellite Pro S500: first look review

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

The first thing to strike you on picking up the Toshiba Satellite Pro S500 is just how very big it is; its 2.5kg weight comes as something of a surprise. It looks more like a laptop with a 17in screen than the 15.6in screen that’s actually inside, and this feeling is emphasised by the fact a numeric keypad is squeezed to the right of the traditional keyboard.

While this does have its benefits, particularly for power users of Excel, it takes a little while to get used to the arrangement; for example, finding the Backspace key when typing quickly. Toshiba compensates for this by making this key, and the right Shift key, nice and large – possibly the biggest hindrance will be the half-width Enter key.

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MSI X-Slim X420: first look review

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I had a brief play with the MSI X420 at CES Unveiled last night, the opening salvo in the five-day technological war that is Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show – the biggest, as they’re rather fond of telling us, in the world.

The X420 is interesting not only of itself, but because its 14in thin-and-light design is a form factor that many people expect to be huge in the coming year or two. Light weight, thin profile, low price and high battery life are the key driving factors, and though we don’t yet know what the X420’s price is going to be in the UK (it’s $799 in the US) it’s set to deliver on the three other factors.

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