SD cards: the cheap way to boost laptop storage

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

An increasing number of laptops these days boast SSDs, but capacities are rising quite slowly. For some people, 128GB as your main drive might be enough, but if you want more, is it worth shelling out the huge fees charged by manufacturers to upgrade to a higher capacity SSD, or can you make do with alternative storage?

To find out, we ran our standard file transfer tests – first between a RAM disk and the SSD of a brand new laptop, then between a RAM disk and a variety of external storage devices. (more…)

Ultimate PCs (part one): water-cooling, dual-graphics and more

Monday, August 8th, 2011

It’s been two years since an Ultimate PC group test found its way into the pages of PC Pro, and this year’s selection showed exactly what we’ve been missing. Seven systems arrived to fight for the title and, with every single one boasting an overclocked processor and dual graphics, we knew we were in for a fierce battle before we’d even unpacked.

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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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I kissed a flash, and I liked it…

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Someone was asking about SSD drive upgrades in a comment thread; I just took a bit of a risk and tried the OCZ Apex Series 120GB inside my two-ish year old MacBook Pro.

You want the short summary? It works. And how: the machine boots in a shade over 4 seconds.

The detail is where the devil lives, of course. This wasn’t a full test, by any means – i got a recommendation from a mate and thought the risk worth taking: I wanted to extend the life of the trusty MacBook but if it turned out the whole idea was a non-starter I could always use the SSD in a more mainstream laptop, and I wanted to see if the claimed advances in flash architecture really did make the whole concept more usable. Well, that and a conversation with the guys at Overclockers who instantly categorised all the cheaper options by a four-letter word rhyming with “trap”. But then, vendors with new expensive things to sell often do that…

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First look: Samsung’s ultraportable X-series – the 13.3″ X360 and 14.1″ X460

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

With netbooks stealing all the headlines in the sub-2kg market, it’s refreshing to see that the big manufacturers are still making premium ultraportables for £1000+ budgets. After all, netbooks might be fine for surfing the net or tapping out the odd email, but still don’t offer a combination of power, screen resolution and features which can truly replace a fully-featured ultraportable laptop.

It was only last week that we took a good, hard look at Sony’s latest business-focussed ultraportable, the VGN-Z11WN/B, and now hot on its lightweight heels is Samsung’s newly refreshed X-series.

We managed to get a closer look at two models from the range, the 13.3” X360 and the 14.1” model, the X460.

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