Tips to boot up your laptop hunt

Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist
of the Hp laptop battery   First post by: www.itsbattery.com

Laptop computers have taken over the market from desktops, but along the way many of them have become the functional equivalent of their deskbound cousins.

Laptop users tote them no farther than from one room to another, not really minding their heft or short battery life.

But many users — college students among them — still need laptops that survive away from desks and power outlets. Neither heavy "desktop replacements" nor ultralight netbooks with tiny screens and cramped keyboards work in that scenario.

This piece is for those shoppers. What should they consider when looking for a new laptop?

Mac or Windows: There's no getting around two issues. One, Windows computers have gotten a lot cheaper than Apple's Macs — a PC is easily found for as little as $300 with the cutdown Home Basic edition of Windows Vista, while Apple's cheapest laptop sells for $999. Two, Mac OS X is better than Windows Vista. OS X boots up faster, uses less memory, needs less maintenance and faces far fewer security risks than Vista (and still lets you run Windows alongside OS X).

In other words, you'll pay one way or another.

Both Apple and Microsoft will ship new operating systems this fall, with free or nearly free upgrades for anybody buying a laptop now.

Apple says its OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will include numerous performance improvements. Microsoft's Windows 7 should also run more efficiently than its predecessor and brings some interface refinements to the Windows desktop.

Both releases look promising, but history suggests that Apple's upgrade will be easier than Microsoft's.

Weight and screen size: If the computer will be hanging from your shoulder, don't get one weighing more than 5 pounds (the power brick will add from half a pound to more than a pound, depending on how much care was taken with its design). That would probably limit you to a 13- or 14-inch screen — almost always with a webcam mounted above it. If you can accept a 12-inch display, it's easier to keep the laptop's weight below 4 pounds.

Battery life: Many manufacturers won't cite a number here, but you can bet those computers won't run for more than three hours untethered. On some Windows laptops, you can buy higher-capacity batteries such as Hp F2019 battery, a worthwhile upgrade if they don't add more than half a pound.

Apple is switching to sealed-in-the-case batteries that run much longer: a 13-inch MacBook Pro played a collection of MP3s for just over five hours.