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Click for Presentation Materials: |
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Computer and Technology May 17, 2007 |
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By Jack Bevis (Branch 116), CTG Secretary/Web Correspondent |
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"Are You Thinking About Buying a Laptop Computer? Presented by Dean Steichen (Branch 8)
Dean presented information to guide you through the process. He outlined the key factors to consider and help you match your selection to your personal needs. He discussed issues such as transportability, keyboards, screen size, and cost. Armed with Dean's information, you will be a much better informed purchaser (and probably save some money). He defined the minimum hardware configuration that he would recommend, and presented a number of priced offerings from Fry’s covering the spectrum of user types that he had defined. From this he showed a specification list with price. He recommended that you make such a list for each of the machines that you are considering tabulated side by side for easy comparison. He added a final slide that isn’t in the online presentation. This gave his personal recommendations that include –Get the more powerful CPU such as the Core 2 Duo or Turion64x2. Have at least 1GB of RAM. Choose Nvidia or AII Graphics processors. Go for video cards with dedicated memory. Vista Premium is much to be preferred over Basic. "Q&A Session" By Dick Curry (Branch 171) Dick picked up on a question about laptop battery life. Four years life is fairly good. But operating with the ac power on as a regular thing will shorten battery life. A battery needs to be cycled. Dick recommends that about once a month you run the battery all the way down until fully discharged. There was a big discussion about Vista upgrades from an earlier operating system. It was generally agreed that this is a difficult thing to do. Look at the Microsoft site for good pointers on upgrading. Dick would not do it on an older machine.” Is a clean install better than an upgrade? The downside of “clean” is that you start with a reformatted hard drive and have to reinstall everything. You must backup all data or it will be lost. A disadvantage of the upgrade is that you reuse the old registry and retain any and all of its problems. How do you export multiple emails from Outlook Express? The simplest way is to find the file in windows explorer and copy and paste. Email attachment pictures that arrive as a red “X” are probably due to your security settings. Lower the settings. There was a comment that Google Gmail sends pictures ok. There is software available to calibrate your monitor to display true colors. Even so your pictures when sent to the print shop may still come back dark or have some other problem. If this is important to you the best solution is to use your own printer. |