Laptop stickers
Tuesday 7th September at 11:21 am by Allie Finnie | View/edit comments
How many of you have experienced the joy of buying a new laptop, eagerly waiting for it to be delivered, finally receiving and un-boxing it, finally getting your sleek looking machine in your hands, only to open the laptop and find your lovely new machine plastered with advertising stickers telling you what it has inside! What use are these stickers if you've already bought the machine, surely you would have found out before buying it what the laptop contained? And then you have the time consuming task of trying to scrape off the stickers with out ruining the machine. Well luckily for us AMD feel the same way about the stickers and are giving the manufactures the option of whether they want to apply them or not. And if the decision is to have the stickers then AMD has developed easy peel one! At last someone who is listening to the consumer, lets hope now that the other companies follow suit.
Well it seems to be Toshiba's turn to have a massive recall due to a burn hazard. The overheating is affecting the Toshiba Satelite T135, Satelite T135D and Satelite Pro T130 notebook models. 41,000 were sold worldwide from August 2009 through to August 2010. For more information and to find out how to proceed if you have one of the affected models 
I'm sure the user of this laptop got a big scare when lightning struck and burnt a hole straight through it! The user had the laptop plugged into the phoneline, when the lightning struck . Unfortunatley the damage caused has deemed this machine beyond economical repair, this is the first time we've seen something like this so hopefully for the user lightning won't strike twice.
In a couple of weeks, our little lovelies will be back at school. Increasingly, today's students include a laptop in their kit so how they carry around this new item is important. We always recommend backpacks however sometimes they can do more harm than good. I love bags witl lots of compartments but the trouble with this is that they can be filled resulting in a very heavy bag to heave around on our poor back. So keep it simple, ensure there is lots of padding to a) keep the laptop safe and b) protect the human body from the load. We think a spend of £20-25 should get you a good quality backpack – Targus are always reliable and come with warranty – try 
Well we are completely unbiased when it comes to laptops, yes there are manufacturers we prefer – the ones that have great parts availability with a price tag to match but we often get asked which is the toughest out there and the answer has remained the same for a number of years – the Panasonic Toughbook is exactly that, the range are the toughest on the market. Just recently, the new Toughbook 31 was shown to be dropped 26 times by a 6ft man and still it powered on no problem – 
To us, its not just about a good looking laptop that does the job but what happens when it goes wrong. So we thought we’d share with you our opinion/rating on the repair of laptops at the present time, of course this may change in time however these opinions have not changed drastically over time;
Whether you are buying an additional adapter or a replacement for your laptop, make sure it’s the right one and not a cheap and cheerful badged version. A customer called in last week stating that their laptop was under warranty and before they sent it back for assessment, they wanted to be sure what was wrong with it. It wasn’t charging the battery and was only 8 months old. Within minutes, we realised that the 2nd adapter purchased for home was a cheap replica bought for £5 from ebay – it just wasn’t up to the job basically. Very luckily, the laptop was undamaged and a journey back to the manufacturer was saved – he would have been charged for the offence! Our suggestion would be to avoid spending less than £20-£25 as you could be risking you or your laptop!
We all know that if someone is out to steal, if there is one, they are going to choose the easy option. So if two laptops are in sight and one is locked down via a security cable, the unsecured laptop is likely to go walkies. This morning, I simply went to Amazon and typed in laptop security cable and was happy to find for as little as £2.50, I could make my laptop safe. Why not invest in such an item for peace of mind - 
Yesterday, a laptop came into us acting funny on the web. We immediately suspected a virus and our fears were confirmed after a full scan. The detected Trojan virus had duplicated itself many times to cause a meltdown. The operating system had to be reinstalled from scratch as there was not an affective anti virus application installed. The virus had come from the customer’s smartphone! 
Asus have announced the launch of their B series notebooks that will be installed with the from Boston-Power's Sonata long life battery. The batteries are claimed to have a lifetime triple that of standard lithium-ion cells, that is to say the life time before the batteries degrade and hold less charge which means for us an increase in productivity, it will lower the total cost of ownership and supports the environment to boot. Only just released in the US, the UK will have a little time to wait but good news nonetheless!
Even from new, just months after using the laptop, the battery gets weak and can’t fully discharge. This applies to laptops in constant use and ones used every so often.
A woman who was burgled and tied to her bed managed to use her laptop to send an SOS message. She convinced the robber that the laptop was no use to him due to the security on it. Once he had gone, she used her feet to power it up, having struggled to type with her toes, she put the powerlead in between her toes to type a message to her boyfriend who then alerted the police. Technology saves the day!
Investigators blame an overheated laptop to the cause of a fire that did $10,000 worth of damage to a house on Friday in America. Police said an investigation into the cause of the fire revealed that it started when a laptop, which had been sitting on a mattress in a bedroom, overheated, setting the mattress ablaze. Thankfully, the father and son thought quickly by dragging the mattress out of the house, preventing the flames from spreading and no one was serioulsy injured. Laptops get very hot if left on for a long time and sat on bedding then covers up the ventilation making the laptop hotter and hotter. So here's a warning to all of you bed lovers - keep your laptop away unless you are clever enough to have one of those portable desk stands
This is what happens when you carry your laptop in an unsubstantial bag. We see laptops in all sorts of bags, suprisingly even carrier bags but this was actually in a laptop bag which probably cost £5-£10 and the padding was non existent. Our advise is to buy a backpack with loads of padding, one that looks more like a rucksack rather than a laptop carry case so you are not advertising that your carrying a laptop and spend £25+. Luckily, the screen is undamaged but the cost to repair will be £55+
We’ve mentioned security in the past for your laptop, well what about this newly released Laptop Locking Station ($80) to help make sure that your laptop is always right where you left it: on your desk. It attaches directly to a desk via several screws, is a bit like a vise: you put your laptop down, close the side arm and the laptop's locked in place; to release your laptop, just insert the key in the high-security disk lock. The all-steel backbone and deflector plates on the Locking Station can hold up to attempts to cut, drill, or pry the laptop free. While the contraption keeps your portable safe and secure, you can still rotate, slide, and tilt it to access the ports or adjust the viewing angle. The Locking Station works with laptop sizes from 13.3-inch to 17-inch.
India
Laptops are a great way to keep mobile, but when you’re on the move with them one thing you can miss out on is decent quality sound. The new 
Arc has come up with a concept of a curved notebook design with a 3D-ready OLED display.
Swiftpoint have developed a new mouse for laptops thats upto 40% more efficient than a touchpad. 
Samsung has announced the arrival of the N230 netbook, boasting a mighty 13.8 hours life assuming you buy the 'optional long life battery’. If you stick with the battery that comes with the laptop at £349 you are looking at 7 hours which is still very good. This of course is also based on what you use the laptop for. If you sit watching movies all day, that usage will be dramatically reduced. We think the exterior is stylish too, its light and small so not a bad little laptop.
If you just can't do without your laptop, then these in-car charges are a great item to keep you mobile for longer. With all the different tips on offer, most makes of laptops as well as mobile devices suck as blackberry's seem to be covered. 
With laptops becoming even more portable, I thought it was probably a good time to remind people about some useful tips while using them. Here at The Laptop Specialist, we have seen lots of varied and unusual user damage to laptops. There are always the common ones when laptops get dropped from worktops/beds/laps etc and these often result in broken ports or cracked screens. On a few occasions though we have seen ones that have landed in sinks or even baths.
HP are the latest to jump on the bandwagon with this rugged netbook aimed at primary school children. The HP Mini 100e is a pretty standard netbook specs-wise. It has an Intel N455 Atom 
