Gadget Reviews

Few Best Ways to Protect Your Laptop – A Complete Notebook Guide

by Satish on February 10, 2012 · 1 comment

Do you ever try to protect your laptop? Are you searching for a complete guide on how to protect your laptop for a longer life? Well, your search will end here. Protecting a laptop is very crucial when compared to desktop personal computers. Usually we don’t give much attention to our laptops when we are using it daily. Most of us will forget the basic steps of handling a laptop in right way. Nowadays, everyone has got one laptop with them. We usually use laptops when we are out, and we never care to bother few important things. Let me give you a detailed description on how to protect your laptops. Protecting a laptop doesn’t mean that you have to install a good antivirus and forget about it. There are a lot of aspects you have to take care of. Starting from the software to the hardware maintenance, everything must be under control.

We have found out few ways to protect your laptops from every possible way. The only thing you have to do is to follow this article carefully and try to implement them. I bet this post will really help you, especially when your laptop is not performing well. Here goes the list of most important points you have to remember when using a laptop.

protect your laptop

Protect Your Laptop from Theft :

Most of the people lose their laptops when they put them for charging. We usually use a power cable connector with AC adapter to charge our laptop batteries. You can actually use many software’s to protect your laptops. It’s better to use ALARM which is a laptop A/C Removal Monitor. This is an open source application designed by SourceForge.net. If someone is trying to steal your laptop by remove the power cable connector from your laptop, it will raise an alarm with big sounds. This is really useful when you are away from your laptop in a public place. This will work only when there is a power cable connector connected to your laptop.

protect your laptop

Another best way to protect your laptop is by installing Prey. Prey is an amazing application which can really trace out your laptop, if stolen. It can trace the location and take the picture of the person who stole it. You have to enable the protection to ON in the official site, when your laptop is missing. You have to install this application in your laptop first, and then create a account in Prey. Whenever your laptop is missing, you can directly trace out the missing laptop with the help of your account id. Prey will show the exact location of the missing laptop, with the help of a map or a GPRS system. it also takes a screenshot of the person who is using it. You can also lock it down from your prey account itself. This will allow you to secure your important data. It’s completely free to use and people who want to try it out with advance options has to upgrade to a Pro account.

Protect Your Laptop from Over Heat :

Always make sure that your laptop is not left out in hot temperatures. If you leave your laptops in warm places, you may spoil the battery, hard drive and sometimes even the other internal parts of your laptop. You may even lose data from your hard drive sometimes (I’m not kidding). You have to really take care of the surroundings when you take your laptop out. Most of use our laptop even on car hoods, outings on sunny days, near to huge machines and other random places. This has to be avoided if you want to save your laptop. You should also take care about few things like,

1) Don’t bring your laptop suddenly out of a Air condition (AC cool) to a normal or a hot temperature.
2) If you are changing the place, make sure that the temperature is constant for a while. It’s better to switch of your laptop, if you are not using it. But it’s better to switch it off when you are moving from one temperature to other (like AC and Non AC temperatures).
3) Don’t use your laptops more than 2hrs in places where there is no AC. Especially most of us use our laptops in cars which have no AC or buses when traveling long.
4) Make sure you always carry a plastic bag with you. In case of rain, you may cover your laptop to avoid water getting into it.
5) Try to use a cool pad. This will make your laptop to cool down a bit. I recommend you to use a cool pad if you use your laptop for more than 3hrs continuously.
6) Never let your laptop to go near Microwave Ovens, TV’s, DVD Players and other electronic devices. The magnetic force from these devices will corrupt your hard drive for sure.
7) Never switch on of your laptop in less than a minute when switched off. Make sure you maintain a gap of at least 1min before actually turning it on.
8 ) There are chances to short circuit if you let your laptop to take water onto it. So, try to avoid using the laptop when it’s wet.
9) Over charging will make your laptop behave weird. It may burn up the AC adapter first and then the internal parts slowly.
10) Unplug your laptop from charging if there is a heavy rain. It’s better that you connect the power cord to a stabilizer or UPS when you are using your laptop at home.

protect your laptop

Save the External & Internal Battery Life :

Most of us fail to save our laptop batteries. We usually screw up our batteries within 2years. There are a lot of issues when it comes to save your laptop battery. The most important things to keep in mind are,

1) Never use your laptop when you are charging the battery.
2) Wait for the 100% completion of your battery charge up to use it again. It usually takes 2 to 3hrs to charge up completely.
3) Don’t expose the battery to direct sun light.
4) Discharge the battery from your laptop, if you are not using it from long time.
5) Never put your laptop or batteries in hot temperatures like machines, car tanks, sun light, and other hot places.

protect your laptop

These were few important points to save your battery externally. But if you want to save your battery from internal point of view, then you have to follow these below steps.

1) Switch off the WI-fi and Bluetooth devices when not required.
2) Don’t play high resolution graphic games when the battery life is less than 50%. It will drain the battery life 2 times faster.
3) Using USB ports will drain your battery life sooner. So avoid using external mouse, pen drive and joystick when not required.
4) Use 5/10 minutes power schemes to switch of your monitors when the laptop is idle.
5) Use tools like Push Monitor Off to switch of your monitor screen when not used. Just download this application and press Shift + F1 to enable and disable your laptop display screen.
6) Turn of the back-end processors and unwanted programs from the Task Manager. Also make sure you don’t have pending scheduled tasks and auto save features in MS office.
7) Don’t leave CD/DVD in your disk drive when not required. Remove it as soon as you have done your work.
8 ) It’s better to use Hibernate mode instead of Sleep.
9) Don’t use flashy screensavers and funny desktop applications.
10) The most important point, Decrease the brightness of your screen. Especially when you are in a dark place.

Installing a good Maintenance Tool :

There are a lot of tools which can protect your laptop. One of the best tools is IObit Toolbox. IObit can protect your laptop with over 20 different tools. You can find options like Cleaning, Repairing, Security and other categories, where you can protect your laptop. Also we all forget how much battery life is left out in our laptops. This can be solved by using BattCursor. This application when installed in your laptop will display a battery bar under your cursor and shows how much battery life is actually remaining for further use. It will change the color of the battery according to your usage. If the color of the battery bar turns red, then make sure to charge your laptop battery again.protect your laptop

Saving the Memory :

If you don’t have enough disk space, you can always use some tools like Portable Apps Suite Standard. This will allow you to install tools in your USB drive. So whenever you have utilities with less memory, try to install them in your USB with this application. And to protect important files in your USB drive, you can always use TrueCrpt

Take care of Keyboard and Screen :

It’s your responsibility to make sure the keyboard and screen are properly protected. Sometimes we observe that there will be a lot of dust around the keys in our laptop. This will make the keys to function slowly and also there is chance to jam your keys. Since we love our laptop, we usually show too much of love towards it. Like, letting it to eat your burger, make it to drink a Beer and offer other food items. Make sure you are protecting your keyboard from liquids. Protect Covers are the best alternatives to save your screens and keyboards. Usually we never take care of the display screen for laptops. The LCD screen of any laptop is very sensitive. Its better to use a screen guard against scratches and other marks. Usually a screen guard will not cost you more than 2$. If you want to protect your mouse pad, then try to cover it with a cover from above mentioned link.

protect your laptop

Don’t use a detergent or a cleaning liquid to clean your laptop display screen.  Always try to take a soft cloth to clean the screen. It’s better that you spray the detergent liquid on the cloth first and then rub it on the screen.

Protect Your Laptop with Few Important Software’s :

Your laptop should always have a track of what applications are running behind. So you have to track what are the software’s which are in use, what is the disk space used, and what CPU usage is allocated to the installed applications. Since we can’t monitor all of these things at a time manually, it’s better to use Freemeter.

You can use Battery Care to know information like battery capacity, Battery Mode, Basic Information, Automatic Updates and etc. and to know the performance of your laptop, you can use Performance Monitor. This will show you CPU memory, disk network and other important aspects in your windows system tray. You can also try other software’s like:

  1. CPU Thermometer.
  2. Laptop Battery Power Monitor
  3. CPU-Z and etc.

This is our complete guide to protect your laptops from many issues. We hope these tips will help you maintaining your laptop well and good. If you have any queries or suggestions on the above post, Please leave a comment below. Hope this article will surely help you to protect your laptop.

Aakash Tablet PC Poor Service & Disappointing Performance – Aakash Fail

by Satish on January 13, 2012 · 17 comments

Do you think Aakash Tablet PC Failed to keep their promise? Aakash, the world’s cheapest tablet is trying very hard to deliver their product ? We are in the second week of January 2012 and still no news of Aakash Tablet. The Data Wind Company said that they will start the delivery from January 2012. But as usual they didn’t keep their promise. It was really surprising to know that they are still keeping the slot open to book Ubislate 7. I guess if we book now, it will be delivered somewhere around end of May 2012. Because, they said if you book in January, the tablet may be delivered by the end of March. Since they promised it as march, you can add two more additional months and get it by May 2012. And that too it is not confirmed that the tablet will be delivered by the end of January for people who have booked it in the month of December 2011.

Aakash Tablet PC Failed: Disappointing Service

The main reason to discuss about the poor service of Aakash and Datawind is their negligence towards people’s queries and mails. There are around 40 websites with Aakash domain name stating them as the official site. Out of which 38 are fake and the remaining two are the official sites which are of no use. You can find hundreds of comments and mails on our Aakash posts. Each and every comment is replied by Coolpctips team. Doesn’t the Datawind Company feel the minimum responsibility of replying to people who send them mails? At-least an automated message can keep them waiting. To be frank, I guess there is no proper and well structured customer service team guiding the people who have booked the Aakash Tablet. At least an official press meet can give people some hope. Which the Datawind company is not trying to do. They might be busy with their deliver data coming close. But a official statement saying that the tablet will be delivered in so and so time will be fair enough to keep a hope.

Aakash Tablet PC failed

Last year in 2011, Aakash was the biggest technology news in all over the world, now it has been the biggest failure in whole world. With its poor customer service response, the tablet has become nothing more than a big fail. When the official team has announced that people can book the tab, guess they didn’t expect the response to be this big. Because in 14days, people have ordered over 15lakh tablets where each unit is priced with a tag of Rs: 2500/- Seeing this amazing response, Data Wind has decided to open 3 new factory centers in Cochin, Noida and Hyderabad. As per my knowledge, Data Wind is ready with one factory in Hyderabad which will be leading by Quad, which is making LCD for this Aakash tablet. The Datawind CEO Mr.Suneet Singh Tuli has announced that once the factories are in their place, they will be able to make 70,000-80,000 tablets per day. This seems to be a tough task for me.

It’s really good that Datawind doesn’t want their customers to pay the money online. As there are hundreds of fake aakash sites now in internet, it is really easy to fool people to pay money saying this is official site of Aakash tablet. Let’s wait for the official statement from the company to give some official statement of when they are delivering the product to their users. Recent news say that Aakash had a record of over 900,000+ pre-sales in 2011 when compared to all other tabs which were sold out around 300,000 in 2011. These 300,000 tablets include all Apple, Samsung, and other popular tabs. Seeing this huge demand for Aakash in India, the company should really take some serious action to improve the delivery date of the product.

 Aakash Tablet PC FailedIf Aakash is compared to any random low performance tablet in world, it got the cheap resistive touch screen and a slow processor which is very disappointing for a 2012 techie guy. But at this price, it is the best tablet which any student would love to have. Even though it received about 1, 00,000 orders a day, the craze of Aakash tablet is still the same. People are expecting Aakash to be the next iPad in India. Where in the cheapest model of iPad is 12times costlier than Aakash. So, expecting Aakash to be substitute of Apple iPad would be nothing more than a sin for sure. There is a proverb called, the more wheat you add, the more bread you get. This is for people who are expecting too much from a poor Indian Tablet. Keep in mind that Aakash can never replace any other tab released in India. What you are getting in 2,500 is a real gift for the people. Lets, be happy with what we are getting now.

The only replacement to Aakash can be its newer version called Ubislate 7. This comes with a 700 MHz processor which is an upgrade to 300 MHz in Aakash Tablet. The government of India has promised that Ubislate 7 will be out in market with amazing exceptions. But, it is a million dollar question when it comes to deliver the product in less time. People are feeling embarrassing when someone talks about Aakash now. Because they are tired of waiting for the tab from 3months. Let’s take a look at the Performance of Aakash which you have to read for sure. You will get to know why this tab is a tagged with a price of Rs:2,500.

Aakash Tablet PC Failed: Disappointing Performance

In the above section of our post you have read about the poor service of Aakash. Now let’s find why Aakash is a fail in terms of technology and revolutionary gadgets. To be frank, Aakash is not at all worth spending Rs: 2,500. The actual cost of the device will not cost more than Rs: 1500. Well that is not the point now, the main point is, and we have lot of hopes on Aakash. But is it really worth? Let me give a detailed answer with a No. I want to tell you few basic facts about Aakash tablet. Later, it’s up to you to decide if Aakash Tablet PC Failed or still a super hit.

1) Hidden Costs & Pricing: There are few hidden costs when you are buying Aakash. Try to find them here; you have to buy these below things to use Aakash effectively. The device will cost you Rs: 2500 + an Extra shipping which costs you minimum Rs: 200-300, you should buy a minimum of 4GB Micro SD card which will be around Rs: 400 – 900 and there will be no Earphones – Rs: 300 – 400.
Total – Rs: 3800 – 4000.

2) Slow Processor: I personally don’t think that Android can work efficiently on a 366MHz processor. The processor in Aakash is the biggest drawback of the device. You can’t run more than 3 apps at a time. Even though you try to run them, the result we all know. Restart the device..The processor is heating up very fast when compared to other tabs. If you are using Aakash for more than two hours, then you will feel that you are holding a stove in hand.

3) Limited Memory:  You cannot store much data on this device. There are a lot of amazing android apps in market which require minimum 8GB card. In our Indian market, a 8GB Memory card is somewhere around Rs: 999.. So is it worth spending almost all Rs: 1,000 for a memory card? That too for a 2,500 tab? I don’t think it will work. Even if the tab allows 32GB storage, you cannot afford to buy a Rs: 5000 memory card for a tab which is half the price of the memory card. Because you don’t have enough memory, you cannot store more movies, data and music on the tablet, which is a waste.

4) Low Battery Life: Aakash has got 2100 mAh battery which can give a battery back of hardly 3hours. So, for every 3hours you have to charge your battery? Then when are we actually using it? The situation would be worst if students are fighting for switch boards in college to charge their devices for every 3hours. If the screen size is not 7″ then the 2100 mAh would have the best battery for Aakash. Now it seems that the battery will disappoint many people.

5) Bad Display & Touch Screen: Trust me; Aakash is nothing great when it comes to its display. The basic display which has no HD output is really horrible to watch a movie or a video. The screen will reflect the light and also it’s over brightness. To my knowledge, you can never see what’s on your screen if you are under the sun. And also the touch screen is too resistive. You need to press the screen very hard sometimes to get your work done. So, don’t even think of playing a game on it. Aakash Tablet PC Failed6) No Bluetooth, No USB dongles: You cannot access your 3G dongles like Airtel, Idea and Reliance in your Aakash tablets. I still didn’t understand why they have given 2 USB ports when there is no USB dongles support. We hardly use one for the Pen drive. Also there is no support for Bluetooth or IR to send and receive data. The only possible way to copy data is the USB port used to insert USB drives.

7) No Android Market: Yes, there is no android market support to the Aakash Tablet. It will limit to very few apps. If you are a techie guy, you can install the market on this tab in minutes. But what about people who are in rural areas and what about students? Well, the answer is you can’t do anything. Just they have to adjust with what they got. If you want to install any new app, you have to spend some real time.

8 ) No Hardware Support : You cannot upgrade your tablet to newer versions of Aakash. This means, you have to fix only to android 2.2 through out your life. This is really embarrassing when you show it to your friends. If you are trying to upgrade to android 2.3 or some other versions, first try to check the processor speed and other requirements needed to install it. I am sure you will be disappointed. Because the future versions of android require minimum of 700 MHz.

9) No Speakers: The first thing is, you are not getting any headphones to listen to audio or watch video on your tab. and secondly, you don’t have any external speakers to listen the audio. So, this is another minus point in this tab.

10) Operating System: You will not be satisfied with android 2.2. Because now where ever you see any new phone or tab, they will have minimum android 2.3 or 4.0. Your processor in Aakash will never support any upgrade apart from Android 2.3. This will make you feel irritating which is another bonus and apart from this, you can find a bad logo design behind the back of Aakash which is very ugly. You feel like holding a govt. laptop filled with stickers and bar codes.

Trust me, for a Rs:2,500 tablet, these performance from a tablet is quite natural. These are the few drawbacks of Aakash which will never fulfill people’s requirement. But still we have some hope that at least we are trying to put our hands on a tab which really has been the hot favorite of year 2011. We hope at least the service should be good from the Datawind company when the product is out and ready to use by the people. If Datawind Company is not showing any respect to their buyers at the beginning stage of the tablet release, then Aakash tablet will not survive much days in the Indian market.

They are concentration only on building the product. But the key factor is missing, which is nothing but proper customer support and a healthy relationship with its users. I know that its very difficult to give replies to all 15lakh customers to tell when the product will be delivered, but still they have a alternative of announcing it in a press release or at least with an automated message to all their customers. And I am very sure that it is not worth to wait this much for a ordinary low quality tablet. Please share your feelings and queries below. We will find a way to answer it and tell you why Aakash Tablet PC Failed in India.

2012 Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies – New Revolutionary Inventions

by Pranay Kotapi on January 8, 2012 · 1 comment

A Lot of Best Upcoming Gadgets will entertain you this year. I guess everyone is excited to know about these Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies in 2012. I have found some amazing technologies which will boom up 2012 year for sure. These amazing gadgets will be are very popular in up coming days. We all are very lucky to get amazing updates from different technologies in this year 2012. We have already posted 30 Biggest Technology Inventions & Revolutionary Gadgets of 2011 in our previous post. To a continuation to that post, we are posting the 7 amazing technologies and gadgets of 2012. Check them out, hope you find them interesting.

The Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies :

1) Ultrabooks :

We’ve seen a lot of tablets last year, with the increase of demand for tablets among the student groups around the world, huge giants like Lenovo and HP are stepping forward to manufacturing Ultrabooks for the techies and people who just cant get enough performance out of their portable computers. Okay, lets hold on for a second right here. What exactly in the world is an Ultrabook? Ultrabook are the new notebook computers that are promising  enough to fill the gap between lightweight laptops and tablets. Ultra books are extremely thin, as thin as a paper !! Okay that wasn’t funny, Ultrabooks are less than 20 millimeters, or 0.8 inches which is quite unbelievable when you consider the following features.

★ High-powered, low voltage processors
★ Long battery life (A few hours more than an average laptop)
★ Near instant-on and instant-resume capabilities
★ Fast storage
★ Additional RAM
★ Larger screen sizes

Okay now comes the worst part, despite the fact that you are reading this with an open mouth, the price of Ultrabooks are “Ultra” high too, approximately 1000$ when compared to 600$ for a high end Laptop. For what its worth, since Ultrabooks are new in the market, they need some time for the prices to eventually come down to an expected 600-700$ mark by the end of the year.If you are one of those who just cant wait, then consider purchasing the following Ultrabooks which i highly recommend.

★ Toshiba Portege Z835
★ Samsung Series 9
★ LG X-Note Z330
★ Asus Zenbook UX31

2) Xbox 720

Microsoft is now down with Xbox 720, I bet you don’t know this yet. You heard it, Microsoft has already entered the alpha development phase and going strong. It might be silly to mention Xbox 720 in this post and it is even more silly to claim that its gonna release in 2012, nope XBOX 720 is set to release somewhere around 2013 as its pretty much uncertain how consistent the performance is and its performance in the market confirmed by Microsoft. Don’t be disappointed too much because  a mean gaming console that offers performance twice of that of an xbox is definitely gonna take time. Halo 4 is gonna release by the end of 2012 maybe that can drench your thirst.

Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies3) PlayStation 4

Sony is certainly in competition with Microsoft to bring up its next generation gaming console to the market. When the PlayStation 3 was released five years ago, it was sold out in almost every store, and as of June 31, 2011 there were more than 51 million units sold.The gaming console is expected to be made up to 60% of recyclable materials. Apart from that, it will also have a “Eco Start” feature, which will allow gamers to save and resume games, without having to switch off the console. So we all know its gonna take some time before we can lay our hands on Sony PlayStation 4. Check out this mock up for PlayStation 4 by the PlayStation fans.

Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies4) Windows 8

Okay we’ve just experienced the awesome features of Windows 7, Now Windows 8? Seriously? Why not. Microsoft has released the beta version already and promises a lot more features and better security than the previous versions, now that’s a catch. Though a lot of work needs to be done on Windows 8 as the beta testers have reported a lot of bugs and issues in the beta version. All we can do is wait for it and we can expect Windows 8 in the markets by the end of 2012. Now by the looks of the UI and the detail I’d say the best operating system waits upon us and vice versa.

5) Android 4.0 : Ice Cream Sandwich

We heard a lot about this in 2011, but the real action will start from 2012. and Android 4.0 just stacks up more and more on top of the interests of the android users which they love the most.Easy multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep User interactivity, and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing. Ice cream Sandwich is just simple, elegant and beautiful. You buy a phone with Android 4.0, trust me you are not gonna leave it till you fall sick. It simply is just so addictive, no wonder this is going to be the best operating system in mobile phones. Now lets see what we have in store.

Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies1) Redefined and Completely transformed User Interface.
2) High definition home screen that allows better accessibility.
3) Access your internet, music, maps, games all at the same time, with multi tasking.
3) New screen lock actions which has all sorts of fuzzy and wiggly actions to unlock your screen makes it very fun to use and interesting.
4) Better spell check features which will never make you utter “Damn that auto correct” again ever in your life again.
5) Control over network data so that you can know how your data control is transmitted over the network.
6) Live effects for video transformation which feel like a CGI movie maker with the effects features.
7) Face recognition which lets you unlock your phone with your face.

6) OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode)

We’ve relentlessly and tiredly used the CRT (Cathode ray Tube) monitors. A few years later, LCD’s (Liquid Crystal Display) we’re in our homes and we were just happy to experience the new computing experience. Best Upcoming Gadgets & Technologies

With the increasing popularity of DVDs and Blurays performance just wasn’t enough so we bought LED(Light emitting diode) screens. Now what’s OLED? An OLED (organic light-emitting diode) is a light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compounds which emit light in response to an electric current. This layer of organic semiconductor material is situated between two electrodes. Generally, at least one of these electrodes is transparent.

That’s it, these are the best technologies which are ready to hit the market. I hope you liked them, we will update you more about latest technologies and revolutions in our future posts. Tell us if you feel any gadget is missing and can be added to this Best Upcoming Gadgets list.

Most Popular External Hard Drives – Best Branded Portable Hard Disks

by Satish on December 5, 2011 · 1 comment

Oops, The Link has been changed to :  Top 20 Portable Hard Drives – The Best 500GB & 1TB External Hard disks