The best laptops of 2014

4 days ago | By Melissa Riofrio

Lenovo N20p Chromebook review: This $329 model stands out for its 300-degree hinge

Take an 11-inch Chromebook, add a touchscreen with a 300-degree hinge, and you suddenly have a model that's versatile and interesting. Too bad it can't be a tablet, though.

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Best Dell and Alienware Laptops

From basic, entry-level laptops to powerful gaming rigs, Dell offers more laptop variety than anyone else. For instance, college students can opt for an affordable Chromebook for everyday use, while an extra durable Dell Latitude is ideal for a busy office. Want a tablet and laptop in one? You’ll find an ultraportable with a touch display you can flip into slate mode for less than $500. There’s also Dell’s Alienware brand, which produces some of the finest gaming notebooks around. Here are our favorite Dell and Alienware laptops for work, play and everything in-between.

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Hybrid – Gaming Laptop – Ultrabook – Business Laptop – Thin and Light - Multimedia

Full Review & Benchmarks

For those on a budget who mostly need to get online, a Chromebook like the Dell Chromebook 11 is an excellent choice. Students will appreciate its sleek design, comfortable keyboard and touchpad, as well as the booming speakers. The 14.5 hours of battery life is also a major selling point. The $299 price tag is steeper than some Chromebooks, but overall this is a winner.

Full Review & Benchmarks

You won’t find a more versatile convertible for the money in Dell’s lineup. Starting at $399 ($479 as reviewed), the Inspiron 11 3000 sports a vibrant touch screen that you can easily flip into tent or tablet mode. We also like the comfortable keyboard and fairly loud speakers. The Pentium CPU provides decent performance, while the 500GB hard drive gives you plenty of storage. We just wish the touchpad were less stiff.

Full Review & Benchmarks

Gamers will slobber all over themselves at the prospect of owning this rig. The Alienware 17 combines a sexy chassis and colorful 1080p display with customizable lighting and big and rich audio. But it’s the sheer power of this laptop that will keep you coming back for more, which is due to the state-of-the-art Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M GPU and 8GB of video memory and blazing 2.9-GHz Intel Core i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM.

 Full Review & Benchmarks

The 2014 Dell XPS 13 is a sight to behold. We love the aluminum lid, as well as the soft-touch finish around the keyboard, which makes it very comfortable for typing. Even better is the full HD touch-screen display, which is much brighter than Dell’s nearest competitors. Plus, the 11 hours and 26 minutes of battery life makes this one of the longest-running Ultrabooks around.

Full Review & Benchmarks

Built for business, the attractive and comfortable Dell Latitude 7440 is one of our favorite work-minded notebooks around. This 14-inch laptop’s Tri-Metal chassis makes the machine tough enough to handle the rigors of the road. Another plus: the soft-touch deck kept our wrists cozy through long hours of typing. The Latitude 7440 is equally impressive on the inside, with a fast Core i5 CPU and a bright and colorful full HD touch display.

A Tri-metal chassis, carbon-fiber backed display and Gorilla Glass touch screen make this business laptop tough. Watch Dell’s durability test of the Latitutde 7000 series vs. the Lenovo X1 Carbon on YouTube.

Full Review & Benchmarks

Want a premium-looking notebook for a less than premium price? The Dell Inspiron 14 7000 fills that need, sporting a luxurious all-aluminum build with a starting price under $1000. This 14-inch laptop has a striking 1920 x 1080 Gorilla Glass touch screen and a 4th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, all wrapped in a thin and attractive design you’ll want to take everywhere. The keyboard is on the mushy side but otherwise this Inspiron looks as good as it performs.

The Inspiron 14 7000’s aluminum body, chamfered edges around the deck and colorful touchscreen add up to one of the most striking notebooks at this price.

Full Review & Benchmarks

The 2013 edition of Dell’s XPS 15 packs a powerful 4th-gen Intel Core processor, discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics, and a stunning 3200 x 1800 display, which is the sharpest we’ve seen yet on a 15-incher. This Windows 8.1 notebook can last most of the workday on a single charge, and its soft-touch palmrest will keep you comfortable whether you’re composing spreadsheets or casually gaming.

With a higher-than-HD, 3200 x 1800 display, the XPS 15 provides crisp, compelling images. Whether you’re watching movies or doing detailed photo editing,  this  sharp screen makes everything look better, while supplying a ton of desktop real estate for multitasking. 

A devout gamer and tech enthusiast, Mike Andronico joined the Laptop team in July 2013. With a B.A. in Journalism from Purchase College and experience at GameNGuide, Examiner and 2D-X, Mike tackles everything from iPhone rumors to in-depth hardware reviews.

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Best Business Laptops 2014

Durability. Security. Reliability. These are the hallmarks of a good business notebook. Business laptops tend to sport sturdy metal cases and feature comfortable, backlit keyboards (most of which are spill-resistant). In some cases you’ll get a pointing stick in addition to a touchpad for more precision. Business notebooks also tend to come with security software to help protect your data and the ability to dock your system for the best desktop computing experience.

Selecting the right system doesn’t just come down to specs. Your business and personal style also play a role. With all of the above in mind, we present the top rated business notebooks, based on our in-depth reviews.

The Lenovo ThinkPad T440s is quite simply the business laptop to beat. This 3.8-pound powerhouse offers a class-leading keyboard and fast performance, plus more than 14 hours of endurance with its extended battery. An optional full HD touch screen is another plus, especially for those who opt for Windows 8.1. All of this is wrapped in a sturdy magnesium and carbon fiber design.

More: Lenovo ThinkPad T440s: Full Review

Responsible for the editorial vision for Laptopmag.com, Mark Spoonauer has been Editor in Chief of LAPTOP since 2003 and has covered technology for nearly 15 years. Mark speaks at key tech industry events and makes regular media appearances on CNBC, Fox and CNN. Mark was previously reviews editor at Mobile Computing, and his work has appeared in Wired, Popular Science and Inc.

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5 budget laptops for college students: We name the best

So you’re heading back to school and you need a new laptop—but you didn’t manage your finances over the summer. Your bank account is nearly tapped out, and you still need to buy text books and lay in enough ramen noodles to last through the winter.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. Fortunately, Moore’s Law is still in play, so today’s budget notebook is yesterday’s workhorse. Pretty much any modern laptop can handle the gamut of productivity chores—word processing, number crunching, email, and the like—but all of the machines in this roundup can also tackle media editing and encoding sessions, and deliver respectable entertainment experiences.

To strike the best balance between performance and affordability, I gathered the top five notebooks I could find for $650 or less. Benchmark busters they’re not, but they aren’t budget busters, either.

Asus VivoBook S550CA (Reference)500GB 5400-rpm
(+24GB cache)HP Pavilion TouchSmart
11z-e000Toshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A5253

I used several criteria to evaluate these laptops, including benchmark performance, storage capacity, weight, battery life, and (of course) price. Three of the laptops use Intel CPUs and two are AMD-based, but no two machines use the same CPU. And though Intel’s Haswell family has been justly lauded for its conservative power consumption, the one entry in this roundup equipped with a fourth-generation Core processor finished third in our battery rundown test.

When you’re shopping in this price category, you can expect to make some trade-offs. If carry weight is your primary consideration, for example, you’ll have to sacrifice display size. The lightest notebook I looked at weighs 2 pounds less than the heaviest, but it also has the smallest screen: 11.6 inches. On the other hand, all five models here deliver the same native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels, and each has an HDMI output for connecting to an external display or a TV. Four of the five notebooks come with Windows 8 installed, but only three of them have touchscreens.

Asus VivoBook S550CA (Reference)15.6 inches, 1366 by 768 touch15.6 inches, 1366 by 768 nontouch13.0 inches, 1366 by 768 nontouchHP Pavilion TouchSmart
11z-e00011.6 inches, 1366 by 768 touch14.0 inches, 1366 by 768 touchToshiba Satellite
L55Dt-A525315.6 inches, 1366 by 768 touch

You should consider relying on the cloud or on an external hard drive if you need a lot of storage, since most laptops in this price range have smallish hard drives (and none of the ones I looked at for this story have a solid-state drive). The two models with drives bigger than 500GB are also the heaviest and most expensive in the group.

You won’t have to make too many compromises on connectivity, however: Each of the five laptops has at least one speedy USB 3.0 port, and all have both 802.11n Wi-Fi adapters and hardwired ethernet connections for networking. Even so, some models had better networking options than others.

Now all you have to do is decide out which laptop fits your needs best.

For general use, Acer’s Aspire E1 is the clear winner in this roundup. Acer crams a lot of value into this laptop’s $580 price tag, including a Haswell-class CPU (Intel’s 1.6GHz Core i5-4200U) and a 15.6-inch LED-backlit display with native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels.

Though Acer uses quite a bit of plastic in the Aspire E1’s design, you won’t be ashamed to pull the notebook out of your bag. A smooth finish and rich color—Acer calls it Clarinet Black—make the 1-inch-thick machine very attractive.

AcerThe Acer Aspire E1-572-6870 is the easy winner of this roundup.

The chassis and lid, on the other hand, exhibit quite a bit of flex, so you won’t want to subject this machine to rough handling. The upside to all the plastic is low weight: At 4.6 pounds, this laptop has an advantage of more than 1 pound over the other 15.6-inch models I looked at, and it weighs just over a pound more than the ones with smaller displays.

Capitalizing on the display’s generous size, Acer includes a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad on the Aspire E1’s deck. I expected the island-style keyboard to be somewhat flimsy, but I was pleasantly surprised by its solid tactile feedback. It’s not backlit and it’s a trifle noisy, but I have no complaints about how it felt under my fingertips.

The Aspire E1’s display is plenty bright, producing vivid photos and videos, but off-axis viewing is merely adequate. Acer also shaved a few bucks off the Aspire E1’s asking price by not including a touchscreen, but its highly responsive trackpad supports several Windows 8 gestures, including two-finger scrolling, zoom, rotate, and flip. You can also slide in from the right to open the charm bar, and slide in from the left to switch between applications.

The trackpad, which has a wide bar at its base that provides both right and left mouse-button functions, is off center in relation to the display, but dead center to the keyboard. It looks a little odd until you lay your hands on the keyboard’s home row.

The Aspire E1 has only 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory, but you can open it up and pop in a second module to double that amount to 8GB. Storage takes the form of a 500GB, 5400-rpm hard drive. There’s no SSD, to handle cache or anything else, and I noticed what appears to be an empty bay where an optical drive might go.

Benchmark performance

Acer’s machine delivered a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 177, the best of the group by a wide margin. It also outperformed our reference platform, an Asus VivoBook S550CA, which has both an SSD and a touchscreen (but costs more than any of the systems reviewed here). Diving into the individual components in our test suite, the Acer performed better than the rest of the field in the PCMark Productivity suite, but Lenovo’s IdeaPad Z400, which has a larger and faster hard drive, handled our collection of media editing and encoding tasks better.

Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance.

All work and no play makes for a boring lifestyle, but you’ll want to stick with casual games on this computer. We dialed BioShock Infinite’s resolution down to 1024 by 768 and its image quality to Low, and Acer’s laptop still managed to render the game at no better than a sluggish 25 frames per second. Intel has made strides with its integrated graphics, but its Intel HD Graphics 4400 still isn’t up to snuff for hardcore gaming. Even so, its gaming score beat everything else in the field (aside from our reference notebook).

Connectivity and conclusion

The Aspire E1-572-6870 offers a gigabit ethernet connection for occasions when you can plug into a network, and a Qualcomm Atheros AR956x dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter for times when you can’t. The laptop also has a Bluetooth 4.0 + HS adapter to support theoretical data-transfer speeds of up to 24 mbps, though the only good application I’ve ever found for Bluetooth is streaming audio).

Acer provides an HDMI-out for connecting the computer to digital displays and TVs, and a VGA output for older monitors and video projectors (the latter could come in very handy in classrooms and conference rooms, which tend to have vintage equipment). The system also has three USB ports, but only one of them is USB 3.0. The included memory card reader supports only SD Card.

i enjoyed using Acer’s Aspire E1-572-6870. The machine is blessedly quiet, and it delivered a respectable 4 hours of battery life (middle-of-the-pack performance in this roundup).

Pros

Haswell-class CPUBright 15.6-inch displayRelatively lightweightDual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter

Cons

No touchscreenLots of flex in the chassis and lidJust one USB 3.0 port

Bottom line

You won’t get everything in a 15.6-inch notebook priced below $600, but Acer made nearly all the right compromises to get to that price point.

Rating

4 stars

If someone tells you “Dude! You’re gettin’ a Dell!” in reference to the Latitude 3330, run away. Dell makes plenty of good computers, but this isn’t one of them.

Admittedly, the Latitude 3330 didn’t burst into flames or poke anyone’s eye out during our testing. But you have many better choices in the same price range. Though one of the five budget notebooks in this roundup (HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000) delivered even lower performance than this one—probably because it has an even less powerful CPU than the Dell’s 1.5GHz Intel Core i3-2375m—the HP also costs $110 less than the Latitude 3330 and has a ten-point touchscreen. The Dell’s 13.3-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display doesn’t support touch, though its trackpad does support simple gestures such as two-finger scrolling.

ROBERT CARDINDell’s Latitude 3330 doesn't deliver the performance its price tag warrants.

The Latitude has only 4GB of DDR/1600 memory, but an open and readily accessible slot accommodates a second module to double its memory. Its puny 320GB, 5400-rpm hard drive is similarly easy to access and upgrade. And this is one of only two notebooks in our roundup to include a removable and upgradable battery (the other one again being the HP Pavilion).

One component that won’t be easy to swap out is the Dell Wireless 1504 single-band (2.4GHz), 1x1, 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, which delivers a physical link rate of just 150 megabits per second. The laptop doesn’t provide Bluetooth support, either. But it does have a gigabit ethernet interface.

Unlike most of the notebooks in this price range, the Latitude 3330’s chassis contains some aluminum elements that render it considerably more rigid than the other machines we looked at. The lid, on the other hand, is rather flimsy, and the display inside doesn’t feature edge-to-edge glass, as most of the others do.

The PCMark 7 Productivity element of our benchmark suite evaluates a system's performance with everyday office tasks.

The Latitude 3330’s display isn’t wide enough to accommodate a deck with both a full-size keyboard and a numeric keypad, but the system’s arrow keys are full-size and not easily mistaken for anything else. Apart from not being backlit, the island-style keyboard is well designed and a joy to type on, delivering firm but springy tactile feedback. The Function keys in the top row play their traditional roles, so you’ll need to hold down the Fn key and tap them to access their alternative assignments, such as controlling a media player.

Benchmark performance

The Latitude 3330 tied for dead last in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark. Its overall score of 64 was more than 35 percent slower than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA. Drilling down into some of the individual benchmarks from that suite, I note that the Dell finished next to last in the PCMark7 Productivity benchmark and the BioShock Infinite test, beating out only the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000.

Connectivity and conclusion

Dell broke the pattern of Intel-powered laptops providing only one USB 3.0 port. The Latitude 330 boasts two, plus one USB 2.0 port that can charge a device whether the computer is awake or asleep. It doesn’t have an optical drive, but its media card reader supports both SD and MMC media.

ROBERT CARDINThe Dell Latitude 3330 is one of the lighter laptops we evaluated.

Dell follows the crowd by providing HDMI and VGA video outputs. Because the Latitude’s Wi-Fi adapter isn’t an Intel model, the system doesn’t support Intel’s WiDi wireless media-streaming. If your primary concern is long battery life, however, be aware that this machine turned in a first-place finish, running for 5 hours, 13 minutes. And you can quickly pull out a run-down battery and snap in a fresh one to double the laptop’s useful life. But that’s one of the system’s few truly bright spots.

Note: We also reviewed this model as a small-business laptop. You can read that review here.

Pros

Easily upgradable memory, battery, and hard driveSolid construction

Cons

Lousy benchmark performanceNo touchscreenWeak Wi-Fi adapter

Bottom line

Dell’s Latitude 3330 delivers very good battery life—but little else to recommend it at this price.

Rating

2 stars

HP’s Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is one the smallest, lightest, and least expensive notebooks we’ve ever reviewed. It’s also one of the slowest, finishing dead last on nearly every criterion in our five-system roundup except two important ones: weight and battery life.

Despite carrying a price tag of just $410, this Pavilion has a touchscreen. It measures just 11.6 inches, but delivers ten-point touch and the same 1366-by-768-pixel resolution as the other budget notebooks we looked at. Once you get over its diminutive size, you realize that the display is actually pretty good. Though it has a minor issue with vertical off-axis viewing, it’s much better than the screen on the Toshiba T Satellite L55Dt-A5253. Augmenting the Pavilion’s touchscreen is a trackpad that supports Windows 8 gestures such as two-finger scrolling, zoom, and rotate. Mechanical right and left mouse buttons are situated beneath the pad.

HPThe HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is a very inexpensive touchscreen laptop.

Apart from its small size, the Pavilion doesn’t look like a cheap PC. Though its case is composed almost entirely of plastic, the finishes on the lid and chassis are dead ringers for brushed aluminum, and the computer feels very sturdy despite being just 0.86 inch thick. Although this laptop was one of the lightest we considered for our roundup, its 3.4-pound heft is not especially impressive for its overall size.

As you might expect, the most powerful notebooks also had the shortest battery life.

If you have large fingers, you won’t like the reduced size of the Pavilion’s non-backlit keyboard. The keys are only slightly smaller than average, but the difference drove me crazy during touch-typing sessions. The laptop is too small to accommodate a numeric keypad, too—and I loathe its arrow keys’ design. Rather than laying them out in the familiar inverted T formation, HP made the right and left keys oversize, and the up and down keys half-size—and bookended by the other two.

The Fn keys have common tasks (such as volume and media player control) assigned to them by default, so you don’t have to hold down a second key to use them for those purposes. Speaking of media, the Pavilion has surprisingly good speakers, augmented by DTS Sound+ audio-processing software.

Benchmark performance

Egad, is this computer ever slow! Much of the blame can be laid at the 1GHz AMD A4-1250 processor that runs the show. This is paired with 4GB of DDR3/1333 memory, which HP says is upgradeable to 8GB. But since the machine has only one DIMM slot, you’ll need to toss the existing 4GB DIMM to do so (unless you buy the 8GB version at the outset). Our review model came with a 500GB hard-drive upgrade (the stock machine packs a 320GB hard drive), but both drives spin their platters at an unhurried 5400 rpm. There is no SSD option available, and the only optical drive option is external.

The Pavilion TouchSmart’s pitiful Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 64 matches that of the $539 Dell Latitude 3330, but its scores on most of the other benchmarks are significantly worse than the Dell’s. For example, the Latitude earned a PCMark 7 Productivity score of 932, versus the Pavilion’s mark of 348. And the HP’s scores on our media editing and encoding tests were off-the-chart bad. On the plus side, the superior graphics processor integrated into the AMD A4 processor helped level the playing field in at least some of our gaming benchmarks.

Connectivity and conclusion

One of the ways that HP kept this computer’s price so slow was by provisioning it with cheap networking capabilities. The Realtek RTL8188EE Wi-Fi adapter is a single-band 802.11n model that supports a maximum physical link rate of just 150 mbps, and its hardwired ethernet adapter maxes out at 100 mbps.

HPHP's Pavilion TouchSmart is less than 1 inch thick, but it's rather heavy for its size.

For better wireless networking performance, you can plug an adapter into one of the Pavilion’s USB ports. It has two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port, plus a multiformat media card reader. HP provides both HDMI and VGA video outputs.

The HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11z-e000 is tough to beat on price—you get a lot of computer for the money. Its closest rival in price—Dell’s Latitude 3330—costs $100 more, doesn’t have a touchscreen, and carries a smaller hard drive. The Dell is slightly faster and has a larger display, but I think the TouchSmart 11z is a better value in the long run.

Pros

Solid buildTouchscreenGreat battery lifeVery inexpensive

Cons

Very, very slowChintzy network connectivity optionsLess-than-optimal keyboard

Bottom line

If you insist on getting a laptop with a touchscreen, HP delivers a lot of computer for very little money. But you’ll need to be patient with this one’s performance.

Rating

2.5 stars

Next up: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Z400 Touch and Toshiba’s Satellite L55Dt-A5253

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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Best Battery Life: Laptops That Last 7+ Hours

What good is a notebook that dies two hours after it’s unplugged from the wall? Not much. We’ve created a list of the clamshells that ran the distance on the LAPTOP Battery Test (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi).  Each machine lasts (at least) to the 7-hour marker, but some systems use larger, sold-separately batteries to stay active up to 20 hours. See for your yourself below.

Consider the Lenovo ThinkPad X230 the poster-laptop for systems with optional batteries. The 12-inch ultraportable ships with a 6-cell battery that lasts a decent 7 hours, but the sold-separately 9-cell option pushes the juice supply beyond the 12-hour mark. If that's not enough productivity time for you, the X230 also works with a sheet-battery that, when paired with the 9-cell, helped the system run an epic 20 hours!

Lenovo ThinkPad X230 Review

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Best Laptops of March 2012

Some notebooks boast a long battery life, others stand out with an innovative design and still others make waves with their hard drive and memory. But finding a notebook that has all these features-and-more is tricky. In our reviews, we take design, keyboard, heat, ports, display, audio, performance, battery life, security, software and price into account, then size up a laptop’s rating out of five stars. And to get a decent score-well, that’s easier said than done. Read on to see which laptops made it to the top of the heap out of all those reviewed in March.

This notebook gives business users everything they need: fast boot times, a great keyboard, a high-resolution display and extra-long battery life. We wish Lenovo made the touchpad a bit bigger and the design a bit less bulky, but this 15.6-inch ThinkPad T520 ($1,299) is made for any business user who needs a system stocked with power and efficiency features.

Review of the Lenovo ThinkPad T520

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Top 6 Most Ancticipated Ivy Bridge Laptops

The followup to Intel’s wildly successful Sandy Bridge series of Core processors, Ivy Bridge, won’t be reaching the market any time soon. In fact, it looks like the chip maker won’t be releasing its latest work into the wild until June, a full two months after Intel’s originally promised April release date.

But what kind of computing goodness are you missing out on thanks to the delay? How about a notebook that’s part tablet, part Ultrabook and a super-powered gaming rig that could have Alienware’s best machines running away with their tails between their legs? And those are just the start. So read on to see the six Ivy Bridge-powered notebooks that you’ll be pining for, for months to come.

Lenovo's Ultrabook/ tablet chimera, the IdeaPad Yoga packs the power of a notebook and the versatility of a tablet into a beautiful machine that would make Frankenstein himself swoon. Powered by Intel's third-generation processor, the Yoga can be used like a standard notebook, but flip its screen over and it becomes a super-charged tablet.

In addition to its flashy processor, the 13.3-inch Yoga comes with 256GB of storage space, and 8GB of RAM and will come loaded with Windows 8. Yoga mats not included.

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More Juice Please: All Lightweight Laptops Should Last 10+ Hours

In the rush to hook know-nothing consumers mindlessly scannning the shelves at retail, looking for shiny objects, too many notebook makers have forgotten the true meaning of “ultraportable” as they manufacturer systems that get little more than half a day’s battery life. Sure, everyone wants a notebook that’s wafer thin, blinged out with brushed metal or soft-touch rubber, and lighter than Kodak’s bank account, but not when that $1,000 system takes a siesta first thing after lunch. There’s only one solution: higher-capacity batteries.

With the noteworthy exception of the HP Folio 13, which lasted a solid 7 hours and 50 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery Test, all of the Ultrabook notebooks we’ve tested have gotten less than 7 hours of battery life, with ASUS’s UX31 lasting just 5-hours and 58 minutes and Acer’s pitiful S3 dying after only 4:23.

Ultrabooks aren’t alone in trading precious minutes of productivity for a smaller chassis. While not officially labeled as “Ultrabooks,” the MacBook Air 13-inch lasts just 6.5 hours while the new Samsung Series 9 endures for only 4:48. In LAPTOP’s tests, the average thin-and-light notebook (14-inches, less than 5 pounds) endures for a little over 6 hours while the average ultraportable (13-inches or less, lighter than 4 pounds) lasts just 6:39.

If those numbers don’t sound bad to you, let me put them in perspective. The LAPTOP Battery test we used to get the above runtimes measures a common, but not very taxing use case, surfing the web at 40 percent brightness and loading up a new page every 30 seconds. If you’re pushing up the brightness level or you want to do something more intense like crunching a video, viewing an HD movie, or playing a game, you can expect less endurance than we encountered. But even if your usage habits allow you to  get a full 5 or 6 hours of life, that’s simply not enough endurance for real all-day use.

The standard battery life for any laptop that weighs less than 5 pounds should be 10 hours or more. Whether you’re working on an international flight, going from meeting to meeting at the office, or sitting on the couch at home with your lightweight notebook,  you need that amount of time to avoid battery panic. Even if you’re not using the notebook for 10 consecutive hours, you ought to be able to use it on and off throughout the day, without even worrying about its charge level. 

As I write this article, I’m sitting on my couch with my 13-inch notebook unplugged. In this location, I have relatively easy access to a wall socket, but I don’t plug in, because being tethered to the wall is still unpleasant as I have to worry about yanking the wire, sitting on the wire or watching my cats knock over the adapter. Though the system gets a full 5 hours of battery life under optimal conditions, I’m down under 50 percent after just a couple of hours of work and must start thinking about either plugging in or lowering the brightness to uncomfortable levels. I shouldn’t have to deal with that distraction.  

When I’m in my office, carrying my notebook from conference room to conference room, I often have to carry my AC adapter with me and sit near an outlet or string my power cord across the room and hope nobody trips on it. Trade shows like CES are the biggest battery challenge of all, as I spend 12 to 14 hours a day running to a series of hotels and conventions centers writing articles and editing videos with no time at all to stop and recharge. I’ll often have to go out of my way or crouch down on a hard floor, just to find an outlet I can sit next to. 

Smartphone companies are starting to get it. After a 2011 year in which manufacturers released a slew of 4G handsets with anemic endurance, Motorola recently showed its competitors the right way to build a device when it released the Droid RAZR Maxx with a high-capacity 3300 mAH battery on-board that allowed it to last through over 8 hours of continuous use. Compare that to phones like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, whose 1850 mAH battery only gave it enough juice to last 3 hours and 40 minutes on our test.

Notebook makers need to learn from Motorola’s example and beef up their battery offerings, even if that means charging more money for their products or increasing the chassis size.  The longest-lasting notebook on the market, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X220 lasts a whopping 12 hours and 39 minutes with its extended 9-cell battery. The trade-off for moving up from its default battery is a 1-inch battery bump in the back and an additional .2 pounds of weight, well worth it for nearly 5 additional hours of battery life and the ability to leave your .5 pound AC adapter in the hotel room.

If you get the right kind of battery, you can even pack a lot of juice into a very small space. The RAZR Maxx, for example, is only .07 inches thicker than the original RAZR, yet gets nearly double its battery life. Sure, Motorola is charging $100 more for the thicker battery, but it’s worth it.

With phones, users expect to be able to leave their chargers at home, spend 16 hours using them on and off, and then plug in when they sleep at night. You ought to be able to do the same with a notebook and you could, if notebook makers would stop racing to make their products 0.2-inches thinner, 0.2 pounds lighter, and a few dollars cheaper and focus on what users really need from a lightweight laptop. As consumers, we need to support this effort by purchasing longer-lasting notebooks.

Fortunately, if you’re in the market for a notebook today, you don’t need to wait for the industry to get its act together. You just need to make the most of the long-lasting choices available today and be willing to purchase a system that’s available with an extended battery or a battery slice. In many cases, your best choice is a business-oriented notebook, but that doesn’t mean consumers should hesitate. For example, the corporate-minded Lenovo Thinkpad T420 with 9-cell battery costs less than $850 but lasts over 10 hours on a charge. The $1,399 Sony VAIO S lasts nearly 11 hours with an attached battery slice.

In the end, every extra penny you spend on a notebook with a high-capacity battery will be worth a dollar saved in therapy costs for low-battery phobia. If only vendors understood this.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here

11 Ways to Increase Your Windows 7 Laptop’s Battery Life

Your screen backlight uses the most power of any component in your notebook, so you can save a lot of juice by turning it down to the lowest acceptable level. You can manually raise and lower the brightness in increments of 10 percent by hitting the appropriate key combination for your laptop (example: Fn + left/right arrows on the Acer Aspire TimelineX series), but we recommend changing the brightness in your power profile so it lowers automatically every time you unplug.

To lower the brightness level in your power profile:

Select Power Options from the control panel.Click Change Plan Settings next to your current power plan.Select “Change advanced power settings.”Expand Display, then Display brightness.Enter a brightness percentage for On Battery, then Click OK.Experiment with different brightness levels to determine which is the lowest you can tolerate.

Your virus scanner and disk defragmenter, along with auto updates from the likes of Apple and Google, are scheduled to run themselves on a regular basis—often without your knowledge or consent. Set these tasks to run only on AC power so they don’t eat up precious juice running your hard drive, CPU and wireless while you’re unplugged.

Select Administrative Tools > Task Scheduler in the Control Panel.Select Task Scheduler (Local) in the left window pane.Go through each active task that has a future date in the Next Run Time column and do the following:Double-click the task.Select the Conditions tab.Toggle on the first two power options: “Start the task only if the computer is on AC power” and “Stop if the computer switches to battery power” if they are not already checked.Click the back button to return to the list of active tasks.

If your notebook has a backlit keyboard, it will certainly help you see keys in a dark room, but it’s also sucking juice out of your battery. You’ll save some power by turning off that light. Every notebook has its own way of enabling or disabling its keyboard backlight, but the method usually involves hitting a Function key on the top row of the keyboard.

Every USB peripheral attached to your notebook is eating up power just by registering itself with the operating system. By the same token, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays can drain battery life, even when they’re just sitting idle in your optical drive. Remove any discs along with USB keys, card readers, modems or other peripherals you don’t need while on battery power.

The LED-backlit screens used on most modern notebooks expend less energy displaying black pixels than those showing colors. Setting your computer to show white and yellow text on a black background can improve battery life and even make text more readable when sunlight is hitting your screen.

To enable High-Contrast mode in Windows 7, simply hit the key combination Left Shift + Left Alt + Print Screen and click Yes when asked to confirm. You can turn off High-Contrast mode by hitting the same combo.

High-Contrast mode will affect your desktop and most Windows programs, including the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. However, if you use the Chrome browser, you will need to install the Change Colors extension, which is available for free from the Chrome Web Store. Once the extension is installed, it will show an icon in the right side of your address bar. Click that icon and select “Apply override on all pages” to enable high-contrast mode.

While you’re surfing the Web, checking email or watching a movie, messaging apps such as Google Talk and Skype are hitting the Internet constantly, just to see which of your contacts are online and whether you’ve received any messages. Automatic updating apps from the likes of Adobe, Apple and Google may also be pinging the Internet to see if there are updates to your copies of Adobe Reader, Chrome browser or iTunes. To stop these silent power vampires before they start, prevent them from loading at boot time.

To see and disable programs from starting when your computer starts:

Type msconfig into the Start Menu text field, and click msconfig.Select the Startup tab.Uncheck messaging programs such as AOL Instant Messenger, Gtalk and Skype. You can always launch them manually if you want to use them.Uncheck autoupdaters such as Adobe Update, Apple Update, Google Update and Java Autoupdater.Click OK.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here