Find The Perfect Laptop For Yourself In Under A Minute With Swogo

Buying a laptop with little to no knowledge of what kind of hardware specifications would suit your needs best can be something of a nightmare. You might end up buying the wrong machine, or paying too much for an inferior system. Swogo is a simple web app that can help you make the right decision, or point you in the right direction at the very least. The app asks you to set a budget, specify what you want to use the computer for, select a screen size, choose some additional features (like BluRay drive or HDMI), and mention any brand preference that you may have. Swogo will then hunt down the perfect laptop(s) for you. It’s a simple six-step process that caters to your needs and budget; there is no need to create an account or anything. Just visit the app's website, and click ‘Get started’. Read More

Send Your Laptop Into Hibernate Mode On Power Failure

Laptops are a great way to make sure that your system keeps running even when there is a power failure. Most modern laptops give you a battery backup of around 3 to 5 hours, depending on the activity you are doing. Processes that require lesser power, such as browsing or reading a document, does not consume a lot of battery compared to processing intensive activities. For instance, if you start playing a game, which has heavy graphic requirements, on your laptop while on battery power, the battery is going to run out very fast. As time goes on, the backup time of the battery reduces even further. When the battery gets old, it is not able to hold as much charge and runs out of power much more quickly. If you have an old battery, sometimes when the laptop is not connected to AC power, the battery charge gets depleted very quickly and notice it only when the laptop suddenly shuts down, erasing all the unsaved information. This can be quite frustrating if it happens a lot, and you have to start your work again from scratch every time. HibernateOnPowerFail is a lightweight application for Windows that automatically sends your computer into hibernate mode as soon as the power goes out. Read More

Tweak & Manage Laptop Hardware Settings With Notebook Hardware Control

Notebook Hardware Control is a portable application for controlling the hardware components of your Notebook. Using this application, you can prolong the battery life, reduce system heat up issues, mange full processor speed, monitor the battery charge level and system temperature, manage your hard drive using S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) management, reduce Notebook Fan noise and more. Read past the break for details. Read More

Bring Linux Alt-Dragging To Windows With TaekWindow

Are you using a netbook and struggling with resizing and moving windows across the screen to get a sufficient place to adjust other application windows? Try TaekWindow. It takes advantage of only Alt key to quickly move and resize active application windows. The application was specifically developed for laptop and netbook users who find it difficult to move windows and resize them while dealing with multiple windows on small screen. What makes it different from traditional resize method is that it can resize any part of the open window. If you have used Linux, you must be familiar with Alt-Dragging. TaekWindow brings this alt-dragging to Windows. Read More

Add Security Layers Over Your Laptop With LapSec

It is always recommended to make your portable devices as secure as they can be. No matter which type of mobile device you’re using, there is always a need of having an efficient security application which can instantly protect it from data theft and other general vulnerabilities. Take laptops for an instance, security concerns should be addressed right from the outset to ensure that nobody will ever break in and exploit administrative privileges. LapSec is a security application, developed especially for laptop owners to add security layers for keeping the system always safe from any kind of exploitations. The provided security measures are based upon diverse protection scales, including, disposing off pagefile before system shuts down, activating screen saver after defined time, removing autorun in USB and local drives, enabling password in recovery mode, disabling administrator account, and checking user password complexity. Furthermore, it also allows user to cipher My Documents folder to protect classified projects and information whilst option to encrypt user-defined directories is also available. Read More

10 Things To Consider When Buying A Computer

Buying a new laptop or desktop PC can be quite confusing. Many people find it difficult to compare prices, features, processor types,etc to find the right choice in accordance with their requirements. In this post we will tell you the top 10 things to consider before buying a PC. Read More

Use Different Speeds For External Mouse And Touchpad On Laptop [Windows]

If while working on your laptop, you frequently need to switch between the touchpad and an external mouse, you’d have experienced the irritation that accompanies when the operating system applies the same cursor movement speed and settings to both of them. One speed may be fine for an external mouse, but it may prove to be extremely slow for the touchpad (I experience that on an almost daily basis). If only Windows could save mouse profiles just like power profiles! Read More

Increase Laptop Battery Performance With Aerofoil [Windows]

As a laptop ages, its battery begins to weaken. No matter how well you take care of it, no matter what steps you take, the battery is bound to weaken because that’s how they are built. Hence the importance of power management on such a machine increases perhaps twice as much as it would on a new one. Windows 7 comes with default battery profiles, but they lack automation. This discrepancy is overcome by using a small program Aerofoil, which performs automatic power management functions for your laptop. Read More

Find, Monitor, And Secure Your Lost Laptop With LockItTight

LockItTight is a nice web application to locate, monitor, and secure your lost laptop. A free account is required before you can begin installation of client software. Once installed, it runs silently in Windows background. The standard version is free but only supports one device. Which is probably a big downside if you have more than one devices. On the other hand, Prey, a widely popular monitoring app, supports upto 3 devices for free. Read More

Track And Find Your Stolen Laptop With Prey

It is always a pain to lose something, both financially and in terms of the emotional stress that a person goes through. And if it is something as valuable as a laptop, which contains your personal data, the damage becomes even more pronounced. Laptops come these days with Kensington lock slots, but you cannot find a Kensington lock everywhere as well. So what is the solution? Read More

Fully Configurable Laptop Battery Manager For Windows 8 & 7

We have previously covered PC battery power management tools that allow you to keep a check on your laptop battery. Among them so far our favorite has been Battery Bar, but now a new contender has come that aims to be totally flexible and fully configurable, and yes it also supports Windows 7 / Windows 8 Aero Glass. BattCursor is a free battery management utility that aims to replace the default Power functionality that comes with Windows 8 and Windows 7. The application is highly customizable in terms of changing battery level indicator, system tray symbol, battery icon colors, power profiles, and battery level notifications. Read past the jump for details. Read More

Prevent Laptop Theft And Data Loss With LAlarm

LAlarm is a free software for laptops(running Windows) that prevents both data loss and theft. HDD(Hard Disk Drive) crash are common occurrences, it can crash either due to logical or physical disk problems. Most people are not aware of such problems until the hard disk crashes and the data become irrecoverable. LAlarm will alert you about both logical and physical error.

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Battery Bar – Get Detailed Information Of Your Laptop Battery

Battery Bar is a free tool for Windows that sits on your taskbar and monitors your laptop battery in real time using a unique algorithm. Many battery monitoring tools are not accurate, but what makes Battery bar different is that it takes a whole new approach. It constantly monitors your laptop battery and keeps it’s historical data. Using this historical data, it can provide you with a very accurate estimate of how much time is remaining on your battery.

Once you have installed this tool, right-click your taskbar, select Toolbars and select Battery Bar from the list.

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How To Check And Monitor Your Laptop Battery With PowerMeter

The build-in power meter in Windows is totally crap, after fully recharging your laptop it will tell you that battery is full, but after a few minutes it will say only 75% is left. What the heck? Can’t there be a simple and reliable way to monitor laptop battery? There are many apps that  help you in determining the accurate amount of power left, but the problem with these apps is that they themselves take a good amount of resources to run, which makes them basically useless. PowerMeter is a free tool for laptop users who wants to monitor their battery level accurately all the time. The battery bar becomes more visible as the power level reduces, when the battery is full the visibility is at it’s minimum, you can choose to hide the bar when battery is full. Read More

How To Put Your Laptop Into Automatic Hibernate Mode When Running Windows XP

To help conserve battery power and save your documents while you away from the laptop for an extended period of time you should use the automatic hibernate capabilities of your laptop. Once you have made these changes your laptop will always go into hibernate after a set time.The secret behind hibernation is that before you turn off the laptop, everything you are doing with the computer is saved. When the computer is turned on again, it recovers from hibernating by reloading all the saved information and restoring your laptop to exactly the same condition it was in before it went into hibernation.

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How To Increase Your Laptop’s Battery Life

With the rise in laptop sales it is essential for laptop buyers to make sure they use their laptop batteries to the fullest and also make sure they can achieve the highest performance with the available battery. Generally most laptops claim to have 4-6 hours of battery life but in real it comes to 50% of the promised backup time because of many factors like heavy laptop usage while on battery backup, running USB Based gadgets, CD/DVD ROMs etc. You also need to make sure about some battery life saving tips because the laptop batteries generally have a life of around 1000 recharge cycles. Here is a list of some essential tips which can almost double your laptop battery life.

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