Laptops

Now that you’ve bought a new laptop, it’s time to make it your own with these tips to make a Windows laptop more fun and more productive.

As you no doubt know, when it comes to trying to pack the performance needed to undertake serious video gaming in a laptop, it comes down to a very tricky balance between speed and portability. Try to shove too much power in a gaming laptop and for all intents and purposes, it ceases to be a portable PC —heavy, bulky and with little battery life. Go too far in the other direction, though, and you end up with something that’s svelte but unable to play games on anything but the lowest settings. I just spent some quality time with a gaming laptop that manages to strike the perfect balance: the Eurocom M3. It’s a compact, lightweight laptop with the power to chew through pixels and polygons while keeping frame rates high. Eurocom says the M3 is the most powerful 13-inch notebook ever made and everything I’ve seen supports that claim.

The Dell Inspiron 7590 is a 15.6-inch 2-in-1 laptop with a beautiful UHD 4K display and clever design touches like integrated Active Pen storage.

The release of several ultra-portable PCs over the past few months has taken the laptop form factor to new extremes. The new Apple MacBook, Dell’s XPS 13 and Lenovo Yoga 3 are so svelte, they actually weigh less than the battery alone from a late 1980s vintage Macintosh Portable. I’ve put together a timeline showing some of the key advances in technology that have helped us move from a 10 kg PC in a suitcase to a device weighing 1 kg or less.

Samsung is making strides to make better laptops, and the Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 continues the 2-in-1 design that helped spread the word.

 It’s tough to beat a convertible, 2-in-1 laptop for versatility. You get a laptop, tablet and everything in between in a single device. With the ASUS VivoBook Flip TP501U, you also get a big, Full HD display, a Core i7 CPU and Nvidia’s 940M graphics card, making this convertible laptop a compelling combination of versatility and power.

How do you follow up the luxurious Pixelbook? Google just announced the new Pixelbook Go, a premium Chromebook that's more portable and affordable.

Are you in the market for a new laptop with the power to chew through whatever applications and programs you throw at it, but at the same time won’t devour your budget? I tested out the ASUS X-Series X555QA AMD Quad-Core laptop recently, and I’ll tell you why this computer deserves a closer look.

 The new HP Spectre laptop is a beautiful marriage of luxurious design and raw horsepower that stands out from the crowd.

One of the most confusing aspects of buying a laptop is the processor, or CPU. It’s not difficult to figure out which CPU a laptop has—in fact, processor specs are one of a laptop’s primary bragging points. But what does it all mean? Is AMD better than Intel? What’s a core and what’s the difference between having two (dual-core) four (quad-core) or six (hexa-core)? How can one Intel Core i5 CPU be so much faster than another Intel Core i5 CPU? The answers to these vexing questions and more as I outline what laptop buyers should know about processors.