Laptops

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 ASUS X540LA is a big, surprisingly light and very affordable laptop. Aimed at students and casual home use, this 15.6-inch laptop could also easily replace an aging desktop PC. Here’s my review.

 Does your laptop seem a little sluggish? Replacing its hard drive with a solid state drive (SSD) is a big performance win. Even better, the procedure takes just minutes and just about anyone can do it. Here’s how.