Laptop Buying Guide: Shopping for the Right Notebook

Shopping for your first laptop, or looking to upgrade your old system? Follow our advice to find just the right one for you.

Are you in the market for a new laptop? Looking to buy a new laptop, or upgrade that four-year-old system that just can't keep up anymore? Navigating the labyrinth of brands, product names, and specifications can be tough. From tiny netbooks to big and powerful desktop-replacement systems, the differences in pricing, features, and performance are staggering. Follow our comprehensive guide to make sure you get the ideal laptop.

Deciding what to buy is tough not just because of all the makes and models and the dizzying array of specifications and customization options, but also because every user is different. Maybe you're buying for a college student whose aging notebook doesn't have the battery life to last through a day of classes. Maybe your child needs a laptop for doing their high-school homework during the week and playing some games, chatting with friends, and watching videos on the weekend. Or maybe you're shopping for a gaming enthusiast who wants something really powerful but a little easier to carry to a buddy's LAN party. Even if you know what you want, with so many laptop models available it can be hard to decide.

It's probably best to start by determining which category of laptop you're most interested in. Laptops can be broadly divided into four main categories: netbooks, ultraportables, all-purpose laptops, and desktop replacements.

Once you have decided which category of laptop is right for your gift recipient (or yourself), it's time to consider the specs. For help in wading through all the product names and acronyms, check out "Making Sense of the Specifications." And before you run your credit card, read our handy "Shopping Tips" list.

Netbooks

Although netbooks are great for their intended purpose, they aren't satisfactory for much else. They typically aren't powerful enough to do everything you need a PC for. Rather, they're meant to be companions to your main PC. Small and light enough to carry around all day, they're the perfect thing for taking notes in class or surfing the Web from a commuter train. A typical netbook weighs about 3 pounds or less, and has a screen size of 6 to 10 inches. Most cost about $300 to $400, but premium features can drive the price up further.

How Malware Might Blow Up Your Laptop

A Hacker Speaks: How Malware Might Blow Up Your Laptop

We depend on our computers to get work done, and so we try to safeguard them appropriately. But our trusty laptops, desktops, and tablets rely on their own internal network of sophisticated computer chips to function. These tiny chips--called microcontrollers--regulate everything from the battery in your laptop to the headlights on your car--and they aren’t always so secure.

Microcontrollers have their own CPU and enough discrete memory to run simple programs, and although they’re usually designed for a single task, they can be reprogrammed via updates to the device firmware. Typically the hardware manufacturer delivers such downloadable updates to improve the performance of your device, but there’s nothing stopping a hacker from mimicking those updates and injecting your device with malicious code.

Charlie Miller

Thankfully, hackers such as Charlie Miller are happy to demonstrate the potential pitfalls of purchasing hardware from manufacturers that don’t secure seemingly "dumb" devices like batteries. Miller is a security researcher for Accuvant Labs, and after demonstrating how a hacker could take over your iPhone with a text message at the Black Hat security conference in 2009, he went looking for a more exciting hack.

"I’d just wrapped a presentation on iPhone hacking and wanted to work on something more flashy," said Miller during an interview with PCWorld. "I wanted to know, could a remote hacker do something to cause physical damage to a computer? Like, could I set my sister’s laptop on fire?"

As it turns out, he probably could. Miller experimented with the seven or eight MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air models he had won in Pwn2Own hacking competitions over the past three years, and he found that most modern laptop batteries are part of a Smart Battery System that relays information between the battery and the laptop’s operating system to ensure that power is safely stored and discharged. If you’ve ever wondered how your laptop knows exactly how much time you have left before the battery dies, it’s because of this system.

Top 10 Alternative Ways to Search Google

More Ways to Search 

For many of us, searching on Google is automatic. You click on your browser's search bar or omnibar, type what you want, and go. But a plain old Google search isn't the only way to tap into the world's biggest search engine. Here are 10 alternative ways to search Google.

1.What do you love? 

Sometimes, searching one Google service at a time isn't enough. Fortunately, there's "What do you love?," which aggregates results across many Google services, including YouTube, Translate, Images, and News. The only missing service is Google Search, but chances are you know how to use that one already.

2.Google Mobile 

For the times when Google's desktop search engine feels too overwhelming--images and sidebars and advertisements, oh my!--a visit to Google's mobile Website should provide some much-needed clarity. Just type google.com/m into your desktop browser to access an uncomplicated (albeit small) version of the site.

3.Sidebar Begone 

If you want to bring back an older style of Google, consider theGoogle Classic script for GreaseMonkey, or the Remove Google Sidebar extension in Chrome. Both scripts remove the redundant sidebar from Google searches, though the Classic script works better as it preserves the ability to show more search options.

Google+: 5 Big Developments

Google+ is not even two weeks old yet and is already becoming a social networking favorite among early adopters.

Estimates for the social network's user base run as high as 5 million, websites are quickly adopting the +1 button, and the service is getting accolades from critics. It's not clear if Google+ is here to stay yet or will end up another piece of refuse in Google's social networking trash heap along with Buzz, Wave, and Orkut. But for now things are looking up for Google's latest social experiment.

If you haven't signed up yet, or haven't been able to, here's a look at five notable developments that have already happened on Google+.

Digg and MySpace +1 Google

Digg Founder Kevin Rose announced on Saturday that he was forwarding his own domain,KevinRose.com, to his Google+ page, essentially moving his online activity to the new network.

Tom Anderson, cofounder of MySpace, has an extensive presence on Google+. Anderson even used Google+ to write a blog post praising Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg for the company's recent Skype integration. Even Zuckerberg himself, the reigning king of social networks, reportedly has a Google+ presence; however, with six Mark Zuckerbergs to choose from, I'll leave it to you to figure out which one is the real deal.

Crowd Sourced Tips and Tricks

Google+ has some dedicated users who have already banded together to create a tips and tricks guideon Google Docs called Google+: A Collaborative Document.

The document is more than 40 pages long and covers topics such as creative ways to use circles, privacy tips, how to send private messages, and an extensions guide for Chrome and Safari. The guide is currently in English, but is being translated into Chinese, German and Russian.

+1 Buttons Grow

Google+ may have a long way to go to challenge Facebook's dominance, but the social network is already taking a run at Twitter, according to an online report.

BrightEdge, an SEO platform for businesses, says there are already more Google+ share buttons (known as the +1 button) on the web than Twitter sharing plugins. Among the 10,000 most heavily trafficked websites around 4.5 percent have +1 buttons, while only 2.1 percent have Twitter buttons.

Of course, both of those numbers pale in comparison to Facebook's various sharing plugins at 20 percent of the top websites. Google announced +1 in March and made buttons for third-party sites available in early June.

Google+ :New social Network by Google

9 Things Google+ Needs for Me to Ditch Facebook

This week I've noticed the honeymoon with Google+ start to wane ever so slightly. Myself and others who were first enamored with the bright, shiny new social network Google+ have drifted back to check in on Facebook, to see what's going on back in the "real world," in a sense.

Google+ has immense potential, but it's still early in its beta process (Google calls it a "field test"), leaving room for it to falter. Ultimately, its success will depend upon sucking millions of users away from Facebook.

It's also possible that Google+ and Facebook will eventually settle into their own roles. Perhaps one day Google+ will be the place I go to get things done, while Facebook remains a destination for socializing. Nobody ever said my relationship with social networking had to be monogamous, after all.

Here's the top nine things I need to see from Google+ before I can be sure it will be my social network of choice in the future.

Integration of other Google services like Calendar and Docs: 

This is such a no-brainer for Google that I assume it's already on its way. All the Google eggs need to be put in the Google+ basket. If they do it right, I'll never visit that plain, vanilla search site, Google.com, ever again, because Google+ will be my starting point for everything I could possibly want to do online. Facebook events are nice, but meshing a more robust product like Google Calendar or a productivity tool like collaboration through Docs with a social network opens up whole new avenues of possibility. And if the integration is done right, keeping it simple and intuitive, Facebook will start to seem like an old play-thing we all grew out of.

Open up the platform, but keep it under control:

 I've come to expect an open platform from just about every service I use so that developers can help expand the possibilities and offer ways to sync up with the other services I use -- think simultaneous posting to Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare via apps like Hootsuite -- but I'm also getting tired of the chaos and junk that model encourages on places like Facebook. Google+ needs to open up the API (as they surely will), but also give me more ways to filter out the spam, social gaming progress updates and other blather from my experience without degrading it, as Facebook's current "all or nothing" approach to blocking and ignoring users does.