by David Hakala
If you work on a laptop computer in low lighting conditions, you may wish you could see the keyboard better. In fact, many people want a laptop keyboard light. That’s why a keyboard light is built into some modern laptops.
Read your laptop’s documentation. If there is a keyboard light built into the machine, you will probably need special software from your laptop’s manufacturer to activate it.
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by David Hakala
Laptop batteries require a bit more attention than flashlight batteries to extend their lives and maximize the power you get out of them. Most notebook computers come with battery and power consumption management software. Windows has a few tools built into it, too. Go to Start > Control Panel > Power Options.
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by David Hakala
After buying a laptop computer, you need something to carry it in. Laptop bags come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and configurations. If you answer a few questions, you can quickly narrow down the choices to the right laptop bag for you.
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by David Hakala
A smartphone is a cell phone with many of a computer’s features. A smartphone can store and run applications such as a calendar, contact manager, games, Web browsers and email clients, even a stripped-down version of Microsoft Office if you have the Windows Mobile operating system. Here are some things you should know when shopping for a smartphone.
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by Tina Gasperson
Your laptop probably has a slot for either a PCMCIA or an ExpressCard. PCMCIA is the older standard, used many times for modems or wireless broadband cards. Lately, however, laptop manufacturers have been building machines with Express slots instead of PCMCIA. That might throw you for a loop if you’re not careful, since the slots for PCMCIA and Express are similar. You’ll quickly find that they are not interchangeable, however. If you buy a new laptop with an Express slot and your broadband wireless card is PCMCIA, it will not work in your new system.
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by Gabe Goldberg
Anyone who uses email regularly, whether for business or personal communication, gets serious jitters when cut off from it. Fortunately, there are many ways to stay in touch away from home; the biggest problem can be explaining to people you’re visiting or traveling with why you want to.
One reason to stay caught up is that some ISPs impose limits on the amount of email they’ll store for you; if you exceed your quota, subsequent email will be rejected and bounced back to senders. That’s especially bad when it happens to mailing list traffic, since you may be unsubscribed. So, while it’s tedious, it’s sometimes worthwhile to suspend list mailings while you’ll be away.
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by David Hakala
Imagine you are away from the office, or home, or home-office, about to make a presentation to an important client. In the waiting room, you discover you’ve left your PowerPoint presentation and, more importantly, the contract the client was going to sign on your desktop PC! It’s time to die … unless you have Remote Desktop running back home.
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by David Hakala
Compact, convenient smart phones are increasingly used in lieu of laptop computers for communication and personal information management when one is away from home or office. Consequently, it becomes necessary to ensure that up-to-date copies of your contacts, email, correspondence, and other frequently accessed information are on your phone as well as your desktop computer. You have to synchronize the two devices.
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by Davis Strom
If you have an iPhone, one of your frustrations is that you don’t easily have any way to make copies of your files from your Mac desktop and view them. You can use iTunes to move videos, photos and music files, but anything else is an issue.
It is an odd omission: Any iPod since the very early days has the ability to act as an USB-connected hard drive and you can drag and drop files to it—as long as you have enough room on your iPod, that is. Luckily, there is a solution – actually, several solutions. You’ll need to download an app for your iPhone, and we found many of them that claim to offer this feature. Sadly, none of them allows this simple configuration of being able to plug your iPhone into your computer via USB. But since the iPhone is chock full of connectivity, there are several ways to skin the file transfer cat. We tested a variety of apps that can connect in between your desktop and iPhone in some interesting, and perhaps too clever, ways.
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