Round-up You’ve bought a shiny new laptop PC, MacBook or netbook. Pound to a penny, within a day you’ll puzzling over one, two or maybe even three things: how can you use it on your knees while watching telly and not get warm lap syndrome? How can you set it at a better typing angle on your desk? And how can you stop the blasted fan from firing up every five minutes?
A decent deskstand or lap rest is what you’ll be wanting, so we’ve has rounded up ten of the best and planted a 15.4in Dell Inspiron, an Acer Aspire One, a 17in MacBook Pro and a four-year-old 15in Advent that runs as hot as Hades and fires up its fan at the drop of a hat on each to see which is the comfiest, most versatile and coolest – both literally and metaphorically. 1. Rain Design iLap
The iLap scores high in the comfort stakes due to its two felt-covered supports. The rear one is articulated, while the front one slides off to let the unit sit more securely on a Desktop at a well-judged typing angle. The main part is made from aluminium, so it’s light, sturdy and rather attractive. The tear-drop ventilation hole seemed unnecessarily small to us, but Rain bundles four self-adhesive rubber feet if the ones on our laptop have come adrift or you want to make some more airflow space. That big lower cushion also ensures your laptop will stay in place even when propped up at the most extreme angle in slob-out-on-the-sofa-with-knees-up mode. It’s not cheap – while the smallest 12/13in version will set you back £45, the 15in costs £55 and the 17in model comes in at a whopping £60. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The sleepy Scottish market town of Lanark is best known for being the place where Mel Gibson William Wallace began his rising against the English is 1297 and as the home town of 1995 World Rally champion Colin McCrae. Well, Reg Hardware can now add to that list because it’s also the home of Revo Technologies, a company that make some very interesting audio kit such as the Blok iPod dock currently sat on our desk.
Pull the Blok from its box and you’d have to be blind not spot the fact that Revo has eschewed the industry standard black plastics, cloth speaker covers and faux chrome in favour of good old fashioned wood. American walnut veneer to be precise, though if you really must have one in black you can – in black oak mind, not black plastic. Read the rest of this entry »
Review This update of Apple’s Time Capsule Wi-fi access point-cum-NAS box went rather unnoticed amid the recent barrage of Mac revamps. However, it works well and boasts an ease of use that justifies its slightly above-average price tag.
For those who aren’t familiar with it already, the Time Capsule takes one of Apple’s standard Airport Extreme wireless routers and bolts a hard disk into it in order to provide a network storage system. It’s primarily designed for use with the Time Machine backup software that’s built into Mac’s OS X 10.5, but it uses standard 802.11a, b, g and n wireless technology so it can be used with older Macs and Windows PCs too.
We tested the 500GB version, which costs £229, and there’s a 1TB model as well, although this is priced at a far less attractive £379. Read the rest of this entry »
Review If you buy a netbook, you have to be prepared to live without an optical drive. You can add an external drive for reading and writing DVDs and CDs, but to make it as convenient as the mini-laptop, it needs to be self-contained and compact. Lite-On has one with a good spec.
Adding a DVD rewriter to a Desktop or laptop isn’t as awkward as it used to be, thanks to USB. There are plenty of external DVD readers and rewriters available, but many are built around 5.25in chassis and few have many trimmings. Korean maker Lite-On makes drives, so isn’t just boxing and rebranding other people’s.
Lite-On’s excitingly named the eSAU208-16 comes in black, red, white and blue, so should blend in with most of the latest netbooks. It also comes with a slide-on stand, so you can mount it vertically, to save space. Like any laptop-style drive, CD/DVD discs are clipped onto the central spindle. Read the rest of this entry »
Hot-desking is one thing, but you should never actually have to put up with a hot desk. So Logitech has launched a laptop stand with an integrated cooling fan.
The N100 “Cooling Pad” has a USB-powered airflow system inside that sits beneath a slotted surface, the combination of which, Logitech claimed, ensures air’s distributed evenly around your machine.
The firm claimed that, unlike other cooling pads, its N100 draws air in from the rear. Housing the fan inside the cooling pad also protects the spinner from dust and damage, Logitech stressed. Read the rest of this entry »
