Monday, December 08, 2008

42. How It Works: Batteries

By: Dustin Sklavos
From: NotebookReview

"How it Works" has been going strong for eight chapters now, and here in the ninth chapter we get to a subject that frankly, I've been dreading: batteries. This is a situation where explaining how the battery itself works is largely irrelevant; instead, it's more important to know how to choose a battery, how to save battery life, and how the battery itself decays.

There are problems here. While I can be credibly marked down for missing one or two points of minutiae in the last article, when talking about batteries there's a mountain of hearsay. Even more than the urban legends that surround them, there are other factors that ultimately make them difficult to talk about. Lenovo, for example, regularly squeezes obscene amounts of battery life out of their laptops, while an Asus equipped with the same hardware will get borderline half as much battery life. I can't give you the precise reason why.

So here we go, getting into Part IX of "How it Works" and talking about one of the most important and misunderstood parts of your laptop: the battery.

How It Works: Batteries

Before I get into the nitty gritty of this, I need to make something clear: I'm neither chemist nor engineer, so the nitty gritty details and minutiae of batteries are things I won't go into. This is largely because understanding them isn't really relevant to understanding how to care for and use your laptop battery.

First and probably most important is that Metallica lied to you: battery is not, in fact, here to stay. Lithium Ion batteries (commonly referred to as LiIon) have been powering laptops for quite some time now, and if anything in this world is ephemeral, surely these are. These batteries begin losing capacity - not charge, but full capacity - from the moment they come off the manufacturing line. That means that your battery life is going to be at its best the day you buy your laptop and from then on, it will become progressively worse. Period.

That said, laptop batteries have to be pretty impressive given the fact that they power an entire computer. And mercifully, compared to other parts like processors or graphics cards, battery statistics are incredibly easy to understand. There are really just two statistics to them: number of cells and life rated in milliampere-hours (mAh). There is, however, no way to totally gauge how much battery life a computer can pull from these. An ASUS Eee PC 1000H netbook, for example, can pull a staggering six hours out of a six cell battery. By the same token, I had an old ASUS laptop that, at the time I bought it, would be lucky to hit 2:30 from the same-sized battery. So as I mentioned before, there are variables here, and I'll discuss them.

Cells and Power Hours

Laptop batteries are comprised of groups of cells. Traditionally, low capacity batteries contain three to four cells; the average laptop battery is a six cell. When you get into 17" laptops, batteries tend to contain eight or nine cells. Finally, I've seen high capacity batteries go up to twelve.

What's important to understand is that the number of cells the battery contains directly affects the size of the battery itself. In smaller laptops (12.1" and under), for example, going beyond three or four cells often results in a battery that hangs out the back of the notebook. Likewise, the 12-cell high capacity battery HP offers for their 14.1" and 15.4" laptop lines (they're kind enough to at least standardize the battery) lifts up the machine, tilting it up on a flat surface and having the pleasant side effect of producing a more comfortable typing angle (depending on who you ask).


3-cell standard battery on HP 2133 Mini-Note

6-cell extended life battery on HP 2133 Mini-Note

The battery itself will also be rated for either watt hours or more commonly, milliampere-hours, or mAh, and again, more is better. Where this gets a little bit tricky is that some batteries are able to produce a smidge more milliampere-hours out of the same number of cells using higher capacity cells. I've seen six cell batteries offer just 4400 mAh, or go up to 4800 mAh or better.

Battery Life

Here I'm going to explain about the easiest things you can do to improve battery life in your laptop, and it amazes me how many users aren't familiar with some of these. This isn't even going to get into the nitty gritty of the control panels, really, they're just basic tips.

First and foremost, the most power hungry component of your laptop by a long mile is the screen. While LED-backlit screens (see Part VIII) do draw substantially less power than CCFL-backlit screens, they still draw a decent amount of power. Fortunately, laptop manufacturers are aware of this and gave you a way to dim the backlight, thus improving battery life greatly. Backlight brightness is generally controlled by a combination of the Fn key on the keyboard and a pair of the function keys, which dim or brighten the screen depending on which you press. By dimming the screen while running on the battery to where you can comfortably read it, you can potentially add at least a half hour to your useful battery life if not more.

The second thing you can do is disable your wireless connection. Laptops always include some way of toggling the wireless card on and off, usually with a dedicated switch but occasionally with the tried and true Fn and function key combination. While this is something you may be loathe to disable and is becoming less and less relevant as newer wireless cards draw less and less power, it's still worth knowing. If your laptop is Bluetooth-enabled, disable that when you're not using Bluetooth to avoid wasting power.

Third is what you use your laptop for. Frankly, gaming on the battery is a good way to kill it in a hurry. Modern 3D games tend to be very hardware intensive. Pushing your CPU and video hardware at full bore or near full bore is going to draw more power, but this only gets magnified by the heat they generate as a result, which pushes the fan in your laptop that much harder as well. If you're just playing Solitaire or Minesweeper you don't have a lot to worry about, but if you're trying to play World of Warcraft or Doom 3 during class, your battery is likely to go in a hurry.

In this vein, doing heavy Photoshop or video work isn't going to thrill your laptop's battery a whole lot either. While it's not the kind of killer that gaming can be, it still pushes the processor pretty hard, causing it to draw more power as a result. And finally, playing DVDs or Blu-rays on the battery is also a good way to kill it, though at least laptops tend to be semi-optimized for this. These tasks draw more power by virtue of having to spin up the optical drive, and in the case of Blu-ray can pretty aggressively tax both the CPU and video hardware.

Given all this information, you can probably assume installing software on the battery from a disc isn't going to do you any favors either.

So what the hell can you do? Well, remember, you CAN do any of these tasks, you just need to understand they're going to hit the battery a little harder and make peace with that.

Shopping for Battery Life

While I do plan on putting together a full bore "buying a laptop online" guide at a later date, for now I can give you some key pointers on how to shop for a laptop that can maximize the useful life out of its battery.

As far as screens go, LED-backlit screens make a big difference in power draw and can improve your battery life while also producing a much more pleasing picture. It also bears keeping in mind that if you buy a larger laptop, it's going to have a larger screen, and that larger screen is going to need more power.

Dedicated graphics hardware (remember Part V) is always going to take a bigger bite out of your battery life. If you must have the absolute best battery life you can, you're better off with integrated graphics.

As of the time of this writing and likely for the foreseeable future, Intel processors generally produce superior battery life than AMD's do. It's a hard fact of life, especially for those of us AMD stalwarts. Intel's P series mobile processors seem to be the cream of the crop right now, sitting in a mainstream segment and reporting a TDP of 10W less than T series processors. Oftentimes, thin and light and ultraportable laptops will contain low voltage or ultra low voltage processors, and these are going to do the best on battery life but come at a premium cost.

If you're slumming it and hitting low cost laptops, you're likely just not going to get the battery life you want. These tend to use cheaper and fewer cells in the batteries to get the cost that low and pass the savings on to you, so to speak.

And finally, look at the review of the laptop you're eyeballing. Notebook Review has reviews for an alarming number of laptops on the market, and better, there's probably at least one person on the forums who owns the laptop you're looking at and can answer questions about it for you.

Your Battery Is Not Here To Stay

And now we come to the hard fact of laptop batteries: they lose capacity over time. First of all, anyone who tells you not to constantly recharge it, or to power cycle it, or whatever, is cracked out. Power cycling it may calibrate software in the battery that tells the computer how much life the battery has left, but that's it. LiIon batteries begin losing capacity the instant they come off the conveyor belt, period.

The one thing these batteries are sensitive to is temperature. If you're planning not to use a battery for a while, keeping it in the freezer will substantially reduce the steady loss of capacity. The site Battery University has a little more math (okay, a lot more) for you to dig on here, but basically you'll want to reduce the battery to about a 40% charge and then freeze it, and that will help reduce the loss of capacity.

Unfortunately, you probably want to use your battery. That means that the increased temperatures that come with running your laptop are going to take their toll on the battery's capacity.

Given regular, average use coupled with the math on Battery University's site, it's safe to assume your maximum battery life will be reduced by roughly a third by the end of the first year.

One important thing to keep in mind is that contrary to what anyone says, laptop LiIon batteries do not have a "memory" the way other rechargeables might. This is not how these batteries lose capacity.

And finally, do not buy a battery and plan to use it later. As I said, batteries lose their charge the instant they come off the line, so avoid buying the battery until you intend to use it.

Conclusion

Yet another article where I can't really give you any recommendations. That's because ... hey ... these are batteries. Part of the problem is that there's no real good metric for measuring how much battery life you can expect from a laptop because of the design decisions each manufacturer makes. I can say that I've generally seen solid battery life out of HP's hardware, and I've heard good things about Dell's. Lenovo is practically a class leader here. Likewise, though I love ASUS, their laptops tend to have mediocre to poor battery life. As the stalwarts on the forums will tell you, an ASUS laptop just wouldn't be an ASUS without some kind of horrible fatal flaw, and nine times out of ten, that battery life is it.

As for the steady decay of battery life, well, it comes with the territory. The nice thing about bigger, high capacity batteries is that even though age sets in, their useful life is longer as a result of just holding more. I have a nearly two year old 12-cell HP battery powering my HP Pavilion dv2500t that still gets me about four useful hours on the charge.

Oh, and those of you that are wondering where the section on battery recalls is, there's a simple answer: there isn't one. Recalls occur for all kinds of stuff, though admittedly laptop batteries seem to be a little more prone. But that's a business and manufacturing detail.

And that concludes Part IX of "How it Works." At this point, if you can't practically build your own laptop there may be no hope for you, but fear not ... we'll get it all covered.

41. How It Works: Screens

By: Dustin Sklavos
From: NotebookReview

As the "How it Works" series gets on in the years, it may be helpful to look back at one of its predecessors; in this case, the Notebook Screen Guide I wrote in 2005. While yes, laptops continue to have screens and many traits have managed to stay the same, there have been advances and changes in the market that definitely precipitate a new guide. Since "How it Works" is in full swing right now, it seems fairly obvious that screens should get their due here. After all, we're examining every facet of your notebook to understand how it all comes together, right?

It's easy to underestimate the importance of the screen. Performance characteristics of computers in general often take precedence in peoples' minds; no one goes up to their friends and says "I just got this sweet 15.4 inch screen laptop" when they could say "I just got this sweet Centrino 2 laptop." But the screen is important, especially with your laptop. The screen is the most important part of you interact with your computer, and a bad screen can ruin the experience while a great screen can make it that much more enjoyable. I found on my own desktop that moving to a 21" widescreen made using it more pleasant, and when I made the jump from a 24" LG to a 27" Dell screen, everything became that much better. Being able to use that 24" as a secondary monitor also dramatically improved video editing and even just basic efficiency. Frankly, my computer is a place I really don't mind spending a whole lot of time.

Likewise, a bad screen can ruin your day and make you want to use your laptop less. While the screen on my HP dv2500t isn't going to win any prizes, it's still a good enough screen that it doesn't factor in to whether or not I want to use the laptop itself, and the backlighting even on the lowest setting is still quite manageable. Likewise, I used to have an Asus A8Jm that was a remarkably powerful laptop with such an abysmal screen that it made using the computer a chore. What good is a gaming quality GPU when a game with subtle shadowing like Doom 3 is rendered virtually impossible to see by dismal viewing angles?

So, today I'm going to talk to you about your laptop screen.

How It Works: Screens

Laptop screens may be one of the simplest things to get into while dodging the irritating technical stuff. The vast majority of information is readily available on these, so this guide is going to wind up largely being a "screen decoder ring."

First of all, in order to understand the screen, you're basically looking at these qualities: resolution, aspect ratio, screen size, backlighting, and finish. Before I get into these qualities, a little briefing may be in order as to how the screen itself is designed.

Building A Laptop Screen

Basically, the modern laptop screen is a fixed series of "little windows" called pixels. The pixels themselves each have three subpixels - red, blue, and green. These subpixels are basically tinted shutters. To get a picture on the screen, these subpixels shutter the light from the backlight and together produce the different colors displayed on the screen itself.

While desktop panels are typically one of three types - TN, *VA (PVA and MVA), and IPS - laptop panels are almost universally TN panels. It's important to note that desktop screens are not all created equal, and that TN panels are by far the cheapest (read: least expensive and lowest quality) of the three. They sport mediocre viewing angles and in the case of larger panels, this results in a profoundly non-uniform perception of the coloring of the image.

In laptops, this is pretty much the way of the world, but because laptop screens are smaller they're at least better suited to this panel type. Unfortunately, TN panels also produce generally poor color accuracy. TN panels have 6-bit color per subpixel, totalling an effective eighteen bits of color or a maximum of around 200,000 colors. They then use dithering to simulate the remaining 24-bit color gamut which has been standard for as long as I can remember. This ultimately makes TN panels - and by extension, laptops - less than ideal for doing color sensitive work like video editing and photo manipulation. Try not to take this too seriously, though: the dithering is generally pretty good and you largely wouldn't notice this if I never mentioned it to you. (On desktop screens, this is another matter entirely.)

Another aspect briefly worth mentioning is "response time." Since the image on the screen is created by the subpixels moving to filter light through, motion in the image itself can ghost or blur a little bit. This is where TN panels excel; ghosting is minimal on these compared to the other panel types. Thus, motion appears quite fluid on typical notebook screens, and the response time isn't really an issue.

Resolution and Aspect Ratio

These are going into a section together because they're inextricably tied to one another. Resolution is expressed in X times Y; X is the number of pixels wide the screen is and Y is the number of pixels tall.

Aspect ratio is a profoundly important thing for the modern consumer to know and be aware of. I can't tell you how many times hairs have stood up on the back of my neck in restaurants because someone is running the HDTV at standard aspect, causing the image to appear stretched and squished. This is something easily controlled but no one has been educated about it, so let me spell it out for you.

Aspect ratio is expressed in a similar way to resolution - X:Y, where X is the number of units wide and Y is the number of units tall. Alternatively, it may be expressed as X:1, where X is a decimal value. A screen that is 1.33:1 is 1.33 times as wide as it is tall. You follow?

So here are the aspect ratios in rotation right now:

4:3 (1.33:1) - This is the aspect ratio of standard definition. Your old TV is going to produce a picture three units tall and four units wide. While screens are seldom produced in this aspect anymore, a common resolution in standard is 1024x768.

16:9 (1.77:1) - This is the aspect ratio of HDTVs. It's substantially wider than it is tall, and while this aspect ratio was more or less nonexistent in the laptop market a year ago, it's becoming increasingly popular with the manufacturers as 16:9 panels are cheaper to produce than the next type, which is currently the most common. 16:9 laptop screens are commonly either 1366x768 or 1920x1080; 1680x945 is an awkward half step that has materialized as well in 18.4" screens.

16:10 (1.66:1) - This is the most common computer aspect ratio. While it may be a matter of preference, I personally find this aspect to be the most productive for computing. As humans we read left to right, down a page, so an aspect slightly taller than 16:9 - which is more ideal for movie watching - is typically more practical.

5:4 (1.25:1) - This is a bizarre aspect that used to be quite common but is becoming increasingly rarefied. This aspect only appears with the resolution 1280x1024, a resolution which was common on desktops but rare in notebooks and is now all but extinct.

The only aspect ratios you need to worry about in modern laptops are 16:9 and, more importantly, 16:10. Naturally, in an effort to make things even more confusing, manufacturers seldom refer to these by their resolution, but instead with odd abbreviations. Here's your decoder ring.

16:10 screens come in the following resolutions:
WXGA - 1280x800
WXGA+ - 1440x900
WSXGA+ - 1680x1050
WUXGA - 1920x1200

16:9 screens thankfully eschew these conventions, instead simply stating their resolutions. This is, however, where high definition entertainment and resolution cross paths:
1280x720 (720p)
1366x768 (erroneously referred to as 720p)
1600x900 (odd half step)
1680x945 (odd half step)
1920x1080 (1080p)

Okay, before I go on I just want to point something out: high definition resolutions are often referred to with an i or p at the end; these stand for interlaced and progressive respectively. What you need to know is this: progressive is better than interlaced, and all computer screens are progressive.

Going back to the resolutions themselves, there are a couple of key points to make here. First, the higher the resolution, the more information can be displayed on the screen because there are more pixels. Second, when in gaming, resolution is the single biggest factor in determining the game's performance. A weaker GPU (remember part 5?) is going to have a tougher time pushing higher resolutions, and resolutions above 1440x900 will tax even solid mid-range graphics hardware. Integrated graphics will be lucky to run anything at better than 800x600. Third, the resolution of the screen is NOT the resolution you have to run it at. You can set a lower resolution in Windows or in games, but the trade off is that edges will be slightly blurred. Remember that the number of pixels in the screen hasn't changed, but the number of pixels you've asked it to render has. Rendering 1024x640 pixels on a 1280x800 pixel screen means there's going to be some softening of the edges involved.

I haven't mentioned every single resolution that appears in laptops here, but you should now be able to understand what the resolution is, and using simple math you should be able to calculate the aspect ratio of any given laptop screen.

Now, moving on.

Screen Size

Okay, so how big is the freakin' screen? Screen size is measured in a diagonal line from opposite corners of the screen. It's important to note the relationship between resolution and screen size here, because it directly affects the usability of the screen itself.

Let's say we have a 15.4" screen and a 17" screen, and both have a resolution of 1440x900. The 15.4" screen will be harder to read because the pixels comprising the image are physically smaller. At 14.1" this issue is only exacerbated, so it's really going to depend on how good your eyesight is and what's comfortable for you.

Because the screen is the largest single part of the laptop, the screen size typically defines the size of the entire machine. A 15.4"/15.6" is going to be a standard middle of the road mainstream unit, running at least six pounds and generally closer to seven. 14.1" and smaller are more and more portable, while larger than 15.6" are desktop replacement class and much less portable as a result.

Now, the screen size itself can be a useful tool for determining the aspect ratio of a screen and, to a lesser extent, the resolution. Next to each screen size I'll list the lowest (and often most common) resolution and in parenthesis the other resolutions screens of that size come in.

16:10 screens:
12.1" - 1280x800
13.3" - 1280x800 (1440x900)
14.1" - 1280x800 (1440x900)
15.4" - 1280x800 (1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1200)
17.0" - 1440x900 (1680x1050, 1920x1200)

16:9 screens:
11.1" - 1366x768
13.1" - 1366x768 (1600x900)
15.6" - 1366x768
16.0" - 1366x768 (1920x1080)
16.4" - 1600x900 (1920x1080)
18.4" - 1680x945 (1920x1080)

This is still missing some resolutions on the extreme sides - the netbooks and the units charitably called notebooks - but should be a pretty good, clear indicator. I've neglected to include standard aspect screens as they're all but dead in the mobile market and will almost never be seen in the wild.

Backlighting and Viewing Angles

Remember how I mentioned earlier that the screen on your laptop required backlighting? There are two types of backlights on the market: CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) and LED (light emitting diode).

CCFL is the old tried and true standard, and what most laptops have. It draws more power than LED backlighting does and generally produces a more washed out picture than its counterpart. Additionally, CCFL tends to result in a phenomenon called backlight bleed, where the lamp results in uneven lighting of the image. Since the CCFL is generally in the bottom of the notebook panel, on a pure black screen you may notice the top of the screen is much darker than the bottom. In a particularly bad notebook where the bottom of the screen bezel isn't properly affixed to the screen itself, you may even be able to see the backlight itself. CCFL screens also tend to have poorer viewing angles than their LED counterparts, partially due to this poor quality lighting.

So why is CCFL more common? It's presently cheaper than LED backlighting. When custom ordering a laptop, LED backlighting may cost an extra $100.

LED backlighting provides a much more even lighting of the image, somewhat better viewing angles, and a much brighter and more vibrant picture overall. It also draws notably less power than CCFL backlighting. The industry is transitioning to this at present, as it can also be potentially cheaper to produce than CCFL lighting.

I do want to point out that while CCFL is being presented to you as godawful, it IS the old standby, and a well made CCFL screen can still be very pleasant to look at.

I'm including viewing angles in this section because the lighting method used does affect the viewing angles of the screen. You may note when looking at a laptop from above, below, or the sides that the picture washes out a bit (or a lot). This is the nature of the beast with TN panels, which are most readily identified by their dismal below viewing angles that cause the colors to invert. If a screen has bad viewing angles, it may be impossible to produce an even image from looking at it dead on. Some laptops do have excellent viewing angles, though, but they're typically the more expensive ones.

Surface Finish

The last section here is the finish of the screen itself, of which there are two kinds: glossy and matte.

The glossy finish is vastly more common than matte, which is fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it. A glossy finish on the screen will make it appear brighter and the colors more vibrant, but the trade off is that the finish itself is very reflective. Some manufacturers are even using multiple coats in some instances, which would produce a fantastic image if you couldn't style your hair in it.

The matte finish is the old standby, and a lot of desktop panels still use this. While color may seem a little bit dull compared to the glossy finish, mattes are far less reflective and a lot of more seasoned computer users tend to prefer these in the long run (myself included). These are unfortunately becoming rarefied, but business class notebooks still use these much more often than consumer grade hardware.

This is all a matter of taste, honestly. Glossy or matte isn't a dealbreaker for me on my laptop the way it is on my desktop. The overwhelming majority of screens in retail are going to be glossy, while manufacturers like Lenovo tend to prefer mattes.

Conclusion

This is another one of those articles where I can't give you much of a helpful rundown at the end nor offer recommendations, and this holds true from the last time I talked about screens.

The fact is that screens tend to be very subjective. My girlfriend, for example, has a 1920x1200 resolution screen on her 15.4" Dell. That's way, way too high resolution for me. Text is tiny. But she also has better than 20/20 eyesight while I'm blind as a bat. Likewise, a lot of gamers recommend getting the lowest resolution screen you can for your laptop so the graphics hardware isn't stressed too hard and thus produces a much sharper, cleaner image. And don't get me started on glossy vs. matte. Some people intending to use their laptop as a portable media device may be happy with the influx of 16:9 screens in the marketplace, while stalwarts like me vastly prefer our 16:10 screens. In applications like Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, for example, that extra 32 pixels at the bottom of the screen means enough space for one more timeline, while Photoshop users are oftentimes going to want the tallest screen they can get.

So it's going to be a matter of taste for you, but the nice thing is that you can go out into retail and generally see what the screen looks like and get a proper feel for it yourself. If you're thinking of custom buying a laptop from a manufacturer, retail is a great place to see what you'll be getting yourself into. Just don't sell yourself short on the screen. It's how you interact with the computer itself, and if it's a lousy screen, you're not going to want to use the laptop if you can avoid it.

43. How It Works: Optical Drives

By: Dustin Sklavos
From: NotebookReview

The "How it Works" series has gone on for six exciting, adrenaline-pumping, action packed parts so far, explaining the nitty gritty of all the stuff that makes your laptop perform. You should by this point have a clear understanding of where all the bottlenecks and boondoggles in your laptop are and be able to make some informed decisions.

Or can you?

While we've covered the vast majority of the internals thus far, it's important to keep in mind that you still have to connect things to your laptop. There are other utilities you may use it for outside of the odd game of Minesweeper (a personal favorite) or taking notes, because let's face it: If you were just going to use your laptop for that you might as well just save your money and buy an Eee PC, since it does that stuff just fine.

But now we're going to discuss a part of your laptop that I'm sure you take for granted: your optical drive.

How It Works: Optical Drives

Most of you probably call it the DVD burner or CD writer or DVD drive, but the best all-encompassing technical term for these drives is "optical drive." Why? Because that's how they work, and all of them are variations on a basic theme: a motor spins the disc in the drive super fast while a laser attached to a servo reads data off of it. This is why these drives tend to be pretty loud and draw a lot of power: a whole lot of stuff is moving.

If you think back to last article when I talked about hard drives, you'll see similar concepts: a circular disc containing data which is read by a moving head. But while hard drives can hit transfer speeds close to 100MB per second (especially on the desktop), optical drives seldom hit anywhere near that. Data on optical discs is less dense, and the mechanisms for reading it are different.

Optical drives, similar to hard drives, also have a small amount of built in memory, but because data on a disc is nowhere near as dense (or numerous), cache is usually very small and not terribly important for you to know.

Anatomy of a Disc

In order to understand how the optical drive works, you need to know how an optical disc works. This is pretty simple. The disc is basically three layers: the big plastic disc part is on the bottom, a reflective surface is in the middle, and then the top part of the disc is where the art or label is, and this part actually protects the data itself. The data is kept in microscopic pits in the reflective surface. This is why scratching the disc itself isn't catastrophic.

Scratches still aren't good for it though, because the laser used to read the disc is tuned very precisely, and if the disc is damaged, the wrong scratch or hair may refract or block the beam and make the data difficult to read.

That reflective layer sandwiched between the plastic part and the label part is also one reason why you want to use soft pens or markers when writing the label on your writeable disc: the label layer is basically protecting the reflective surface which contains the data.

Formats

Now that you know the fundamentals, it's all just variations on a theme. CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-rays are all basically just different methods of tuning the same core technology to cram more capacity onto the disc. A finer laser results in being able to increase data density on the disc itself.

We'll get to writeable, rewriteable, and dual layer stuff in a second. There are four (well, three still active) basic formats.

CD (Compact Disc) is the granddaddy of them all. Featuring the lowest capacity (topping out at 700MB), CDs remain the cheapest and easiest to produce since the data is not that dense and therefore easier to read.

DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) is the descendant. DVDs top out at 8.54GB in dual layer while a single layer DVD can hold 4.7GB. The laser used to read DVDs is a bit finer, and the higher capacity resulting made them ideal for video and data backup tasks.

Blu-ray and its defeated opponent HD-DVD (High Definition DVD) are where a bifurcation in the format occurred. You were probably aware of this. Blu-ray is so named because it uses a finer, blue-violet laser for reading data. HD-DVD uses a similar blue laser. The main differences between the two had to do with their total capacity (Blu-ray can do 25GB in a single layer and 50GB in a dual layer while HD-DVD could only do 15GB per layer) and their ease of manufacturing (HD-DVDs could be manufactured with minor changes at regular DVD factories while Blu-ray required a substantially larger overhaul).

Let's be clear for a second here: for data archival purposes Blu-ray does indeed just kick HD-DVD around, all over town. More capacity is just plain king there. For doing high definition movies, though, the difference in capacity isn't really a major one. High definition movies, encoded properly, don't need much more space than is provided on a garden variety dual layer DVD.

The HD-DVD and Blu-ray battle wasn't decided by the public, it was decided largely by back room politics, though in fairness, while HD-DVD was a superior movie format for consumers (not for its quality, but for its features, lack of region coding, and consistency), Blu-ray is superior for computer usage. If we're moving into the future, the higher capacity of Blu-ray does make it more ideal.

Oh, and in case you were wondering why you can't just write a CD with a finer laser, part of each of these specifications requires a different laser for reading them and so on. The various formats physically can't work any other way.

Layer Change

So this is all very exciting, but what the heck does all that single and dual layer stuff mean? Dual layer discs have two reflective layers sandwiched between the label side and plastic side instead of one. The first of these layers is semi-transparent, so the laser can change its focal length and read through it to the next layer.

If you have an older DVD player at home, you may notice movies pause at a certain point for maybe a second. This is the result of the layer change on the disc, and I've actually seen this occur every so often with high definition movies as well. Computer optical drives tend to be much more tolerant of layer changes and have the benefit of system memory to buffer them so the transition can appear seamless.

Sub-Formats

Okay, so now that we've established our types, let's hit the sub-types. These are specified by a suffix attached to the disc type. For future reference, while movies are just referred to as "Blu-ray," in computer terms, Blu-ray discs are referred to as "BD," similar to CD. The etymology should be obvious. Moving on ...

"-ROM" stands for "Read Only Memory" and indicates a disc that cannot be written to, only read.

"-R" stands for "Recordable." This is a disc that can be written to once. This is applicable to all formats, but there's a bifurcation here that needs to be discussed later on.

"-RW" stands for "Re-writeable." This disc can be written to, erased, and written to again. This is again applicable to all formats, but has the same bifurcation that "-R" does. For Blu-ray, this is referred to as "-RE." Why they didn't just stick with "-RW" I'll never know, but whatever.

"-RAM" stands for "Random Access Memory" and is the weird one out, appearing only for DVDs. DVD-RAM discs are basically designed to be usable like the floppy discs of old, and because of their flexibility this way, they are very popular in camcorders that write directly to discs. The flipside is that these bad boys tend to be pretty expensive, and write speeds on them are often slower than their "-RW" counterparts. It also tends to be less compatible than the other formats.

"DL" is an extra suffix that stands for "Dual Layer." This currently only applies to DVDs; dual layer Blu-ray discs are also available, but there's no initial distinction made, the packaging will just specify the capacity.

Now, I'm sure many of you have seen "DVD+R" or "DVD+RW." Basically, the + and - versions of these formats occur only in DVD, and have their pro's and con's. All DVD writers on the market these days can write to either one, and most drives can read either one fine. "+" format discs are usually a little faster and a little cheaper. "-" format discs, on the other hand, feature one major benefit: they sport excellent compatibility. Generally DVD+R discs will work fine in most drives that can read DVDs, but when they don't, a DVD-R almost always will.

There was briefly a generation of DVD players early on in the format's lifetime that deliberately didn't read writeable media, probably because the manufacturers expected us to only use it for piracy. DVD-R discs, on the other hand, tend to do an excellent job of fooling these players and will run quite happily in most anything. It's for this reason that as a media major I use DVD-Rs almost exclusively.

Drive and Disc Speeds

As far as read speeds go, these numbers have become largely irrelevant. Read speed for any given drive is invariably "fast enough."

Speed ratings for optical drives are measured pretty crudely, basically in multiples. You've seen "52x" CD-ROM drives, and the CD-Rs at the store may be rated for "16x." The basic problem is that it requires some mathematics to actually yield a theoretical bandwidth speed, so at the end of the day it's basically just "52x is faster than 48x but it really doesn't matter anyhow." Unless you've just gotta have that extra 1MB a second, in which case this series just isn't going to be able to provide you with the kind of help you need.

But there is, however, one important place where these speeds matter, and that's write speeds. When you try to write an optical disc, usually the computer will give you an option of how fast you want to write it. The key here is that writeable or re-writeable optical discs also specify a safe range of speeds where you can reliably write to them, and some are specced for "High Speed."

Almost all CD-Rs generally max out write speeds at this point, but just about everything else has some variation. If you're not sure how fast your drive can write, then keep this in mind: your drive can always slow down to take advantage of slower media.

It also bears mentioning that re-writeable discs are almost always substantially slower than regular writeable media.

Region Coding and Piracy

I'd be remiss not to mention this, and it won't matter to the vast majority of readers. Optical drives are basically coded to a specific region in compliance with DVD digital rights management. These region codes matter solely to DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray movies.

DVDs have the most restrictive regional lockouts, and sport six different region codes (along with the most preferable one, region 0, which means the disc can be played anywhere). The most important ones to know are region 1 (USA and Canada), region 2 (Western Europe), and region 3 (Southeast Asia and Japan). Of course, if you're an aggressive DVD importer, there are ways around regional lockouts. Unfortunately, the computer methods almost always involve software of questionable legality in the United States where we're based, so I can't really talk about those.

Blu-ray is substantially less restrictive, with just three region codes: A covers the Americas, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan; B covers Europe and Australia; and C covers Russia and China.

Finally, lamentably, HD-DVD had no restrictions this way, so naturally it went by the wayside.

Now, piracy: don't do it kids. Most optical media for games has some kind of protection preventing you from making proper copies of the discs themselves. Almost all DVDs have this, so don't get all excited like "oh, I'm gonna copy movies off Netflix." First, if you're the type who rents, copies, and sends back, you're a tool and you're part of the problem. I hate digital rights management with a passion as it really only punishes honest consumers, but honestly, ignoring all the politics involved ... if you like a movie, just buy the thing. You could make a case for CDs and Blu-ray movies being horrendously overpriced, but DVDs? Come on. I just got The Terminator for $3.99. It's affordable.

Lightscribe and Labelflash

I don't want to go into too much detail with these, but it's basically technology that allows you to use the optical drive itself to burn monochrome labels into the top of media designed for this purpose. This process tends to be time consuming (can be a half hour or longer per disc), but can also look pretty cool. You'll need to buy the proper media to do it (labeled "Lightscribe" or "Labelflash"), and you'll need to make sure the drive can support it. Mercifully, notebooks do tend to advertise these pretty aggressively.

Lightscribe is the more popular of these two technologies, and parties almost exclusively on the HP side of town. If your drive can do Lightscribe, there should be a sticker on the notebook telling you just that. Failing that, the drive itself is often labeled (at least on mine).

Media Quirks

Really, it's the writing part that makes these things so freaking complicated. Basically, don't buy cheap writeable media.

Let me explain. All "-R"s and "-RW"s are not created equal, and some are of substantially higher quality than others. Unfortunately, recommending brands can get a bit tricky because some drives will just write happily to about anything while other drives can get really picky. I have a DVD writer at home that used to be just peachy with Memorex media, but now produces coasters on anything but TDK.

I will say that you should avoid the cheapo ones at all costs. In house brands like Dynex, Staples, and GQ are going to produce poor quality discs that may not last long and will certainly have difficulty reading in some drives.

Of course, the unicorn in the room is Taiyo Yuden, generally regarded as the best brand of writeable media. These are almost impossible to find in retail and require special ordering, but if you simply must have the best, these are where you want to go.

Re-writeable media is also kind of flaky. It tends to read and write slower than regular media, but more importantly, after a few writes and rewrites these can turn into coasters, so buyer beware.

Conclusion

This is one of those situations where I can't offer any clear recommendations: buy the drive you need. Notebooks generally only give you this option when they're being custom ordered, so you're pretty much stuck with whatever they give you. This usually isn't a problem.

I wish I could distill this article for you as I've done in articles past, but the problem here is that optical drives are largely governed by aggravating minutiae. If I tried to distill things I'd wind up writing the article all over again, and you and I both would rather go play Mass Effect, so there's that.

40. DIY Notebook Screen Replacement

By: Kevin O'Brien
From: NotebookReview

The screen on any notebook is one of the most vulnerable components and is the single most expensive part to replace in many models. If you are out of warranty, this type of repair can force you to buy a new machine as costs can spiral upwards of 500 dollars for a new panel. If the failure falls under the protection of an extended warranty you can be in great shape, but sending your notebook out for repair can take weeks. In this article we cover the DIY LCD replacement procedure as well as explain how you might acquire a panel through warranty services for an at-home repair.

Like most DIY articles and guides, this advice must be taken at your own risk, as even simple mistakes can completely ruin your notebook. Please follow manufacturer’s guidelines and take as many safety precautions as possible.

Diagnosing the problem, defect or damage?

The first step in this process is diagnosing your screen to find out if it is actually defective, and if so, if it will fall into protection under the manufacturer’s warranty policy. If a baseball hit the screen chances are it won’t be covered; in my case hot spots the size of dimes started showing up on a screen that was pushing two years old. Since no physical damage was present, it was covered under my three year extended warranty. Below is a picture showing the marks that started to appear on dark backgrounds.

Strange hot spots that started showing up on my LCD

Contacting Lenovo for support was the next step, and getting them to ship out a part that retails for almost $1,000 was easier than expected. I called the standard Lenovo tech support line during lunchtime and had a representative on the phone after 45 seconds of phone prompts. I explained my problem and didn’t have to listen to any support scripts on items like reinstalling drivers, rebooting the machine, or other irrelevant steps that I had taken to diagnose the problem. I expressed my concerns over sending my primary machine in for repair, and told the technician that I could handle the repair myself. I was warned that any damage to the notebook would not be covered during my own repair, which was expected. This applies to cracking plastic trying to pry the case open, tearing connectors, or other damage that could be blamed on an untrained individual doing the repair. Soon the replacement panel was on the way. Total time on the phone was roughly 15 minutes.

Repair process

The panel arrived the next business day, one day sooner than expected. I was more than happy to see it and took an extended lunch break for the occasion. For the repair, I picked our conference room since it had such a large, clean table to lay parts on and easily keep track of the numerous small items. An anti-static mat or wrist strap would be advised for this process, but since I was lacking a proper grounding source I discharged my finger on a nearby metal framed wall.


Lenovo T60 ready to be torn apart for repair

The Lenovo Hardware Maintenance Manual describes, in a very detailed fashion, how to disassemble the entire notebook in order to replace any component you can think of. Below is the condensed version of removing the panel from the notebook, with reassembly being the procedure in reverse. It entails removing the lower screen hinge screws, removing the palmrest, keyboard, and top bezel, disconnecting the screen cable, lifting out the screen, and tearing apart the frame around the screen to get to the panel inside. Throughout the process little wires and connectors need to be disconnected, such as the Bluetooth control module, wireless antennas, and the backlight inverter board.

Some of the repair (as with most DIY projects) requires some on-the-fly thinking. In my case it was a strip of glue holding the lower half of the screen bezel in place and needing a Sherwin-Williams discount card to carefully cut the line without bending anything or damaging the fragile screen. Note that even when removing defective components, if you cause physical damage to it during the process, you will end up being charged for the part when you return it. In this situation I didn’t feel like paying Lenovo almost a thousand dollars for a cracked screen.

Screen assembly removed from notebook

With the panel finally removed from the notebook I was able to inspect the old screen and make sure part numbers matched the new screen. With any repair you want to make sure the parts are identical before you start to reassemble the notebook. Mistakes can happen, so you just want to make sure. The delicate process of removing the screws attaching the screen hinge to the side of the panel was the most frightening by far, requiring quite a bit of pressure. I didn’t want the screwdriver to slip in the threads, but I also had to be careful to not use too much pressure and crack the delicate panel.

Clean work environment is very important!

Total time to tear down the notebook and remove the panel was about 15 minutes. I had some past experience repairing notebooks, so I did have a slight edge. Reassembly took four times as long, but only since I rushed and forgot to reattach vital parts. I forgot to reconnect the backlight inverter board, which caused my notebook to boot with a blank screen the first time I fired it up. Needless to say that wasn’t the most comforting moment after replacing the entire screen.

Lenovo T60 partially complete to verify screen works before full reassembly

After some last minute corrections the notebook was in working order and the screen was better than it ever was. Almost 2 years of use had dimmed the backlight considerably, moving the white point from a cooler blue tint to a warmer yellow.

Conclusion

One message that doesn’t always get driven into the heads of new notebook buyers is the importance of a manufacturer’s extended warranty. For most components I would consider the extended warranty laughable (wireless mouse, webcam, ShopVac) but with the cost and complexity of a notebook, it can be a very wise investment. In my case it replaced a single component that roughly costs the same as a new notebook 2 years down the road for free. The repair process turned out to be easier than expected, but I did learn a few things:

  1. Use high quality screwdrivers. (cheap screwdrivers don’t grip finely machined screws without a lot of pressure)
  2. Plan out plenty of time for the repair. You don’t know what might crop up so it is best to plan out double or triple the amount of time that you think it might take.
  3. Be patient. Rushing through reassembly might mean that you extended the time required for the repair because you now need to take it apart again to fix something.

Overall, most repairs could be completed by beginners with a basic skillset, requiring only patience and a good screwdriver. This repair did throw a curveball at me with the strip of glue on the screen bezel, but for the most part the manual detailed the entire process with plenty of pictures and tips. I also have to give props to Lenovo for the more than helpful customer support staff that were friendly to work with and understanding of my concerns.

39. How It Works: Hard Disks

By: Dustin Sklavos
From: NotebookReview

It may seem that the more exciting parts of the "How it Works" series are behind us. We've covered the graphics, memory, and processor - three key performance-defining elements of modern computers in general. While there's no question that these components are the big performance workhorses of the machine, it bears mentioning that the memory and northbridge are designed with mitigating the low bandwidth of the hard disk in mind.

Even beyond simple performance characteristics, understanding the hard disk in your notebook is very important. After all, it's where you keep all of your data. Family photos, video games, school work, music...all of it is being stored here. In some cases your hard disk can quickly become even more important than your car. You can always get a ride somewhere, but how easy is it to recover lost memories?

How It Workd: Hard Disks

As mentioned in the introduction, the hard disk is basically where everything on your notebook is stored to be accessed later. It's also the second slowest component in your notebook in terms of bandwidth (the slowest being your CD/DVD drive). Since we love our analogies here at "How it Works," you can think of the hard disk as being the bank, and the memory (as mentioned in Part IV) as your wallet. The bank stores all of your important stuff, but in order to get it out, you have to actually go there. Your wallet holds a lot less, but you've always got it on you. And much as the bank tries to maximize convenience by offering more branches and adding debit cards, hard disk manufacturers have also made strides in improving access speeds and performance characteristics.

Before we move on, it bears mentioning that the terms "hard disk" and "hard drive" mean essentially the same thing. They're interchangeable. For the purposes of this article we're going to talk about the mechanical hard disks that 99% of us are familiar with. I'll do a small blurb about solid state disks at the end, but for now it's not really relevant.

In this article, I'm going to first explain how the hard disk physically works so you can understand all of the specs that follow it: form factor, spindle speed, cache, interface, and capacity. At the end, as I said, we'll talk about solid state disks, and I'll make some recommendations and talk about brands a bit.

The Hardware Itself

Hard disks are actually pretty interesting pieces of hardware. If you were to open one (which you should never do under any circumstances short of being a licensed technician in a clean room), you'd see a series of metallic discs (as many as three in a notebook drive), and mechanical heads hovering over them.

A hard disk stores data on these discs, called platters, and this data is accessed through those mechanical heads, called drive heads. The software within the hard disk itself, called firmware, operates these parts and optimizes how they function to maximize performance and reduce this troublesome bottleneck. The drive itself also contains a small amount of its own dedicated memory (non-upgradeable) called a "cache" that also helps improve performance, but more on that later.

Given that a drive head has to physically move over a spinning platter to get your data, it should come as no surprise that the hard disk is one of the slowest components in the system. In order to read your stuff, something has to actually physically move someplace else.

The key component here is the platter. The more densely packed data is on the platter, the shorter distance the drive head has to move to get to it, and thus the faster the disk can operate. This results in an aspect that may at first seem counterintuitive: the greater the capacity (more on this later), the faster the disk.

Now, remember how I mentioned that you shouldn't open the hard disk unless you were a licensed technician operating in a clean room? The reason for this is because of how ridiculously fast the platters spin and the drive head moves. A single particle of dust on a platter can fatally damage a hard disk. Alternatively, if the drive head fails, it can collide with the platter and ruin the disk, which is where you get the term "crash." The disks are designed to be as robust as possible, but the hardware within is still somewhat fragile, so violently shaking your laptop while you're copying files is probably not a good idea.

You don't hear about bad memory that often, and almost never defective processors, but everyone hears about hard disks crashing. Manufacturers try to make them as reliable as possible and are standardizing on five year warranties, but there's only so much you can do with a mechanical device like this. I'm not trying to make you paranoid like a mental health student who suddenly thinks he's a paranoid schizophrenic hypochondriac, because these things really are pretty reliable (otherwise they wouldn't have flourished the way they have). Hardware can still fail, though.

So how can you know if your hard disk is becoming bored with life? Hard disk failures in my experience have never been immediate, sudden things. There's usually a warning sign affectionately referred to as "the click of death." While your hard disk is usually operating, the little hard disk light on your laptop (typically symbolized by a cylinder) is blinking and you may hear faint, asynchronous "crunching." The click of death is not dissimilar to the sound a CD player makes when it's trying valiantly to read a CD you've left on the floor of your car a little too long: it keeps making the same series of noises at the same speed over and over again before finally informing you that CD cases were invented for a reason. The click of death will be a single hard click that often follows the typical crunching sound a hard disk makes, but it will repeat the exact pattern over and over again. In the process, your computer will suddenly become completely unresponsive in trying to open anything stored on that drive. Eventually, if you ride it out you may be able to back up your stuff. Odds are you're screwed, though.

So how does all this stuff work? (I know, great lead-in.)

Form Factor

First, the important thing to know is that a desktop hard disk isn't going to fit in your laptop. This probably seems obvious to some of you, but it bears mentioning. There are three common form factors, or sizes, of hard disk.

3.5" drives are used in desktop computers. These are large, heavy SOBs that as of the time of this writing can hold up to 1.5 terabytes. They draw the most power, and will not fit in your laptop.

2.5" drives are the most commonly used in laptops. These offer a good blend of performance and capacity without being too heavy, drawing too much power, or taking up too much space. These are the drives we're talking about in this article.

1.8" drives are the most commonly used in hard disk based media players as well as high end (read: expensive) ultraportable laptops, not to be confused with netbooks. These tend to have mediocre performance and the lowest capacity, but they're also tiny and keep power consumption and weight down.

The hard disk in a notebook is generally user-replaceable and it's pretty easy to do, but there's a caveat: your data isn't going to magically hop aboard this new one, so you'll need to back it up first and then use your recovery media (you did write it when you got your laptop, right?) to reinstall your operating system.

Interface

I know, I'm handling all the exciting stuff first, right? This is important, though. If you've bought your laptop in the last couple years, it probably uses Serial ATA, or SATA to connect to the computer. Serial ATA is the standard all modern laptops use, as it's the fastest and more importantly, universal between desktops and notebooks. Yes, this means you can internally connect a notebook hard disk to a modern desktop. SATA is characterized by two L-shaped plugs next to each other on the back of the drive.

Parallel ATA, or PATA, and originally known as IDE (or EIDE) is the old standard, and many laptop hard disks available in retail use this standard. PATA is identifiable by two rows of pins on the back of the drive, and is generally slower than SATA. PATA laptop disks require a special converter to connect to desktops.

This is important to know if you're planning on upgrading the hard disk in your laptop, so if you're unsure about which interface your laptop uses, check the notebook's specifications on its manufacturer's website.

Spindle Speed

Much like a vinyl, platters inside the hard disk spin. But while your mint Culture Club record rotates at 45 revolutions per minute, or RPM, the platters inside a hard disk can spin as fast as 7,200 RPM. On desktops drives this speed can hit 10,000 RPM, and server disks can reach a scorching 15,000 RPM. And of course, the faster the platters in the drive rotate, the quicker data can be retrieved, but the hotter the drive runs and the more power it draws. This is largely why notebook drives top out at 7,200 RPM and typically ship at 5,400 RPM.

That said, thermal characteristics and power draw can change depending on the manufacturer and the kinds of optimizations they've made to the hardware. While in theory a 7,200 RPM drive should draw much more power than a 5,400 RPM due to the increased draw from spinning the motor that much faster, this is offset by the faster accesses from the 7,200 RPM drive. Simply put, it doesn't have to spin as long to get your data, so the power draw tends to even out.

Of course, that doesn't change the heat dissipated by the drive. Depending on where the hard drive is located inside your notebook, this could be either a non-issue or a serious problem. I had an old Gateway laptop that practically buried the drive on the bottom of the notebook, so it wasn't an issue when I upgraded to a 7,200 RPM drive. On the flipside, my current notebook, a custom-built (and fantastic) HP dv2500t, places the hard drive squarely under the left palm rest. After a little while, the thing gets so hot it makes your palm sweat. I had to stick to a 5,400 RPM drive, much to my chagrin. Your mileage may vary.

Cache

In order to improve performance, hard drives also contain their own tiny amount of memory, or cache. This is really a sort of non-issue that you shouldn't spend much time thinking about. Notebook hard drives tend to come with between 8MB and 32MB of cache, averaging out at 16MB. While cache can have a definite impact on how a hard disk performs, the optimizations the manufacturer has made in how it's used tend to have a greater one. As a result, most retailers won't even tell you how much cache the drive has as it's generally irrelevant.

Capacity

And here we have the reason why hard disks haven't been replaced. Simply put, there isn't a better, more cost-effective technology for storing massive amounts of data on the market. We've already discussed how the data is stored and how it's accessed, and way back in Part I we defined how to measure capacity, so for the most part we should be good to go, right?

Mostly. There are a couple of key elements here. First, while I said that a larger drive will oftentimes be faster than a smaller one (assuming the same spindle speed), this does get a little bit tricky. For example, if a 100GB drive has three platters of 33GB apiece, this drive will generally be a bit slower than an 80GB drive with two 40GB platters. However, by this logic, you can assume that the largest drives on the market will be among the fastest at their spindle speed.

Second, there's the way GB are supposed to be measured and the way hard disk manufacturers measure them, and this is something I alluded to in Part I. Simply put, a drive advertised with a capacity of 100GB will show in the neighborhood of 90-94GB of space in the operating system. This is normal; your operating system measures bytes in base 2 as opposed to base 10 which results in this disparity.

You should keep in mind that capacity is also further reduced by the installation of the operating system and by the file system that operating system uses. File systems aren't worth going into, but suffice to say your operating system needs some way of knowing where everything is on the drive and the file system covers this. Capacity can be reduced yet again by the manufacturer storing the recovery partition on the drive itself. After all is said and done, your shiny new notebook with a 160GB hard drive may only be offering you in the neighborhood of 90GB free.

Worth mentioning is that while some larger notebooks include more than one hard disk bay, the vast majority do not, so the capacity of the single drive in your notebook is what you're stuck with.

Solid State Society

Mechanical hard drives are the standard in modern computing, and this makes them cheap to produce en masse. However, the next great technology is upon us: solid state drives, or SSDs. These drives occupy the same space that your existing hard drive does and is even backwards compatible, but what changes is how the drive stores its data.

A solid state drive uses flash memory, like what you use in your digital camera or in a USB thumb drive, only it uses higher quality flash memory and it uses a lot more of it. Theoretically, this radically reduces power consumption and heat dissipation while dramatically improving acess times.

SSDs are a young technology, however, and while the industry is ramping up to produce more flash memory (and indeed, flash prices have been falling like rocks as a result), the drives aren't quite ready for primetime. Prices for SSDs are exorbitant, capacity is mediocre, and transfer speeds are in some cases poorer than their mechanical counterparts. This technology will mature and take over for mechanical drives, but it's a ways off still. As it stands, they generally aren't worth the money for any but the most indulgent buyers.

As a side note here, it bears mentioning that the burgeoning netbook market is thick with SSDs, but there are caveats here. These drives are typically slower than standard mechanical drives and offer a fraction of the capacity. These are included because a few chips of slower flash memory are easier to fit into a small netbook chassis, draw minimal power, and are less expensive.

Conclusion

As far as drive recommendations go, it gets a little bit trickier. I've found that drive reliability in modern computers is worlds more consistent than it has been in the past. I've seen drives from every major brand fail (excepting Fujitsu and Toshiba, both of which are often too slow to be relevant anyhow). Manufacturers typically employ Fujitsu drives on the low end, with Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital drives filling out the rest.

In my experience, Hitachi drives have been the fastest while running the hottest. This seems to be the prevailing theme over most (not all) of their products. I've used Hitachi drives before and been immensely satisfied by the performance, but the heat dissipation off their 200GB 7,200-RPM drive was too much for my HP dv2500t.

Western Digital's drives fill out the market nicely. They're solid performers and don't dissipate too much heat. Though they have what is in my opinion the best price/performance knockout on the desktop scene, the rest of their lineup is just "solid." Nothing wrong with Western Digital, but nothing performance leading either. The 320GB 5,400-RPM drive I use in my notebook isn't the fastest thing in the world, but it does approach the performance of 7,200-RPM drives, and may be an excellent compromise for speed, power, heat, and capacity.

Seagate is all over the map. I've always loved Seagate drives and found them to be exceptionally reliable, but their products range from industry leading to middle of the road. You can't really go wrong with a Seagate, and they were offering a five year warranty well before the other manufacturers.

Last is Samsung. Samsung has a pretty devoted following among our forums, and I can understand why. While Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate duke it out for the limelight, Samsung offers hard disks at lower prices than their competitors while oftentimes matching them for performance. I don't have a great deal of experience with their notebook drives, but found their desktop drives to be a good value.

Now, let's do what we do and condense it all. First and foremost, the most important specs for you are going to be capacity and spindle speed. Interface is good to know for those itching to upgrade, while form factor is largely a given and cache isn't worth the effort of researching.

The rest of your distillation:

  • Higher spindle speed generally means a faster, hotter drive.
  • Capacity in Windows (or Linux, or Mac OS X) will always read as less than advertised.
  • Solid state drives are the future, but not worth worrying about right now.
  • If you're going to upgrade your hard disk, back up your stuff, have your recovery media ready, and make sure you buy a drive with the right interface.

38. How it Works: Graphics Hardware

By: Dustin Sklavos
From: NotebookReview

This is the entry to the How it Works series that I'm sure some of the more knowledgable readers have been waiting for: graphics hardware. This is one of the most often misunderstood parts of a notebook, or even a desktop, really. It's something that I've struggled with for a while, and recent models from NVIDIA and ATI (mostly or almost entirely NVIDIA at this point) have only served to confuse things further.

But before I get into things, I want to be clear about something: this is NOT going to be a technical article. Take your memory buses, pipelines, and shaders elsewhere. I'm not even going to talk about DirectX, really. Why? Because anything on the market that would require Shader Model 3 needs a dedicated graphics card anyhow to be halfway playable, so ATI's Radeon X1250/X1270 with their halfway implementation aren't even really relevant. And there are no games that require DirectX 10, which has largely flopped anyhow. It's just not worth going into.

I will say that the notebook graphics market, so simple just a couple short years ago, has gotten patently stupid at this point. NVIDIA's model vomit that we can affectionately dub the GeForce 9 series is so convoluted it has actually prevented me from updating my notebook graphics guide. Simply put, I can't keep up with it and I can't make heads or tails of it. What the heck is a 9650? Your guess is as good as mine. ATI, conversely, completely streamlined their model number system.


How It Works: Graphics Hardware

Fundamentally, the graphics hardware in your notebook is what puts a picture on the screen. It's responsible for a couple more things, though: it's responsible for handling computer games that require 3-D rendering, it's responsible for running Vista Aero Glass, it's responsible for decoding some video so the CPU doesn't do all the work (see Part III), and it's responsible for driving an additional screen should you connect one to your laptop.

At its most basic, graphics hardware is comprised of two key components. First is the graphics core, or GPU, which is essentially a CPU that is highly specialized for handling 3-D rendering, video decoding, and outputting a picture. Second is the video memory, which is RAM used by the GPU to buffer images, store visual information for games, and so on.

One of the major points about graphics hardware is whether it's dedicated or integrated, and I'll explain what that means soon. But first, it's important to understand the two components in greater detail.

Graphics Core or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

As I said before, this is basically a specialized CPU designed to handle video related tasks. The GPU runs at its own clock speed (MHz, as described in Part I), which chiefly affects gaming performance.

So what do I mean by specialized? Well, your CPU is designed largely to be a jack of all trades. It can do just about anything, but the problem is that for some tasks, it's just too slow to be usable. For example, the extraordinarily complex graphic effects in modern computer games will completely gum up a CPU. Yet a GPU, designed specifically to handle these effects, can perform exponentially faster and produce a smooth, playable experience depending on the game's settings and just how powerful the GPU itself is. Likewise, decoding high definition video is an extraordinarily hardware-intensive task that gums up all but the most powerful of modern CPUs. A GPU with proper high definition support built into it, however, can radically reduce the amount of CPU power required to play back that video.

Which brings us to an oft-ignored but increasingly vital component of the GPU: hardware support for video decoding. What this means is that the GPU transparently controls how a lot of the video on your computer is played back. Generally, no checkboxes or settings need to be changed for your GPU to handle it. In fact, a visit to the control panel of your GPU can show you just how fully-featured it really is. You can control brightness, contrast, saturation, and a wealth of other settings from there. Most GPUs include some form of de-interlacing, which can produce a cleaner, crisper video. Likewise, many of them include noise reduction, which can help smooth out grainy video. Of course, if these optimizations don't appeal to you, they can also be disabled.

This component is becoming particularly vital with the advent of high definition video. High definition video is simply too much for most notebook CPUs to handle on their own. Even if the CPU can, it generally has to run at near full bore to play it back properly and without stutter, and that has a profoundly deleterious effect on battery life. But if the GPU is designed to handle that video, it can do most of the heavy lifting without anywhere near such a profound impact on battery life.

Of course, the most important place this aids is in watching Blu-ray. Mercifully, manufacturers will seldom sell you a notebook with a Blu-ray drive that can't properly play back that content, and the logic here is fairly obvious: Dell and HP don't want their customer service department getting phone calls about why "Transformers" (terrible movie that it was) is chopping and stuttering. Equipping their notebooks properly from the outset avoids this problem entirely.

I've spoken a whole lot about video playback, and that's largely because gaming is the more obvious application. Unfortunately, it's not easy to just say "oh this GPU is the best for gaming." GPUs are extraordinarily complex in design - in many ways more complex than CPUs - and it's just too difficult to tackle in a basic article like this. As with CPUs, one GPU running at 500MHz can be significantly slower or faster than another one running at the same speed. Even then, performance can become dependent on how much video memory the GPU has (more on this in the next section), how much bandwidth that memory has, and even what game it is. "Crysis," for example, runs pretty poorly across the board (even on top of the line desktop machines), but tends to run better on NVIDIA hardware. "Assassin's Creed," on the other hand, can run markedly faster on ATI hardware if left unpatched (this is a rant for another time).

Video Memory

Much as your CPU requires RAM (see Part IV) to operate efficiently, the GPU requires RAM of its own. Video memory is oftentimes much more expensive than typical computer memory and is designed to run substantially faster to feed what is often a hungry graphics core. So while on a computer you'll see DDR2 or DDR3, video hardware can have DDR2, GDDR2, GDDR3, and even GDDR4 or GDDR5, and all of these are different kinds of video memory. This is a pretty easy one, though: the vast majority of the time, "higher is better."

While your CPU may have its memory controller in the northbridge (as is the case with current Intel CPUs) or onboard (as is the case with current AMD CPUs), the GPU's memory controller is always onboard. As mentioned in the memory article, keeping the controller onboard allows for improved performance. On graphics hardware, this can make all the difference in the world and it's an easy way to improve performance without having to raise video memory or GPU clock speeds.

Though the GPU has a major effect on all facets of your computing experience, video memory's is largely concentrated in gaming performance.

Now that we understand these two concepts, it's time to bring them together.

Integrated and Dedicated Graphics

The key differences between integrated and dedicated graphics are where the GPU is located and if the GPU actually gets its own dedicated video memory.

An integrated graphics part builds the GPU into the northbridge and as a result, the GPU is oftentimes stripped down compared to its dedicated counterparts in order to fit into the northbridge alongside everything else the northbridge has to handle. Consequently, it seldom if ever has its own video memory and uses its proximity to the computer's main memory controller (be it in the CPU as in AMD or in the northbridge as in Intel) to "steal" some of the system memory for itself.

The major drawbacks are fairly obvious: the GPU is stripped down to begin with so at best it may have drastically reduced gaming performance and at worst it may be missing entire features (particularly having to do with video decoding). The lack of dedicated video memory forces the GPU to use system memory which is much slower than the memory typically used for graphics hardware. Worse, video traffic now also has to piggyback on the same bandwidth the rest of the system is already using.

So why would you go integrated? If you're not planning on gaming or playing high definition content, you don't really need dedicated graphics hardware. Because the GPU is built into the northbridge and using system memory, it adds no chips to the design of the notebook - chips that draw power on their own. While the integrated GPU will use some memory bandwidth, it typically uses such a minute amount that the performance difference in regular tasks between integrated and dedicated graphics is more or less imperceptible. It's only when you start pushing your entire system hard (like doing video conversion and encoding) that a difference makes itself known, and even then it's a very minimal one.

Dedicated graphics hardware, on the other hand, is separate from the rest of the system. Generally it's either soldered into the motherboard or uses a proprietary connector (more on this later). The benefit is that the GPU's size (and accordingly complexity) is no longer limited by the northbridge and it has its own video memory which runs at a much faster speed. As a result, gaming is typically much improved and the GPU is much less likely to be feature limited.

The flipside is that a dedicated GPU and its video memory generate their own heat and draw their own power. While ATI and NVIDIA implement measures to reduce their power consumption when they aren't in use, it's never going to be comparable to an integrated part.

This is also where I explain to you why you won't see a high end part like a GeForce 9800M in a 12" notebook. Simply put, the GPU is too big, too complex, draws too much power, and generates too much heat. As GPUs get more powerful, increased size and complexity goes along with that. As they get bigger, they draw more power and thus generate more heat.

The big question is going to be: how can I tell if it's integrated or dedicated? The easiest way is if the graphics hardware has the word "Intel" in the title. If it does, it's integrated. As for the rest? If it lists a specific amount of video memory (not a range), it's dedicated. For example, a "Mobility Radeon HD 3650 512MB" is going to be dedicated.

Now we get to the most important part of the article...

No, You Can't Upgrade Your Notebook Graphics Hardware

Shut up. Just stop. No, you can't. You think you can, but you can't. This is the single most aggravating post that keeps rematerializing in the forums here on Notebook Review: "my graphics are slow, can I upgrade them?" NO. 99.9% of the time, the answer is no, and that .1% of the time it's yes, it's going to be yes for someone who already knows what they're doing and doesn't have to ask that question.

The reason why should be obvious at this point: notebooks are designed around very specific power draw and heat tolerances. More than that, graphics hardware is often soldered into the motherboard. There just isn't a slot for this and I honestly don't expect there will ever be a common one. I know someone in the forums will mention MXM or AXIOM, and to them I say: no. Don't even bother mentioning them, because you're just opening a bigger can of worms.

MXM and AXIOM are standards designed by NVIDIA and ATI respectably to allow for at least some upgrade options for video hardware in notebooks that - and this is key - already have dedicated video hardware to begin with. These standards, however, are somewhat rarefied and generally appear only in notebooks by more obscure brands. They're largely worthless, too. Since support for them is so minimal, you're not going to find graphics hardware upgrades for your laptop at your local Best Buy the way you can with your desktop. Even specialists like NewEgg and NCIX don't carry them. They're almost impossible to get and invariably very expensive. This is the long way of saying "don't waste another minute thinking about this."

What's the bottom line here? No, you can't upgrade your graphics hardware. You're stuck with the hardware in the notebook when you buy it, so you'd better do your research (the forums here are great for that).

Recommendations and Conclusion

First of all, if you're planning on playing games on your notebook, rule out integrated graphics immediately. Outside of the ATI Radeon HD 3100 and 3200 at the time of this writing, integrated graphics really aren't adequate for gaming proper. Intel's graphics hardware in particular has frequent compatibility problems with games, and games it can actually produce playable performance in are basically a crapshoot. Beyond all that, you're just going to have to shop around and do some research, and there's just no way around it. Notebooks in retail seldom have dedicated graphics hardware.

As for brands? Presently I'm an ATI man, but my laptop has an NVIDIA dedicated GPU in it that games alright from time to time. This is one of those situations where it's probably healthiest to just be brand agnostic and pick whichever suits your needs best.

I am also going to openly recommend against gaming notebooks or buying a notebook specifically for gaming. In my opinion, these are a waste of money. Gaming technology tends to advance just too fast to make these machines worthwhile, and they tend to be at least twice as expensive as a comparable PC. The dedicated PC gamer is going to want to have a desktop to game on, where the parts are cheaper and the options are plentiful. Notebooks are fine for the odd game or bringing to a LAN, but buying a notebook just to game on is really silly. The most powerful notebook gaming hardware results in a machine that, frankly, is just too big to be used on your lap. Thus, it winds up being a glorified desktop anyhow.

Though I typically close these articles with a digest of points, there's really only one I want to end with here:

  • No, you can't upgrade your notebook's graphics hardware.

Unfortunately, my sense of responsibility requires me to distill the rest of the article proper, so here goes:

  • Much like your CPU and RAM work together, a GPU and video memory are paired together.
  • Your GPU can substantially improve video playback, and options exist to tweak it to your liking.
  • Integrated graphics are better for battery life and heat but worse for gaming performance.
  • If you plan on gaming on your laptop at all, get dedicated graphics hardware. This is identifiable by having a specific amount of video memory attached to it.