The Laptop Life: Tips to Improve Portable Computing

This information comes to you from AOL.Com, the original author is Deanna Glick.   At Simply Seniors Computer Tutors I am often asked how to make things easier.  This article has some great tips and is worth passing along!

More information on Simply Seniors Computer Tutors at www.ComputerTutorHelp.Us.

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People seem to be on the go more than ever before. And they’d never dream of leaving their electronic life behind.

Ah, the lure of laptop computers. A fully-featured computer that weighs a few pounds and can be carried in your briefcase on a business trip or under your arm as you migrate from the home office to your family room. What’s more, along with ever-expanding wireless Internet availability, laptops allow you to surf at the beach without getting in the water or send email from your porch on a nice day.

This might be why the first quarter of last year saw the best sales record for mobile PCs in eight years, according to a blog at CNET.com. This coincided with the onset of intense iPad hype. However, as one analyst pointed out, limitations of that product category in the face of aggressive price cuts of regular notebooks seemed to give the larger notebook computers staying power in the market. They do more than their smaller counterparts, but consumers still seem generally willing to sacrifice the performance of a desktop for portability, making the traditional laptop the proverbial happy medium for most people.

When it comes to laptops, good things might come in small packages. But portability comes at a price.

A Small Space

For all their benefits, laptop computers can certainly fall short when it comes to memory, speed and hard drive space. And special considerations should be given to wireless network security and battery life. Fortunately, there are some great tips and tricks, special services and accessories that can help make laptop users’ lives a lot easier.

Whenever you open a file or an application, data is stored via Random Access Memory. Laptops use a smaller, slower version of RAM than their desktop counterparts. Once that memory is used up, the computer reverts to the hard drive, causing it to operate much more slowly. What this essentially means is that the more RAM you have, the more applications and files can be open simultaneously without affecting performance. Therefore, it can be helpful for laptop users to use as few applications at a time as possible.

How much hard drive space you need depends on how you use your computer. If you find your music, photo and video collections are causing your hard drive to burst at the seams and thus reducing operating speed, additional options for data storage might help. External hard drives and online storage services can go a long way in freeing up space and providing backup protection for your data in the event of a computer crash.

Wireless Worries

While you may have the ability to work on spreadsheets on the sun porch, the portable life isn’t entirely peaceful. Laptop users would do well to pay special attention to issues that affect wireless network security.

Unlike computers that connect via router or Ethernet cable, wireless networks talk to devices using radio waves. According to an article at LaptopLogic.com, these open radio waves leave you susceptible to myriad snooping attacks that could make way for a hacker to access your network and all of your valuable information. This means family pictures, passwords, electronic bank statements, the information contained in your emails and your personal files are all compromised.

LaptopLogic.com suggests some preventive measures to help achieve security while using a wireless connection with a laptop. For example, when you create a wireless password make sure that you use a combination of numbers, letters (upper and lower case), and symbols. You also need to make sure that password is long -- the longer the password is, the more time required to crack it. It is also recommended that you use guest wireless networks rather than readily giving out your passwords to friends visiting your home. A guest network is a common feature found in newer routers, that is essentially a second network which is completely isolated from the network your personal devices use.

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