A Brooklyn middle school took a novel approach to remote learning: A computer drop-off service to students.

The essential things to consider when buying a laptop

BEST DEALS ON GAMING LAPTOPS:

• MSI - Modern 15 15.6" Laptop — $749

• ASUS - ROG G531GT 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

• Dell - G3 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

It's time to level up.

If you didn't already know, PC gamers take great pride in the way they play. These are the folks who delight in the fact that PC gaming is just so much better than playing on a console, and if this Reddit thread is any indication — this way of thinking isn't going away any time soon.

While it can take a year or two for gaming consoles to adapt to updated technology, PCs see that improvement hit almost instantly. New rigs and laptops hit the market faster, as opposed to consoles that make you wait for months until their release.  Read more...

BEST DEALS ON GAMING LAPTOPS:

• MSI - Modern 15 15.6" Laptop — $749

• ASUS - ROG G531GT 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

• Dell - G3 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

My first gaming laptop cost $1,500 more than 10 years ago, and that was considered affordable. It wasn't a top-of-the-line model, but it wasn't a slouch either, sporting one of the better mid-tier graphics cards and a reliable processor/RAM combination.  

But my, how things have changed.

Today, you can go on Amazon and find plenty of laptops for less than $1,000 that would have been at least $1,500 a few years ago, thus opening doors to people who want to try out PC gaming for themselves. (And if it's Prime Day or Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you can expect deal prices to dip even lower.) But sorting through all of the options and deciding which is best presents its own unique challenge. Read more...

Entrepreneur and business founder Elon Musk will donate $423,000 for laptops in the Michigan district, a few months after making a gift focused on improving water quality in the school system.

Has any recent laptop announcement excited you? Me neither. With no innovations on the horizon, laptop makers should focus on making them sturdier and cheaper.

Dell's SAVE15 coupon is still live, the Dell Vostro 14 3000 is back down to just $299, and Walmart's Overpowered gaming desktop is $800 off right now.

Save on the second-generation Apple AirPods with the wireless charging case, Logitech gaming gear, Dell laptops, the Nintendo Switch, and more today.

Research firm IHS Markit expects the display panel factories in Wuhan, China, to struggle to resume full production when the Chinese New Year holiday ends on Feb. 2. As a result, supplies for panels for TVs and PCs are expected to be tight in the ensuing months.

The Apple Watch Series 4 smartwatch is back at $359, matching its Prime Day price. Plus, Dell is offering an extra 15 percent off select XPS laptops. Finally, the Roomba 891 is just $380.

Today's low-cost laptops can handle everyday computing (and often more) with aplomb, and many of our top picks ring up below $400. Here's how to achieve the perfect balance of price and features in a budget laptop.

Virtual reality demands powerful hardware, but not everyone wants a big desktop PC. Plenty of laptops have the chops to handle VR, and these 10 are the top performers in our testing.

Can't decide between a laptop and a tablet? Get both with a 2-in-1. Our shopping advice and product recommendations will help you find the convertible or detachable that is right for you. (We've tested loads of them.)

After choosing the college or university you'll be attending, your next most important decision is which notebook you'll carry around campus. Start your "best laptops" short list with these top-rated, value-focused models.

Shopping for a notebook is more than just poring over spec lists. Whether you want a simple budget PC, a productivity workhorse, or a screaming machine for gaming, our guide has the advice you need to find the best laptop to fit your needs.

Need a featherweight laptop that lasts all day on a single battery charge? Thin, light, and power-efficient, these ultraportables are our top performers in testing.

Don't be left without juice just when you need it most. We've tested hundreds of laptops to find the ones that last the longest between charges. These battery-life champs will take you through a day of work, as well as a night on the couch.

Who has time to check baggage anymore? Whether you're running to the conference room or catching a flight cross-country, you need the lightest laptop possible. We've tested, well, tons of them and have all the buying advice and recommendations you need to help you land the right one.

Got work to do? Laptops built for business are thinner and more powerful than ever. Our buying advice and product recommendations will help you find your next mobile work companion. Check out our favorites, along with our deep-dive reviews.

  You now know the benefits of picking an SSHD over a normal HDD but what if you’ve already got a laptop or if you are about to buy one and your seller isn’t giving you the option of a SSHD...

  Picked up a brand spanking new SSD? or thinking about getting one to improve the performance of your PC or laptop? Well, you’ll need to know how to go about installing or mounting it once you ha...

If you are looking for an entry level gaming laptop without spending too much, your best bets are laptops powered by NVIDIA’s new GTX 1050 or 1050Ti GPUs. These new GPUs are powerful enough to play AAA titles in Full HD resolution, but at low or medium settings. These GPUs are offered in entry-segment gaming laptops by almost all laptops makers, and some of these are already available in India. Here's taking a look at some of them.

In a vast sea of Dells and Lenovos floated a little green twig called the Avita Liber. We picked it up and reviewed it.

Google Duo group video calling for web will arrive in the coming weeks starting as a preview on Chrome.

BEST DEALS ON GAMING LAPTOPS:

• MSI - Modern 15 15.6" Laptop — $749

• ASUS - ROG G531GT 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

• Dell - G3 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

It's time to level up.

If you didn't already know, PC gamers take great pride in the way they play. These are the folks who delight in the fact that PC gaming is just so much better than playing on a console, and if this Reddit thread is any indication — this way of thinking isn't going away any time soon.

While it can take a year or two for gaming consoles to adapt to updated technology, PCs see that improvement hit almost instantly. New rigs and laptops hit the market faster, as opposed to consoles that make you wait for months until their release.  Read more...

BEST DEALS ON GAMING LAPTOPS:

• MSI - Modern 15 15.6" Laptop — $749

• ASUS - ROG G531GT 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

• Dell - G3 15.6" Gaming Laptop — $999.99

My first gaming laptop cost $1,500 more than 10 years ago, and that was considered affordable. It wasn't a top-of-the-line model, but it wasn't a slouch either, sporting one of the better mid-tier graphics cards and a reliable processor/RAM combination.  

But my, how things have changed.

Today, you can go on Amazon and find plenty of laptops for less than $1,000 that would have been at least $1,500 a few years ago, thus opening doors to people who want to try out PC gaming for themselves. (And if it's Prime Day or Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you can expect deal prices to dip even lower.) But sorting through all of the options and deciding which is best presents its own unique challenge. Read more...

In the wake of Covid-19, We Are One: A Global Film Festival is taking the experience online. But cinema is a bigger encounter

Every year, at Cannes (and other festivals) there’s a plaintive argument about what Cannes (or other festivals) are really all “about”. Some Savonarola-type person will dash the glass of rosé out of your hand, throw your canape into the Med and tell you Cannes is not about red-carpet narcissism, not about stars preening in the flashbulb glare of celeb-worship, not about L’Oréal sponsorship, not about getting drunk at a million late-night parties. It’s about the movies, about cinema itself.

Of course. And that’s what the new Covid-19-related We Are One: A Global Film Festival appears to offer: the 10-day online festival, beginning 29 May, curated by Jane Rosenthal of the Tribeca film festival, featuring arthouse films (though not the big-ticket Hollywood items) from Cannes, Venice, Berlin and many more, streaming for free in return for an optional donation to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 fund. So there you have it. A festival with all the frills and extras and flummeries stripped away. Just you, in your bedroom, with your laptop, communing with cinema. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

ASUS has refreshed its line of gaming laptops with new 10th Generation Intel Core processors, NVIDIA RTX 2070/2080 Super graphics and a bunch of other features designed to make gaming and content creation slicker and smoother. First up, the new Zephyrus S17 (pictured), which comes with a 17.3-inch display with super narrow bezels in an 18.7-millimeter-thin chassis. A 300 Hz refresh rate and 3ms grey-to-grey response time means the display is lightning fast, and it comes with Pantone-validated color accuracy as well.

Acer is joining a flurry of PC makers in adopting the next wave of NVIDIA and Intel chips inside its laptops. It's updating its 15.6-inch Predator Triton 500 (above) and Nitro 5 (below) gaming portables to use NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX Super laptop GPUs as well as Intel's 10th-generation Core H-series processors. As you might guess, the premium Predator series is the highlight. It comes with up to a GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q to deliver speedier and more efficient graphics, and mates that with a 300Hz, 3ms response IPS display and per-key RGB keyboard lighting.

ASUS has been pushing laptops with second screens for a couple of years now, but it's still searching for a winning formula. Last year's ZenBook Pro Duo pushed the keyboard down to the edge of the laptop's body, with the rest of the surface housing a second screen. The problem with that configuration was an awkwardly placed trackpad. But, you know who cares less about trackpad placement? Gamers. Hence, almost a year later, the company's Republic Of Gamers (ROG) division has its own spin on the concept: the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15.

Just like Intel said at CES, it's crossed the 5GHz barrier with its new H-series 10th generation notebook CPUs. And you won't need to shell out for the top-of-the-line Core i9 to do it: The new six and eight-core i7 processors reach up to 5.1Ghz (boost speed) on a single core. But if you want to go all out, the octa-core i9-10980HK hits 5.3GHz -- and it's fully unlocked for overclocking, to boot.

Lenovo is leaping quickly on the latest NVIDIA and Intel technology for its gaming laptops. It's introducing Legion 5i and Legion 7i portables (successors to the Y540 and Y740 respectively) that, most notably, are among the first to use NVIDIA's Advanced Optimus graphics switching. The tech both lowers power consumption in less-intensive moments and ramps up performance in GPU-heavy situations, theoretically giving you added battery life and higher frame rates in the same package. The Legion 7i also touts the option of new GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q graphics if you insist on the best possible visuals.

Microsoft will repair Surface Laptop 3 screens for free, particularly those that suddenly cracked for no discernible reason. Surface owners have been posting online about discovering hairline cracks on their new laptops’ display over the past few mon...

For people like me who work all over the place, portable standing desks can be pretty useful

Another large-sized solar charger and battery system is about to hit the market, as an off-grid solar generator in a briefcase.

Discarded laptop batteries could power LED lights in regions with scarce electricity.

It may well be all most people need as a computer, and it may well be what we have been waiting for.

Because sometimes you need a little private time with your laptop.

The non-profit has made three new announcements at CES this year, one of which is the OLPC 4.0 that switches from laptop to tablet and back.

It's a crazy expensive, overpowered gaming machine, but it turns laptop design on its head.

USB-C, faster processors and new design options continue to keep Microsoft’s Windows 10 laptop near the top of the pile

Microsoft’s top-quality laptop is now in its third generation, with new ports, new processors and a slight redesign, with the option to ditch the unique Alcantara for plain old aluminium.

The £999 and up Surface Laptop 3 is Microsoft’s vision of what a traditional laptop should be. For the most part that’s the same as everyone else, with traditional aluminium body, glass-covered screen and hinge that does not rotate all the way round to the back.

Screen: 13.5in LCD 2256 x 1504 (201 PPI)

Processor: quad-core Intel Core i5 or i7 (10th generation)

RAM: 8 or 16GB

Storage: 128, 256, 512GB or 1TB

Graphics: Intel Iris Plus

Operating system: Windows 10 Home

Camera: 720P front-facing, Windows Hello

Connectivity: wifi 6 (ax), Bluetooth 5, USB-A, USB-C, headphones, Surface Connect TPM

Dimensions: 308.1 x 223.3 x 14.5mm

Weight: 1,265 or 1,288g

Due to the angle of the side of the machine it can be difficult to plug the magnetic power cable in without lifting the side up for more leverage.

The black paint can be scratched revealing the silver aluminium underneath.

The screen supports 10-point touch and Microsoft’s Surface Pen stylus.

Pros: great keyboard, good trackpad, Alcantara or aluminium, sleek design, USB-A and USB-C port, great screen, good battery life, Windows Hello, powerful processor.

Cons: no SD card reader, limited configuration options, no Thunderbolt 3, only one USB-C port.

Surface Laptop 2 review: Microsoft’s sleeker answer to the MacBook Air

Microsoft Surface Pro 6 review: a fantastic tablet PC you shouldn’t buy

Microsoft Surface Go review: tablet that’s better for work than play

Microsoft Surface Studio 2 review: in a class of its own

16in MacBook Pro review: bigger battery, new keyboard, new Apple

Apple MacBook Air review: the new default Mac

Matt is resurrecting a 10-year-old laptop with only 4GB of memory. How can he make it run faster?

I am trying to resurrect an old but good-in-its-day laptop for my son to use for his A-levels. I have bought a cheap 256GB SSD to improve the read/write speeds, but it seems I am stuck with the current 4GB of memory. Its two memory slots could support 8GB but 4GB DDR2 memory modules are prohibitively expensive at roughly £65 each. It doesn’t seem to make sense spending that sort of money on outdated memory technology for a 10-year-old laptop.

What is the best way to set up Windows 10 so it runs fast on relatively limited memory? Is it worth using a different browser to Chrome? Is Microsoft Office too much of a resource hog?

Chip costs are driven by production volumes, so obsolete types of memory are no longer in production, or are very expensive to produce. Often, there are alternatives, such as buying second-hand memory modules, and cannibalising laptops sold on eBay for “spares or repair”.

Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop 3 back in October 2019. Since purchasing and using the new device, users have been reporting cracks appearing on the laptop screen, even without causing any physical damage to the device itself. While the reason is