TechSpot Weekly: Laptop buying guide incoming!

Julio Franco

Posts: 9,092   +2,043
Staff member

Welcome to our second installment of TechSpot Weekly. If you have no idea what this is about, please read our brief intro from last week. As you'll hopefully find week in and week out, this will become our main vehicle to keep you current on any behind scenes news from our staff, our community, and for things in tech that deserve to be mentioned as the week starts.

As discovered early by some of our members, last week we debuted a new revision of our login system that not only should be faster and more user friendly thanks to the use of AJAX, but for those of you who prefer to clear cookies on a regular basis, you will find the system less disruptive for logging in quickly and getting back to where you left before taking any action.

We are also hoping to launch a new forum section later this week called The Tech Exchange. This will be our own dedicated Buy/Sell/Trade forum where TechSpot regulars can offer fellow readers computer and electronics items for sale or trade on a safe and familiar environment. The full details will be unveiled later on, but perhaps the most important aspect of The Tech Exchange is that we will limit participation to members who have been around for a long enough time. This barrier of entry will cap access to a few hundred members to begin with, but that's exactly what can make this a special place within our community. We'll also host a kick off giveaway available only to members that can participate in this new forum section.

As usual, we are working on new reviews and features. Last week things got pretty wild traffic-wise with the StarCraft II GPU/CPU performance article, in a good way, of course. TechSpot was mentioned in several fellow publications, tech and gaming blogs, lots of forums, and on a majority of the news sites dedicated to report on StarCraft happenings. Great job on this article, Steve!

Among other things, we have a big guide update in the pipeline. For some time we have neglected our Laptop Buying Guide, but we are 95% done with a refresh that will take a similar form than our "Latest in Smartphones" series. We expect to complete quarterly updates to these product-centric guides, so you can always count with fresh perspectives on what to buy at any given moment. This will also complete our trio of on-going featured guides, "the big ones" along with our PC Buying Guide that is kept fresh in near real time.

Other things to look forward to (kind of): RIM event on Tuesday where the company is expected to launch their revamped OS; new iPhone 4 jailbreak is now ready; and one of the coolest strategy games ever is slated for a comeback this August, any Worms fans out there?

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A new Worms 2D game for PC, this is just pure awsome!
Me and my friends played that allot 10 years or so ago :)

Also I love reading about games when they are actually coming out soon, so you don't have to wait a whole lifetime (erm Duke Nukem Forever anyone?)
 
Tech Exchange Section is a great idea, I guess specially in cases where one have limited budget or is unable to find something they want elsewhere (read something related to older platforms). All in all it seems you guys are hard at bringing new changes to the forums, good luck with them and more :)
 
SWEET! the Tech Exchange sounds like a great idea! I hope i've been arround long enough? Also that is the best worms game since the old PSone days! and not long to wait to! All excited on a monday!

very rare for me. Cheers techspot.
 
Looking forward to the laptop buying guide, since I bought my Dell 6400 4 years ago I've been a little outdated in laptops specifications. The Tech Exchange looks like a very good idea, please try to add paypal as I think is the best international payment method. If I get to be between the first 100 people, I'll add my two 4830's and my 4850 for a really low price, I'll miss them but I need to move on :D
 
Thanks very much for your informative articles. I recently built my first computer from scratch and relied heavily on your Buying Guides for selection of parts. I am very happy with the result. I got an excellent computer at significantly less cost than I could have bought an equivalent ready-made computer--and building the computer was an enjoyable experience as well as one that made me more familiar with the process.

One favor: Could you start including in your reviews how various components perform with large graphics programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. These types of programs are starting to rely more heavily on the GPUs for rendering, etc., but there is very little information on what level of graphics card will maximize their performance without undue cost. Your information is very helpful to gamers, but not all of your readers are gamers.
 
The tech exchange announcement could not have come at a better (or worse) time for me. I just ended up purchasing a RAM upgrade so I am looking to sell off my current RAM once the new sticks come in. The downside to that is I might have been able to get my upgrade cheaper if someone offered it on the exchange before I made my purchase. Oh well.

I do have a suggestion for the tech exchange if the Techspot staff was not already planning on using it: Make sure eligible members have a heatware account. Heatware is basically a feedback system that keeps track of transactions (similar to eBay) except it facilitates the use of buying/selling/trading through forums and such.

I learned about heatware a couple days ago when I was browsing various other tech forums looking to pick up a cheap set of 4GB RAM. It also has a list of various other trading forums so you can check them out if you are looking to partake in some transactions.
 
Altho I'm not a fan of refurbished and in the same light used computer equipment myself, it may be useful to get old games going for friends on "legacy" equipment. This was necessary on more than one occasion. Nice that Techspot is getting plugs on other sites. Glad that Techspot is special.
 
Docnoq said:
I do have a suggestion for the tech exchange if the Techspot staff was not already planning on using it: Make sure eligible members have a heatware account. Heatware is basically a feedback system that keeps track of transactions (similar to eBay) except it facilitates the use of buying/selling/trading through forums and such.

I would also second this suggestion. If there's a way to integrate heatware ratings into the site, that would be fantastic.
 
Thanks for your suggestions about Heatware, we'll look into it before launch.

@johnehoffman, I will pass this along to Steve who does most of our GPU benchmarking. If there is simple and effective way to do this, we could add it to our test suite. That said, as you know we review graphics cards with a consumer focus, whereas workstation applications get better support on the other GPU families like ATI's FireGL and Nvidia's Quadro.
 
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