11th
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2009
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comment closed
It was in 1999 that Compaq launched iPAQ having the functions of a pocket personal computer and a personal digital assistant (PDA). With the acquisition of Compaq by Hewlett Packard, the products began to be marketed as HP products. iPAQ combines the functions of mobile phone, palm top computer, PDA and smart phone. It also has GPS facility, wireless networking, a card reader and Bluetooth interface. The Microsoft Windows interface gives iPAQ all the benefits of having multimedia capabilities.
There are very many applications in PDAs. The user can actually decide what kind of applications are to be incorporated. PDAs have applications that are useful in medicine. It assists in diagnosis of disease, treatment and the selection of drugs. It can record symptoms as well as present information on treatments. PDAs are applied in the educational field, particularly by students. The relevant tasks that it can execute are digital note taking and its modification, the spell-check, dictionaries, e-books storage and use, digital planning lessons, word processing and many others. It finds application in the field of sports in the calculation of speed, distance and time; pre-flight planning and assistance to the glider pilots in navigation linked to the use of GPS, and for road rallyist with GPS assisted navigation.
Digital Equipment Corporation Western Research Laboratory (WRL) developed iPaq originally. It runs on an Intel Pentium III processor or an Intel Celeron processor with a processing speed of 500 MHz to 1 GHz. It has a memory ranging from 128 MB to as much as 512 MB. The memory can be upgraded also. Some of the popular handheld PDA gadgets are Palm TX Handheld, HP iPAQ 111 Classic Handheld, Nokia N810 Portable Internet Tablet, Palm Tungsten E2 Handheld, Asus A626 3.5-inch PDA Windows Mobile 6.0, HP iPAQ 210 Enterprise Handheld, Sony Ericsson C905i Unlocked Cell Phone and Nokia 02700T6 N810 WiMAX Edition Portable Internet Tablet.
Our life is no longer the same. Mobile technologies have drastically changed the way we work and live. For instance, mobile shopping and mobile banking save lot of our time, energy and worry besides its convenience and ease. We now make use of PDAs for such diverse use as getting to know about the weather, knowing the sports score and getting the stock quotes. It is fast becoming a device without which we will not be able to function and carry out our day to day activities.
29th
09 -
2009
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comment closed
Mini laptop computers are being called by a variety of things besides mini laptops. They are being sold as netbooks and mini notebooks as well. In order to be considered more than just a netbook, a mini laptop has to meet certain requirements although computer marketing people, as well as the computer makers, attempt to blur the lines in order to make more money. A mini laptop should have a monitor screen that is more than 10.5 inches diagonal whereas a netbook computer monitor can be anywhere from 8 inches to 10.5 inches. A netbook will have some version of UNIX (UNIX, Linux or BSD) or Windows XP installed. Anything more powerful than Windows XP is installed on mini laptops. Mini laptops will include an optical drive and a netbook computer will not.
Moving Computer Files between Mini Laptop Computers
It’s obvious that anything described as a mini laptop should have several means of moving or copying files to them. Let’s focus on the mini laptops that are being called netbooks since netbooks don’t include optical drives. The lack of an optical drive makes it difficult to install software on a netbook as well as limiting the file copying and moving options.
The primary way of getting computer files, including music and movie files, onto a netbook is by downloading them or transferring them over the Internet, hence the reason for the “net” part of netbook. Downloading is pretty commonplace and there are various means of doing so. Most people just download files from websites, which make them available, using standard web browsers and third party hosts for extremely large files. Transferring from another computer to a netbook is a little trickier, usually requiring remote connection software on both sides.
Another way to get files onto a netbook, or any mini laptop, is to use USB drives. USB drives come in a variety of flavors including USB flash drives, USB hard drives and even USB optical drives (as in CD, regular DVD or Blu-Ray drives). All modern computers have at least two USB ports, usually more. The mini laptops are no exceptions. The only drawback is the speed of moving files over USB drives. Of course, the USB drive has to be large enough to hold the files in question.
Installing Software on Netbook Computers
Installing software on a netbook computer is easy enough if done through files downloaded from the Internet. As long as this particular kind of mini laptop has an internal drive large enough to hold the files, there isn’t a problem. There are sometimes problems with netbooks with Windows XP installed when the netbooks have solid state drives instead of hard disk drives. The solid state drives currently come in four and eight gigabyte sizes and the operating system, swap file and other related files eat up most of the space.
Installing software from a USB drive is easy enough as well, as long as executable files are being worked with. Needless to say, without a USB optical drive, CD and DVD software installation can be a challenge. If you have a USB drive large enough to hold what would fit on a CD or DVD, there is a way to do it which is relatively painless once you get the hang of it.
There is a ton of free software available for download which will let you convert installation CDs or DVDs to image files. Having the software on both the source computer and the netbook will make it a process that requires converting a computer file on one end to an image, putting it on a USB drive, copying it to the netbook, mounting the image (using the same software) on the netbook and then installing as if it was a regular optical disc.
If you own a mini laptop without an optical drive, you are getting what you pay for. Netbooks are cheaper in price than other mini-laptops and easier to use for mobile computing, but they have their drawbacks. As long as you are aware of the drawbacks, you can use netbooks just like any other notebook computers. Of course, getting the right netbook for your particular needs is a whole different story.