Packard Bell EasyNote TS11 review

ThePackard Bell EasyNote range might not be as front-and-centre as Dell's Inspiron or HP's Pavilion brands, but nevertheless has established itself in our minds as a home for mid-level laptops at budget-level prices.

And we're happy to report that the EasyNote TS11-HR-695UK is a similarly reliable slice of mid-level computing goodness.

It shares the same floral pattern as other Packard Bell EasyNote laptops. There are also a range of colours to choose from, but the pattern is harder to pick out on the black model than the red or white versions. The pattern continues on the palm rest inside the laptop, although the keyboard and rest of the chassis is matte black.

The keyboard itself is a full-length affair with an additional numerical keypad and a couple of extra hotkeys thrown in. The chicklet keys are great for typing on and the overall experience is excellent. There are no issues with odd-sized buttons as common keys like Enter, Backspace and Shift are all well-proportioned and where you would expect to find them.

The touchpad has the same glossy coating as the lid and palmrest and is a little on the sensitive side, although you can adjust this in Windows. It's not the largest around but the single click button works well.
Impressive performance

Unlike the bigger TS13 models, the EasyNote TS11 sports a smaller, Intel Core i3 CPU which works to keep the cost down. However, in terms of performance, we were impressed at the 8159 score this machine posted following our benchmarking tests. Even though it's the budget choice, this dual-core chip will give you a smooth experience when multitasking.

Thanks to a capacious 6GB of RAM we had no problems quickly working around several documents, even with multiple web pages open and music streaming.
TechRadar Labs

tech labs

Battery Eater '05: 249 minutes
Cinebench: 8159
3DMark 2006: 4346

Graphics are handled by the integrated graphics chip bundled onto the Sandy Bridge CPU and provides a reliable, if basic, experience. You can safely manage older games and a spot of photo editing but beware of anything more demanding.

Connectivity is similar to other laptops at this price point. There are three USB ports for peripherals and HDMI and VGA connections for external displays. You can use the 802.11n Wi-Fi connection or the Ethernet wired port for connecting to the internet and there's a Kensington security slot for locking the EasyNote TS11 securely.

There's no doubt that the EasyNote TS11 is a friendly machine. From its decorative pattern, to the social networking hotkey, this seems like a safe choice for a mid-level laptop. Beyond that, though, there's some serious performance underneath. For this price point we reckon the Packard Bell EasyNote TS11 stands as a secure and reliable purchase.

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HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa review

Clad in HP's customary black and silver, the £600 HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa is an affordable, feature-packed media laptop. While it obviously doesn't match up to the premium experience offered by HP's Envy range, it's got plenty to recommend it to anyone who needs to keep their budget in mind.

First, and most obviously, it's a great machine to look at. HP consistently turns out attractive computers and this is no exception.

Despite only being a 15.6-inch laptop, it's a little bit on the chunky side, but with the chassis dimensions measuring 378 x 247 x 35mm.

The entire body is brushed silver aluminium with speaker grills and air vents mixed with jet-black plastic for the keyboard, touchpad and screen bezel.

There's no flex on evidence anywhere around the chassis and the tough metal casing seems like it could take a knock or two without any problems. Of course, all that design doesn't do the weight any favours, and the HP Pavilion dv6 is noticeably heavy, at 2.9kg. This isn't exactly a laptop to be carrying around all day.

The HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa will obviously find a lot of favour with audiophiles. Dr Dre's Beats audio technology is being incorporated into all HP laptops, and the extra functionality is welcome.

HP pavilion dv6-6b50sa

Along with the single speaker strip at the base of the screen, there are two smaller stereo speakers at the front of the palm rest. We didn't have a problem using the dv6 to fill the office with music, although the quality does disintegrate a little when you turn it right up.

The comprehensive Beats Audio Control Panel means you can adjust and tune the audio performance of the HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa to your heart's content.

You can shift the emphasis across the speakers for listening or take advantage of features such as noise and echo cancellation for recording. If you have an external microphone, editing software and some sheet music to hand, this laptop is an excellent tool for crafting some of your own tunes.

If you're prepared to make the substantial investment in a pair of Beats headphones, then the experience is very impressive indeed and makes a big difference when watching a film, for example.

In terms of the screen, the 15.6-inch display on the HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa is bright and clear, with suitably sharp images. Don't expect to hit Full HD 1080p though, since the pixel resolution precludes this machine playing anything above a 720p high-definition picture.

A quick mention must go to the viewing angles and the reassuringly solid hinges on which the screen sits. There's also a relatively thin bezel, which helps improves the viewing experience.

For typing, the isolation keyboard works well and gives the chassis a spacious look. The smallish keys respond firmly and accurately and the large backlit touchpad has a thick texture to it. It would have been great to see the keyboard itself backlit, though.

Although predominantly a multimedia machine for the home, HP has also included a business-like fingerprint scanner on the right palm rest. This gives you an extra level of security to protect your documents and media.
TechRadar Labs

tech labs

Battery Eater '05: 207 minutes
Cinebench: 7807
2DMark 2005: 5576

Inside the HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa is an Intel Core i3 2330M CPU. This is the baby of the Sandy Bridge family and part of the reason the price on this laptop is so reasonable. It can't match the Core i5s and Core i7s of this world for power, but that really shouldn't prove too much of a problem for most users.

And the main reason we're not too worried about the lesser processor is that HP has compensated with loading more RAM into the Pavilion dv6-6b50sa.

While most machines would offer 4GB of RAM, the HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa has 6GB tucked inside to keep the Windows 7 operating system running quickly. What this means in practice is that you can multi-task comfortably and work with any number of web pages without your browser freezing.

Also included in the package is an AMD Radeon HD 6490M dedicated graphics card to take some of the visual strain away from the processor.

Although not always as revered as Nvidia GPUs, AMD graphics chips are solid enough. And although you won't be doing any high-intensity gaming on the Pavilion dv6, other graphical demands - such as streaming movies from a service like Netflix - should be no problem.

We were also pleased to find that the HP remained not only quiet, but also cool to the touch during periods of intensive use.

The connectivity on the HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa is pretty standard for this price point; there are four USB ports and both VGA and HDMI for external displays. You can use 802.11n Wi-Fi or Ethernet to connect to the web, and there's also a 2-in-1 memory card reader.

One last point to raise is that often we find HP machines to be loaded full of the company's own software. Most of the time these are a waste of space. Thankfully, in this case the pre-loaded software is limited to just a few programs.

We feel HP has done a good job revamping its laptop range, and the admittedly attractive HP Pavilion dv6-6b50sa offers a good all-round choice for a reasonable price.

Although the processor isn't top of the range, the added RAM should give this laptop a decent lifespan and make it a reliable purchase for most users.
Verdict

Anyone who wants a machine predominantly for media or music usage can add an extra star to the score.

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Dell Latitude E6220 Advanced review

Although the focus at the consumer end of the laptop world is currently dominated by ultra-portables and Ultrabooks, business laptops such as the Dell Latitude E6220 Advanced ignore this trend, with a focus on solid performance for serious tasks.

It isn't the thinnest or lightest on the market but its powerful Core i7 processor, solid-state drive (SSD) and respectable battery life mean this 12.5-inch laptop won't slow to a halt when running demanding tasks.

Dell has chosen a two-tone design, with the keyboard and bezel in black, and a plastic/ polycarbonate material used on the lid and edge around it.

The screen is non-reflective and looks very sleek and sensible.

The keyboard isn't the isolated style found on nearly every new laptop these days, but reverts to a traditional design with each key touching the next.

While the general aesthetics of the Dell Latitude E6220 Advanced are good, an exception is its battery, with a large section that juts out at the back. This adds a few centimetres to the overall depth, making it less portable.

Although Dell has ignored many rules of ultra-portable design, the firm has adopted one of their worse aspects: a stingy array of ports. There are only two USB 2.0 ports, with a third port that can be used for either eSata or USB. USB 3.0 is nowhere to be seen, which is unacceptable on a modern business machine.

There are also HDMI and analogue VGA video outputs and a headphone jack. Sensibly, Dell remembered a wired Gigabit Ethernet port. There's also the option of a SIM card slot for HSPA+ mobile broadband.

Despite our criticisms, we were still impressed by the Latitude, thanks to its excellent performance. The Core i7-2620M processor runs at a whopping 2.7GHz, enough to make short work of demanding tasks. No ultra-portable even comes into the same league.

Despite relying on Intel's HD 3000 integrated graphics processor, the 3D results aren't bad either.
TechRadar Labs

tech labs

Battery Eater '05: 240 minutes
Performance: 11,202
Gaming: 5,239

The rest of the specification is more conservative. Dell's inclusion of 4GB of RAM is fine, but 8GB would have sweetened the offering.

Likewise, while an SSD is a great addition, having only 128GB of storage is rather limiting. Once the drive is formatted and Windows installed, there's little space left for a media collection or large apps. Again, we'd expect slightly more from a laptop that costs this much.

Despite our disappointment at certain aspects of the Latitude's specification, its battery life made up for it. Four hours may not sound impressive, but it is considering the processing punch of this PC.
Verdict

The Dell Latitude E6220 Advanced is a solid laptop, and if its specification matched its price tag, it would easily earn a recommendation. Unfortunately its shortcomings can't be ignored, so our impression is that while it could have been a winner, it must settle for the bronze.

Telltale Flashes Caught in disappearing act

The inside of a cylindrical antineutrino detector before being filled with clear liquid scintillator, which reveals antineutrino interactions by the very faint flashes of light they emit. Sensitive photomultiplier tubes line the detector walls, ready to amplify and record the telltale flashes.

Dueling Dinos Triceratops reigns alone

Triceratops may no longer have an identity crisis. As paleontologists lock horns on whether these dinosaurs were just baby versions of the largerTorosaurus, the latest clues suggest the two were indeed separate species.

A new study reveals immature and adult examples of both Triceratopsand Torosaurus. “I don't see any clear fossil evidence that one dinosaur turned into the other,” says Nicholas Longrich. He and fellow Yale paleontologist Daniel Field make their case online February 29 in PLoS ONE.

Comparisons between the dinos, which both lived about 65 million years ago in western North America, start with their skulls. Like many horned dinosaurs, Torosaurus sported a sizable frill of bone perforated with two big holes. Triceratops, in comparison, wore an unusually short and solid crown.

Searching for adult Triceratops, Longrich and Field grouped 35 skulls based on how fused together the bones were. Several Triceratops skulls had completely fused, a sign of maturity in modern animals. SomeTorosaurus skulls showed bones still joined by sutures, which are hints of youth.

But fused bones may not be a reliable way to gauge age, says paleontologist John Horner of Montana State University in Bozeman. “We recently collected 100 new Triceratops specimens they haven't seen,” he says. “We see a lot of variety in bone fusion.”

In 2010 Horner blamed Triceratops' unusual frill on youth. Patches of thinning bone on some skulls were steps toward full-fledged holes and aTorosaurus adulthood, he and Montana State colleague John Scannella argued.

Did You Know? How did turkey fowl get its name?

Guineafowl were also known as turkey fowl (or turkey hen and turkey cock) because they were imported to Central Europe through Turkey. Turkey fowl, shortened to just the name of the country, stuck as the name of the North American bird. When Europeans first encountered turkeys in the Americas, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guineafowl (Numididae). In 1550, English navigator William Strickland, who had introduced the turkey into England, was granted a coat of arms including a "turkey-cock in his pride proper".

Deep-Rooted Brain modulates sound sensitivity

The hair cells of the inner ear have a previously unknown "root" extension that may allow them to communicate with nerve cells and the brain to regulate sensitivity to sound vibrations and head position, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine have discovered.

Their finding is reported online in advance of print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The hair-like structures, called stereocilia, are fairly rigid and are interlinked at their tops by structures called tip-links.

When you move your head, or when a sound vibration enters your ear, motion of fluid in the ear causes the tip-links to get displaced and stretched, opening up ion channels and exciting the cell, which can then relay information to the brain, says Anna Lysakowski, professor of anatomy and cell biology at the UIC College of Medicine and principal investigator on the study.

The stereocilia are rooted in a gel-like cuticle on the top of the cell that is believed to act as a rigid platform, helping the hairs return to their resting position.

Lysakowski and her colleagues were interested in a part of the cell called the striated organelle, which lies underneath this cuticle plate and is believed to be responsible for its stability. Using a high-voltage electron microscope at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research at the University of California, San Diego, Florin Vranceanu, a recent doctoral student in Lysakowski's UIC lab and first author of the paper, was able to construct a composite picture of the entire top section of the hair cell.

"When I saw the pictures, I was amazed," said Lysakowski. Textbooks, she said, describe the roots of the stereocilia ending in the cuticular plate. But the new pictures showed that the roots continue through, make a sharp 110-degree angle, and extend all the way to the membrane at the opposite side of the cell, where they connect with the striated organelle.

They Don't Kill What are solar flares?

Do you know enough about solar flares? Is the possibility of a solar flare and the year 2012 encounter freaking you out? Then just calm down and learn the facts to uncover the truth and dispel your fear.

Cooler areas on the sun's surface, where the magnetic fields have disrupted heat passage from the core to photosphere are called sunspots. When sunspots increase they cause large explosive eruptions on the sun called solar flares.

Solar flares blast charged particles into the space and if they reach the earth, they can cause disruptions in the satellite and radio communication and also affect Geographical Positioning System (GPS).

“Near solar maximum” and “near solar minimum” are the two extremes of the sun's 11 year cycle. At maximum the sun blasts flares and erupts at the maximum level possible and sends charged particles and electrical gases in to space. At minimum days pass with almost no flares at all.

Thus, its just a mere coincidence that the next near solar maximum s predicted between 2012 and 2014; since the last in 2001.Plus, anyone above the age of 11 years have experienced a solar flare knowing or unknowingly; and are still alive with no harm done!

“Killer solar flares are a physical impossibility” as per heliophysicist Alex Young (NASA Goddard space flight centre). We live in a planet with a strong atmosphere which protects harmful radiations everyday; he says.

Recent flares such as the one in January 2012where mysterious sky noises were heard from 4th to 9th march have come and gone with the wind; without hurting us. So, lets all relax and stop fearing flares and enjoy the 2012 ,keeping in mind that nothing bad is going to happen to our mother earth.

The Big Crunch Is Cosmos fated to collapse?

Ever wonder how this gigantic Universe of ours will come to an end? One possible theory, amongst many, is the Big Crunch theory. And it states that one day in the future, our Universe will not only stop expanding, but also reverse due to the immense pull of gravity and eventually will collapse into itself and eventually will turn into a super-hot, super-dense singularity. Some scientists even conjecture that this collapse into an imaginably big black hole would eventually trigger another Big Bang (BB).

The Universe is all about the struggle between the momentum of expansion caused by BB and the pull of gravity that came into being after the BB itself. The rate of expansion is measured by the Hubble Constant (a ratio expressing the rate of apparent expansion of the universe, equal to the velocity at which a typical galaxy is receding from Earth divided by its distance from Earth) whereas the strength of the gravity depends on the density (the solidity aspect of an object) and pressure of matter in the Universe. And if the pressure of matter is low which is the case with most forms of matter we know of today, then, the fate of the Universe is governed by its density. And where does the Big Crunch fit in all of these? Well, if the density of the Universe is greater than the critical density (the mass density of the universe which just stops the expansion of space, after infinite cosmic time has elapsed), then gravity will eventually win in its struggle with expansion and the Universe will collapse back onto itself--the Big Crunch. But if the density of the Universe is less than the critical density, then, chances are the Universe will expand forever and ever, where gravity might just be able slow the rate of expansion. However there won't be any reverse pull like that of Big Crunch, instead, there will a Big Chill or Big Freeze where the Universe will slowly cool down as it expands until everything within it becomes absolutely barren and lifeless.

And when will all these apocalyptic phases take place? No one is sure. But for the moment, it seems we are safe. Recent studies of the Cosmos and the extensive mapping of the Cosmic Microwave Background (the cooled remnant of the hot big bang) have led to this conclusion that out Universe is not being slowed down by gravity but rather accelerating. And this is because of the Dark Energy, a form of energy hypothesized to reside in the very structure of space itself, responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. So, our empty Universe is not so empty after all. But there is another theory that predicts how the Universe will come to an end. It states that with such expansion, guided by the dark energy, there is a possibility of the Big Rip, where, being unable to bear such a rate of expansion, everything in this cosmos will be violently ripped apart in such a way as if it never existed.

Higgs boson: The “god” particle

In the late 1960's, the Standard Model (SM) of physics was developed to study elementary particles and forces of nature. It is a menagerie of 17 structureless fundamental particles (6 of them quarks), which are the basic building block of the universe. Quarks exist inside particles called hadrons - composites of either three quarks or a quark-antiquark pair bound together by gluons.

Despite the success of the SM in explaining sub-nuclear physics, it cannot explain how the particles acquire masses. In order to understand the origin of masses, a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field was introduced into the model by the Scottish physicist Peter Higgs. Hence, it is called the Higgs field and the particle associated with the field is called the Higgs boson. It is a zero-spin electrically neutral particle. The Higgs boson is sometimes referred to as “God” particle after Nobel physicist Leon Lederman described it as a “goddamn particle.” As the last remaining particle out of 17 particles of the SM that has not been observed, Higgs has become the “most sought after particle in modern physics.”

How does the Higgs boson give mass to the particles? According to the SM, the Higgs field forms the basic underlying structure of the universe and it permeates throughout the cosmos. When a massless particle passes through the Higgs field, it gains mass by interacting with the field, i.e. the particle will cause the field to cluster around it. The more clustering there is, the more mass the particle will accumulate. It will give quarks and gluons their large masses, but little or no mass to the neutrinos and photons.

Experimental hunt to find the Higgs boson is being carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva. Experiments were also performed at the Tevatron at Fermi Lab near Chicago until its closure last year. The biggest obstacle to finding the Higgs is that before the search began, no one knew exactly in what energy range to look for it. In order to detect it, theorists determined that conditions that existed in the universe nanoseconds after the Big Bang have to be simulated in the lab. This can be achieved by making high energy (greater than 1 trillion electron volt) proton beams crash into each other, hoping that the Higgs will appear “fleetingly in the wreckage.” The LHC is the first accelerator capable of reaching such high energy. But even with the LHC, the journey has not been easy and the search still continues.

If Higgs boson is detected, it would put the half-century old Standard Model and all its predictions on a secure foundation. It would also help to unify two of the fundamental forces of the universe the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles and the weak nuclear force that's responsible for radioactive decay. The unification will be a step closer towards the Grand Unified Theory of all the forces Einstein dreamed of. It will also open the door to a whole new world of super particles, “overweight twins” of the existing particles, predicted by Supersymmetry an extension of the Standard Model. This will eventually allow us to have a better understanding of cosmology and the origin of dark matter, extra dimensions of String Theory and black holes.

If the Higgs boson is not discovered, it will possibly lead to more subtle and exotic theories, like the Technicolor theory, to explain what gives particles mass. It could also mean that quarks are not fundamental particles, but made up of some more complex but smaller particles.

Whether the “god” particle is detected or not, there is no denial that we are at the threshold of a momentous event, an event that will determine the future course of direction of physics. According to the leader of one of CERN's two experiments scheduled for this year, “we're close to getting something in focus. We know we're close to the stage where we're going to see something."

Quamrul Haider, PhD, is professor and Chairman, Dept of Physics and Engineering Physics, Fordham University, New York.

e-mail: haider@fordham.edu