Gaming Laptops

Ok here's my latest gaming laptop advice..

Graphics:
The latest graphics platform (the most recent iteration of Radeon HD) from ATI (now AMD) really competes with NVidia's latest entry - Fermi, which came out after. Fermi is more powerful (by a little), but is more expensive, requires more power, and runs hotter (by quite a bit). So the graphics are up in the air for the first time in a long time. You really have to know what features you want or need, and also what version of what card is in the machine you are looking at, as there are still some older cards being installed, that don't support current needed features like DX11. The top AMD mobile chip is the  ATI Mobility HD 5870, and the top Nvidia mobile graphics is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M. Interestingly there are also high-end shipping laptops that have two of these cards (in crossfire or SLI).

CPU:
The latest Intel chips are "Core iX” where X can be 2,5, or 7, 7 being the most powerful currently. In addition you have mobile and desktop, with some gaming laptops being able to run desktop processors. As well at the very high end you have "Extreme" chips, which have a couple of key performance enhancers, but cost a fortune more.

Memory:
You are looking for triple channel, somewhere between 6 and 24G at the moment. The faster the better of course.

Drives:
You want a machine that offers two or more drives, and here's why. There have been some real performance gains found using an SSD. However you only want it for your system (Windows) drive, because they are so expensive. Put the rest of your files (games, pictures, music) on a big (500GB?) 7200 rpm Seagate (my preference). Furthermore you can't get just any SSD. There are certain controllers that offer good performance, and you have to make sure you get TRIM support. See Maximum PC's site or magazine to find out which controllers are good and what drives they are in.

Laptops:
First off,  I suggest you ignore all the usual laptop sellers (HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo, Apple, etc.), because their high-end machines don't have good enough gaming features compared to how much they cost. I also suggest you ignore the next level up in gaming laptops, which would be Asus and MSI, etc. They do better in terms of price per gaming features, but there's another level. Finally we come to, as far as I can tell, the top of the heap. Perhaps I have mentioned before how most laptops are built by one or two companies, even though they are sold by everybody. The maker of a lot of the ones we just covered is Compal. But the company that makes most of the real gaming laptops, is Clevo. You can't by a laptop from Clevo, so you've probably never heard of them. But you have now. So that's where we start in picking out the model we want. We narrow down the Clevo model. Then we can go to all the performance dealers, and see who has the best build and price of that particular model, with the features we want.

Clevo is at:
http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/products/index.asp

However that's not the easiest site to compare gaming models. My suggestion is to go to:
http://notebooks.avadirect.com/Gaming_Notebooks
- This is one of the Clevo resellers, and they clearly list the Clevo model in their description, and it's all on one page.

Once you decide which Clevo model you like, here are some performance web sites to search for it:

Avadirect:
http://notebooks.avadirect.com/Gaming_Notebooks
   
Xotic
http://www.xoticpc.com

Origin:
http://www.originpc.com

Sager:
http://www.sagernotebook.com

Falcon Northwest:
http://www.falcon-nw.com

iBuyPower:
http://www.ibuypower.com
   
Power Notebooks:
http://www.powernotebooks.com
   
Puget:
http://www.pugetsystems.com

Alienware:
I don't recommend Alienware since Dell bought them.

I also ran across Kobalt http://www.kobaltcomputers.co.uk/notebooks.html for England and Eurocom http://www.eurocom.com for Canada. I'm sure there are more in the US as well. I recommend Sager - you will note that a lot of these other resellers actually buy their Clevo from Sager, or at least use Sager's model number. I don't know enough about the rest of them to say which is better or worse. I'd suggest checking them all out in gaming notebook forums. One that helped me was http://forum.notebookreview.com.

Finally I'm going to detail one particular Clevo model next as an example, because it's the top of the line in my opinion. However you can decide for yourself which model to go with. This one has some drawbacks - I think the price is high, and I wish I could get it in a 15" or 16" instead of a 17". But it is crazy heaped full of fast parts.

The Clevo model is x7200:

• http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/products/prodinfo_2.asp?productid=279 
• http://www.avadirect.com/product_details_configurator.asp?PRID=18340

It is also know as the Origin EON17, and the Sager NP7280:

• http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_info&model_name=NP7280
• http://www.originpc.com/eon17-gaming-laptop-features.asp

It takes Core i7 desktop processors, and can have two Nvidia 480M in SLI. It has room for 3 drives. It has all the newest ports like sata 6 and usb 3. It can take up to 24G of memory. It has HDMI with HDCP, and 7.1 audio.

On the down side it's very heavy, requires significant power, and starts at roughly $2700 and quickly climbs to $6000 when you start throwing in the goodies.

Happy shopping!

Apps are paywalls

This is not my idea, though I wonder if I'm the first to word it like this. It's a current trending topic. When we first got our cute iPhone and started getting all the cool apps for a buck, instead of the $50 we were used to paying for PC software, we were very excited. But I think we got hoodwinked. I think what we are really getting is our free web pages, web content, web apps, web games, for a buck. That's right, these apps are a paywall for the Internet, and the web. Anybody scared?

Distributing virtual goods versus physical goods

Here's the problem with the sea-change to virtual goods over the Internet. The producers want to keep the savings of creating and distributing virtual goods versus physical goods. Consumers want that savings - they expect lower prices, close to free. What is going to virtual goods? Anything that can be transferred in bits:

• audio,
• music,
• video,
• tv shows,
• movies,
• books,
• magazines,
• newspapers,
• software,
• games,
• communication,
• reference,
• research,
• art,
• meetings,
• computer help,
• mapping, etc.

Most of these items are content (the what), but there are also a couple of “hows”. I think we will see more in the future.

Local gaming with the iPhone – Scrabble Party Play

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/04/scrabble-for-the-ipad-stir-in-some-iphones-and-its-the-best-1/

Remember when the Zunes came out with the “Squirt” feature? You could share a song with somebody else with a Zune wirelessly. The big joke at the time is that there were so few Zunes that you could never find anybody to test the feature out with.

We actually love the smaller Zunes, use them every day, prefer them to iPods, especially when you add in the Zune subscription service, which is an amazing deal and somehow remains stealthed despite it’s overwhelming value.

But that’s not what this post is about. One of the cool differences between the iPhone/iPad/Touch franchise and the Zune franchise, is that iPhones etc. as hugely popular. No matter where you are there are at least a couple. This make scenarios like local gaming work really well.

We’ve tried several of the games that you can play over wifi with multiple players. They can be a lot of fun when they work well, but it’s a mixed bag. Uno is one I can think of that works really well.

But I’ve been looking forward to trying out the “Party Play” mode of Scrabble for awhile now. You install the “Tile Rack” app on up to 4 iPhones and Touches, and then they act as the Tile Rack, while your iPad acts as the board.

I tried this over Bluetooth awhile ago, and it didn’t work at all. But on a recent vacation I had enough iPhones, Touches, and people to run them to actually go through a whole game. This time, on a friend’s recommendation I tried wifi, even though most of the help you see recommends Bluetooth. It actually worked. We got all 4 devices signed into a game, with the iPad acting as the board. We played through and completed the game successfully. Despite that, the experience was less than fun, and I think there are some good lessons to be learned from why.

1. The iPad screen is not as big as the actual Scrabble board, so we couldn’t put it in the middle of the table so that everybody could look at it – it was just too hard to see. Instead we had to pass the iPad to each person when it was their turn. This meant that the other players could not work on their play, an important part of the game. Plus now each person is handling two devices, which seems to defeat the purpose of using the iPhones as Tile Racks.

2. The devices all have short screen blank-out times. When the device sleeps, wifi sleeps, which disconnects you from the game. There is some facility for reconnecting, and it worked reasonably well (witness the fact that we finished the game), however it was very painful having to interrupt the game every few minutes to get someone back in, plus everyone was too terrified of disconnecting to put their device down to get a drink or what have you, and kept touching the screen to keep it from sleeping, even though they couldn’t see the board to work on their play. I’ve heard this doesn’t happen on Bluetooth (thus the urging to use it instead), however I found it to be a huge hassle, and unsuccessful.

3. The actual act of flinging your tiles from the “Tile Rack” to the “Board” felt curiously like a novelty, a stunt, a gimmick. It worked ok, and somewhat represented the actual action you take with the physical tile rack and board, but when you fling them, they go to a holding area on the iPad board, and you have to then move the letter to where you want to play. So in some sense there was more pointless work using the tile rack than not, which becomes annoying in a repetitive game.

So what are the lessons to be learned for future games involving local play, especially ones that incorporate the iPad as a central display of some kind?

1. Make sure the game is absolutely easy to set up, and that the underlying platforms, such as networking, are stable and invisible.

2. Make sure the game is easy to play, works better than any physical analogs, and emphasizes the advantages of the platform and de-emphasizes the disadvantages.

3. Novelty wears off quickly. We actually bring a Scrabble game wherever we go, so if this had worked well, it could have replaced our physical game, as we also bring the iPad, iPhones and Touches. However everyone who played agreed we would never do it again, it was just not fun.

Follow-up to WOOT Ripoff: Energizer XP8000 battery

My earlier blog post was at: http://iponderus.com/2010/08/woot-ripoff-energizer-xp8000-battery.html

This particular saga is still not over, however there have been some more developments.

First, I opened a support ticket with Energizer, because the tip wasn’t in the box, and their web site showed the tip (kind of), but would not let me order it as part of my free plan. They were horrible. I don’t know what the backstory is in terms of cost or development or technical problems, but what it comes down to is the tip doesn’t come in the box (that was something Woot was doing). It’s not available as part of the free tips, instead they want you to pay TWENTY dollars for it. They are nuts, and they weren’t particularly customer-friendly about it either. Classic bait and switch. They’ve certainly lost my trust and respect. The whole battery package from Woot was only ~$40!

So I opened a support case with Woot. Within a day I had an email telling me they would send me the tip, just that easy. Now I feel horrible about the title of this post! Energizer is the evil company here, not Woot. Woot rocks!

Stupid keyboard tricks

This is silly simple, and I can't believe I never thought of it before. As a programmer, I have to chop up text files and repurpose them in various ways all the time. One common example is adding a bunch of boilerplate text to the beginning or end of a series of lines. Up to now I tend to use the mouse to position the cursor and then hit [CTRL+V] to paste the text. Due to time and accuracy needed to position the mouse over and over, this is actually pretty time-consuming and painful. Here's what I came up with today:

The first step is always to get the text you are adding into the copy buffer by typing it out, highlighting it, and hitting [CTRL+C].

For adding text to the beginning of the line:

• Position the cursor at the beginning of the first line with the mouse or keyboard. Type the following over and over.
• Type [CTRL+V] [HOME] [DOWN ARROW]

For adding text to the end of the line:

• Position the cursor at the end of the first line with the mouse or keyboard. Type the following over and over.
• Type [CTRL+V] [RIGHT ARROW] [DOWN ARROW] [LEFT ARROW]

Because you can get a finger on each one of these keys at the same time, you can actually do this very very fast, typing the keys over and over in a pattern.