Laptop

Today's laptop computers are lightweight, convenient and increasingly powerful. So business travelers are more frequently packing computers-to-go.But this portable convenience creates its own set of problems. For example, what do you do with all the files you accumulate on the road when you get back to the office and the old desktop PC? By the same token, how do you get the files you need from your desktop machine when you're ready to travel?If your desktop machine has a 3 1/2 -inch floppy disk drive like the one in your laptop wonder, you can always use floppies to make the transfer.

When my wife and I took a fly-and-drive vacation to the Pacific Northwest last year, I had no problem figuring out what to do with the photos from my digital camera. I packed a laptop PC and dumped my camera's memory card to the hard drive when it was full. From our hotel rooms, I could transfer the best shots to a photo-sharing service to make sure they wouldn't get lost or ruined by an electronic glitch or airport security systems. The only heavy-duty laptop lugging involved getting the computer from the airport to our car on both ends.

San Jose, Calif.--The product has scarcely been invented, yet already it is the talk of Silicon Valley insiders and has set off arace to capture a potentially vast market.It's called a "communicator," and while difficult to describe, the device is spurring feverish work at two valley companies, each of which has an impressive management team, well-regarded technology and access to some of America's and Japan's deepest corporate pockets.These future competitors, Eo Computer Inc. of Foster City and General Magic Inc. of Mountain View, also have a penchant for secrecy and are staying tight-lipped about their plans at this point, still a year or more away from product introduction.

A Sykesville man has been indicted on charges that he burglarized his neighbors' homes in Howard County, committing two break-ins at a residence whose owner told police his computer was taken and a third where a bottle of Viagra was stolen. A grand jury handed up indictments last week charging James Taylor Bell, 21, of the 1100 block of Underwood Road of multiple counts of burglary and theft. Police said in charging documents last month that he confessed and was charged Dec. 28. Charging documents say that county investigators linked Bell to burglaries committed Dec. 8 and Dec. 13 at a home in the 1100 block of Underwood Road through a laptop stolen from there.

WHEN INCOME tax time rolls past and refund checks roll in, I get a lot of calls from people who want to replace old computers. This year, there's a common theme: Should I replace my desktop computer with a laptop? A few years ago, I would have said: No, buy a desktop machine, or maybe two - one for home and one for the office. That's because laptops were too expensive for the performance they provided, particularly when they were unlikely to be used anywhere besides the home or office.

There has been a lot of talk about how laptops have evolved enough to replace your bulky desktop PC. This year, that talk has spread to gaming machines. I staged a shootout between gaming laptops from Dell and eMachines, putting them to the test with Far Cry, a first-person shooter game for the PC that requires a ton of graphics power. I also used the graphics benchmark from 3Dmark to measure how well they can run graphics. The Dell Inspiron XPS (starting at $2,339) has a 15.4-inch WUXGA screen, a 3.4-gigahertz Pentium 4 microprocessor with hyperthreading, an 800-megahertz, front-side bus and a minimum of 256 megabytes of DDR Dual Channel DRAM that is expandable to 2 gigabytes.

I have a desktop computer, and I want to transfer all the information from my hard drive to a laptop. What is the procedure? - Dianna Joslin The safest, easiest and probably least costly way to move data from one Windows XP computer to another one running Windows XP is to acquire a specially wired USB cable that plugs into USB ports on both machines (Don't use an ordinary USB cable; it could damage your computers.). These special cables also work between Macintosh desktops and laptops running OS X. They also can be used to move data from a Mac OS X computer to a Windows PC. Consider something along the lines of the new SimpleTransfer Data Transfer and Synchronization Utility from SimpleTech (www.

It's a story that has become too familiar: Employee takes home work containing sensitive company and client information. And it gets stolen. This time, it happened to Baltimore's Mercantile Bankshares Corp. Yesterday the company said that a laptop computer containing Social Security and account numbers for nearly 50,000 customers of its Bethesda-based Mercantile Potomac Bank was stolen a week earlier from a worker's car off company property. It was the most recent in a string of incidents around the country that raised fears of widespread identity theft.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- XO laptops - the low-cost computers geared for children in developing countries - are fetching a pretty penny on eBay. The computers, which have a signature green-and-white case and a customized version of the Linux operating system, have a nominal value of about $188. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the nonprofit that designed and distributes them, is offering them to Americans in a limited program for about $425, including shipping charges and a required $200 donation.

I don't even own a computer, but I read your column anyway, and now I want some advice about what kind of laptop I should buy. I need a machine that I can use for half of the year at my place in Pennsylvania and the other half of the year at my other place in Florida.My needs are of an accounting nature as well as tracking any investments that I may have or institute. Also, I would like to be able to access the Internet. I really don't feel that I want to make an investment of purchasing two desktop computers when it sounds like a laptop would suffice.