Cable Connection Tweak

HP EliteBook 2560p

The nice thing about top-of-line notebooks is that they usually leave you wanting for little—or nothing. HP's new ultraportable EliteBook 2560p, which replaces last year's 2540p, is no exception. It's well built and offers a ton of features and respectable performance at a reasonable price. This newer iteration ups the ante by moving from a 12.1-inch to a 12.5-inch (16x9 HD aspect ratio) screen, Intel's second-generation ( Sandy Bridge ) Core i5 processor, and comes in configurations offering either a 7,200-RPM hard drive or a solid-state drive (SSD). It's also one of the few ultraportables we've seen lately with an optical DVD drive—all in a stylish unit weighing in at less than 4 pounds.

The standard configuration unit we tested sells for $1,199 and ships with a 320GB SATA II SED (self-encrypting drive) hard drive, and a six-cell Lithium-ion battery, and weighs 3.68 pounds. It also comes with an impressive array of software and hardware features designed to keep the business road warrior secure and productive. Key features include face recognition security software, a fingerprint reader, a spill-resistant keyboard, 4GB of RAM, a 720p HD Webcam and an SRS premium sound system. Like other Elitebooks, this model also has also has a digital accelerometer that temporarily halts all data and parks the hard drive heads when the unit detects a shock or high impact. This protects the data on the hard drive if the laptop gets dropped or falls. The EliteBook 2560p lacks, however, a USB 3.0 port, and the stock six-cell battery's longevity is disappointing.

HP also sent us a $159 nine-cell replacement battery, which gave us well over an hour of extra battery life during our battery rundown test. We also received the $199 docking station. In addition to providing more time away from a power source, the battery's increased size elevates the rear of the notebook, slanting the unit slightly from back to front, providing increased ergonomics and making the keyboard much more comfortable to use. The docking station provides several expanded connectivity options, such as additional USB and audio ports, and, at 2.04 pounds, it's easy to take on the road.

How To Stream Video From Your Laptop to HDTV

If you’re like me, you keep getting those Cable TV or satellite TV bills and wondering why you keep spending money when there’s so much terrific content available on the Internet for free or very little cost. Between Hulu , YouTube and a streaming-only subscription to Netflix , for $10/mo you have access to thousands of movies and hundreds of episodes of TV series.

Maybe it’s time to cut that cord!

Problem is, I have a nice big HD television and it’s far nicer for viewing this content than any of my computer screens. The solution? Hook them together.

That’s what we’re going to do in this article: I’ll show you how to use a simple HDMI cable to connect your laptop to an HDTV, then tweak Windows so you can watch anything you’d like on that big screen, even while controlling it all from your PC laptop or desktop computer.

WHAT YOU NEED

To get started, you need a computer that has an HDMI (which stands for “high definition multimedia interface”, if you’re curious) port, an HDMI cable, and an HDTV that you can use to plug into and watch.

HDMI connection on my Windows laptop Turns out that there are two types of HDMI cable, a fat one that you probably already have if you have an HDTV, and a very slim unidirectional cable that requires you plug it in with the correct orientation: “TV” needs to be plugged into the TV on mine, for example.

I’ll be using one of the latter cables to get this all to work, though it’ll work fine with either. The advantage of the skinny cable is that you can more easily travel with it and once you know how to hook up your computer to the TV, you’d be surprised just how many hotel TVs have an HDMI input you can utilize to watch your favorite content rather than pay those exorbitant hotel movie fees.

HOOKING IT ALL UP

First step is to hook things up. When you plug in the HDMI cable on the back of the TV, pay attention to the labels too: It’ll indicate the input port that you’ll want to select once you turn the TV on.

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Cable

The connection machine

The Cable, The Wire That Changed the World