Considering Buying A Laptop Computer? Choose Your Accessories Wisely

I don’t know what the ratio of new computers sold now a days are laptops vs. desktops however I am sure that the laptop share is growing. Laptops offer plenty of benefits to warrant their popularity however laptops also pose a few challenges. Luckily most of these challenges are easy to overcome with the addition of common and reasonably priced accessories.

Some accessories reside inside a laptop but I am only goint to talk about are external accessories because they they are easy to move between computers ore simply leave them at home based on what you are doing and where you are going. You have plenty of choices to make when configuring your laptop (processor, hard drive, RAM, video card, drives and the like) but I am not going to get into those – I will leave that discussion the the techies.

Portability is definitely the biggest advantage of laptops because you can work, use the internet, anything you use a computer for almost anywhere. However portability also creates the biggest risks and concerns for laptop owners. Because you can take a laptop so many places there are more things that can happen to it. You can forget it some place, it can get stolen, it can be damaged. These are the greatest worries of a laptop owner.

In addition to the monetary loss from a lost, stolen or damaged laptop, the biggest worry is loss of the information on your hard drive. Backing up the data on your hard drive is highly recommended for any computer but particularly for a laptop. If you don’t have a lot of data to backup you can use a USB thumb drive as long as you remember to back up your data onto it periodically.

If you have a lot of data to back up external hard drives are available with tons of storage space. External drives are very affordable and many can be programmed to automatically back up your hard drive on specified intervals. There are also some affordable online backup services which means you have less hardware to worry about getting damaged or malfunctioning.

If you want to store lots of large files an external hard drive is the best choice. If you have music or video files on your hard drive but you also have the original on CD or DVD and don’t need to back up them up consider using an external drive to store those files. If you store your large files on your external drive and not your laptop hard drive you can save by choosing a smaller hard drive for your laptop.

The accessory I get the most use of is a laptop TV tuner. For under $100, a USB TV tuner for your laptop makes it possible to watch over the air TV, cable and satellite channels and record TV on your laptop. If you have a high definition monitor many tuners are compatible with high definition signals.

Watching over the air broadcasts on your laptop requires an antenna. A few tuners have built in antennas while others use an external desktop antenna that is about the same size as a beer or soda bottle. More powerful antennas are available. Your reception depends on where you live and how far you are from the broadcast antenna however if you live in a major city chances are you can watch over the air TV in your backyard or at a tailgate party. Watching cable or satellite TV requires a subscription to the service and the tuner must be connected to the cable or satellite cable.

Tags: Computer Accessories, Computer Hardware, file backup, hard drives, laptop computers, laptop TV tuner, USB drive, USB TV tuner

Category: Computer Hardware