Laptops handy but care needed

In the third quarter of last year laptop prices in New Zealand went under the all-important $1000 mark.

Sales of portable computers leapt that quarter to 46 per cent of the total, compared with 40 per cent for the whole year, according to research firm International Data Corporation.

In 2003, only 30 per cent of computers sold were portables. The trend is holding up. Almost 45 per cent of the 129,682 PCs sold in the quarter to March 31 were laptops, preliminary IDC figures show.

That is changing the way we live and work. It means people need to appreciate the difference between the form factors so they can get the best out of their machines, and not damage themselves.

While portability implies mobility, the fact is most laptops will get used at the same office or home office desk where the desktop PC used to sit. But many of the ergonomic workarounds we developed to make out working lives more comfortable will no longer be available.

Instead of being able to have the keyboard at a comfortable height, the mouse waving round at the end of your arm in plenty of space, and the screen at eye height, you will be hunched over looking down at the screen, and making fiddly movements on a trackpad or trackpoint to move the cursor round.

If you are doing a lot of spreadsheeting or copying and pasting, your problems with tiring micro-movements will amplify.

The simplest thing to do is get a keyboard and mouse and plug them in the back. They are relatively cheap now, or you may have one lying around. Then you can raise the screen up to eye level. A stack of telephone books will do the job.

Once you have decent broadband (as you will once Telecom's chokehold on the market is truly broken), you will find it faster to look numbers up in the online white pages anyway. And Skype will actually work properly.

Even better is to invest in a separate LCD screen for your regular workspot. Again, prices are coming down, and it is likely to last through two or three laptops. And you can play DVDs on it after work.

One benefit of all this is your laptop is no longer getting a physical hammering through the keyboard every day - just when you have to really be mobile.

While they are now built more robustly than in earlier years, they are still inherently fragile. And replacing a worn out extenal keyboard is easier and cheaper than replacing the one in your laptop.

IDC says the top laptop vendor is HP, with 34.6 per cent of the market in the most recent quarter, followed by Acer, Toshiba and Dell.

HP business notebooks product manager Simon Molloy says with desktop and portable prices getting closer, the market has become extremely competitive.

While new buyer may be attracted by a price of around $1000 for the entry level, more experienced buyers will probably appreciate they need to pony up more at the start. An entry level machine will probably have a 40 Gigabyte hard drive, a drive which can read DVDs and write CDs, a 12 inch or 13 inch screen, and 256Mb of RAM.

Selling machines with less memory than they really need for satisfactory performance has long been the way the industry has given retailers a place to make a better margin through upselling.

Molloy says he is currently trying to analyse how many people buy more RAM when they buy their machines, and whether it is time to start loading in 512MB DIMMS.

Most configurations of business machines are already 512MB, and some start with 1GB or RAM," Molloy says. "A lot of people come back and get more RAM after five or six months."

That is of course less convenient than doing it at point of purchase. Wireless is becoming standard in notebooks, though again Telecom's dead hand has slowed the advance of wifi networks around the country.

An extended warranty policy for a notebook is usually a good investment. Expecting them to get through three years is a bit much, especially if you move around with them a lot.


Molloy says many firms are investing in desktop setups with screens and keyboards just awaiting staff to arrive with their laptops. "We are seeing a high rate of connection to docking stations, and people are investing in a good LCD on the desktop."

He says the drive is not saving space but flexibility as more companies move to hot desking. "It also raises questions of work life balance. When you have your notebook with you and a wireless connection, there is a temptation to log on to your email," he says.

Even in mobile situations, people may question why they are dragging three or four kilos of laptop and accessories around with them. The world is full of internet cafes and hotel business suites, and a lot of work can be done on smartphones or Palms with fold out keyboards. "If you are just doing word processing that may work, but if you spend your life on Excel, you need the bigger space," says Molloy.