Category: Review

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I’m in love with my laptop

Yes, sad, isn’t it?

About a year ago, I bought an LG Gram 17 laptop. As you’ll see elsewhere in this blog, I was very pleased with it at the time, describing it after three months’ use as “the first laptop I’ve bought and used in at least 10 years that I’m entirely happy with.” So what’s it like after a year of use?

It had the latest CPU at the time of its launch, together with a 17-inch display, a 1TB solid state storage device and 16GB of memory. This specification seemed like enough at the time and – spoiler alert – it still does. The most stress it gets is some light gaming, when the fans will emit a noticeable but not overwhelming amount of white noise. And it can get a little bit hot. Again, not so much that it becomes difficult to handle. The rest of the time, it handles my demands easily.

It’s generally silent, cool and sips at the battery. The LG utility (hello bloatware!) keeps the battery from charging to 100 percent to avoid excessive wear and it still lasts for hours: I’ve not exhausted it, ever. It’s been a couple of hours since the last charge to 80 percent and, as I type this review, 60 percent and a reported four hours’ of life remain. Never thought I’d say nice things about bloatware…

I still welcome the way that the machine is utterly reliable, with no need to go poking around in the innards of Windows to keep it that way. It sleeps and hibernates as and when expected and returns from those states quickly and reliably. Reliable: there’s that word again. The in-built camera recognises my face and logs me in automatically and, again, quickly, except in conditions of low light when it struggles a bit.

Though it took me a little while, I’m now accustomed to the keyboard: the main keys are offset to the left of the large trackpad to make room for the number pad which felt a bit weird at first. But the space that the large format of the machine gives the keyboard means that I don’t have to use the Fn key to access keys such as Home, PgUp, PgDn and Del, each of which are separate. The keys themselves are a reasonable size with space between them. There’s a clicky feel to each keypress.

I’m a huge fan of the 17-inch display which means it almost – but not quite – becomes as good to use as my widescreen desktop displays. This was one of the main reasons I bought this machine. In bright sunshine, it does though struggle to compete.

One issue that it seems no laptop maker has resolved is physical wear and tear. Not that the LG has had a hard life: it travels rarely. But daily handling means the edges of the case where I pick it up have started to look a little worn. A wipe with some isopropyl alcohol tidies up most but not all of it. The keyboard and display in contrast still look brand new.

Other than that, there’s nothing to complain about so I stand by my original conclusion: this is the best laptop I’ve ever bought and, though LG won’t want to hear this, I plan to keep it until it gives up the ghost. And that’s something I’ve never said about any laptop.

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Is this the perfect laptop?

LG Gram 17

It’s not often that I encounter a piece of technology that invokes a need to write about it. Especially in the consumer space, as most technology is a bit more of this or a bit less of that, but otherwise, you find the same technologies perhaps cobbled together in a slightly different way. Too often to ensure that an advertiser gets a better cut.

But the LG Gram 17 laptop, the 2022 edition, is a step forward, in my view.

Backdrop

For the last 25 years or so, I’ve clung to the notion that IBM/Lenovo* laptops, spearheaded by the ThinkPad brand, were the best, and that it was not worth the effort of exploring elsewhere. A habit bolstered by lab tests in my old stamping ground, PC Magazine. And because researching a new laptop is not the work of an hour’s googling: it can take me weeks.

But the last three Lenovo laptops I’ve bought have been disappointments in different ways. My previous machine was a Yoga 730. Its battery life was miserably short, no matter how I configured it. Given that my need to schlep a laptop around the world on soul-crushing long-haul flights has diminished to zero, you might not imagine that short battery life was a problem. But it does still need to be mobile, even within the house, and the 730 couldn’t manage more than an hour or so before it started to demand power. And that’s because it was very noisy and ran hot. Where all that energy was going was inexplicable because even light web browsing could trigger a bout of 747-style roaring and a very hot lap.

Before that was another Yoga which essentially fell apart, the back coming off the screen. Then the display itself started coming loose while the keyboard was thin and unpleasant. It ended up with gaffer tape around its edges in a bid to keep it in one piece. After less than three years use, it was dumped.

And the one before that? I can hardly remember it but it didn’t inspire.

No more Lenovo

I was glad to see the backs of them. Unless you actually need the reversible laptop feature, it’s an unnecessary expense and complication, in my experience; I found I didn’t use it to anything like the extent I expected to.

Of course, my 10-year-old ThinkPad – a bog-standard laptop – is still going strong but looks and feels its age: the screen is low-res by comparison to today’s machines, and modern software near brings it to its knees. So I upgraded it to Linux Mint and don’t let modern software near it, apart my Firefox browser. And it works fine in that limited role (despite the glitchy graphics chip for which I should have returned it inside its warranty period all those years ago). It wasn’t cheap when I bought it but then neither were the Yogas: both cost four-figure sums.

So I’ve finally learnt the lesson of clinging too long to a brand that I trusted but no longer do. When specifying a replacement, I wanted a bigger screen than the standard 15-inch diagonal to allow me to work with a pair of browser windows, or a browser and something else. And I wanted a bit of style and light weight because, even using it mainly within the home, weight is an issue. Have you sat with a laptop actually on your lap for any length of time? A 4Kg behemoth gets heavy quickly. I also didn’t want to pay the earth.

Looking for laptops

So on researching the 17-inch laptop market, because that’s about as big as laptop displays get, I found that there are two distinct segments. Most are gaming laptops: they are big, heavy and expensive, and include a hefty dollop of ugliness for free. I do a little light gaming but most modern laptops can handle that. So no thanks.

Then there are premium 17-inch laptops made by the likes of Dell. Very nice but very expensive: well over £2,000. Fine if the company is paying the bill but I’m not in that fortunate position.

LG Gram impressions

Then I stumbled across the LG Gram, which seemed a bit too good to be true. In most walks of life, anything that seems so usually is. But after weeks of prevarication and more research, I realised it was in a class of its own. I took the plunge.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. You can easily find technical specifications elsewhere so here I just want to focus on the user experience.

It’s slim and light, feeling far lighter at around 1.3Kg than a machine this size ought to do, and certainly significantly lighter than the 15-inch Yoga 730. The keyboard is large with full-sized keys and sufficient depth to type comfortably; I’m a heavy typist. The display is bright and reproduces colours well, making photo editing a joy.

Audio is pretty good – for a laptop. My expectations were not high as you can’t assume that flat speakers crammed into a thin plastic box will sound anything hifi, and of course they don’t, but it’s not bad, considering.

It connects with everything I need it to connect to as well so there’s no shortfall there, and the camera is HD so Zoom calls look good. Or rather, I look as good as I ever will (no laughing at the back, please!).

And it handles my gaming needs with aplomb: the fans deliver a bit of white noise but nothing like the Yoga 730’s racket. And it not only does it not get hot, battery life, which is plenty long enough, seems hardly affected.

Perfect?

In summary, it’s the first laptop I’ve bought and used in at least 10 years that I’m entirely happy with. After three months of ownership and use, I’m still finding it a joy to use. It wasn’t the cheapest machine out there but if you can stretch to the £1,300 I paid for it (deals do come up from time to time), you’re unlikely to be disappointed unless you have heavy-duty requirements. Recommended.

* IBM sold its hardware division to Lenovo in 2005

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AVM Fritz!Box 4040 review

AVM Fritz!Box 4040

AVM Fritz!Box 4040

AVM’s Fritz!Box range of routers has long offered a great range of features and are, in my experience, highly reliable.

The 4040 sits at the top end of the lower half of AVM’s product line-up. The top half includes DECT telephony features but if you’ve already got a working cordless phone system, you can live without that.

The 4040 looks like all the other Fritz!Box devices: a red and silver streamlined slim case without massive protuberances that would persuade you to hide the device from view. A couple of buttons on the top control WPS and WLAN, while indicators show status, with the Info light moderately configurable; it would be helpful if AVM broadened the possible uses of this indicator.

At the back are four 1Gbps LAN ports which you can downgrade individually for power-saving reasons to 100Mbps, and a WAN port. A couple of USB ports are provided too, one 3.0, one 2.0.

The 4040 supports all forms of DSL, either directly or via an existing modem or dongle, WLAN 802.11n and 11ac, both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. The higher frequency network provides connectivity at up to a theoretical 867Mbps; I managed to get 650Mbps with my phone right next to the access point.

Power-saving modes are available for the wireless signal too – it automatically reduces the wireless transmitter power when all devices are logged off – providing a useful saving for a device you’re likely to leave switched on all the time.

Security is catered for by MAC address filtering on the wireless LAN, and by a stateful packet inspection firewall with port sharing to allow access from the Internet.

The software interface is supremely easy to use and handsome too. The overview screen gives an at-a-glance of the status of the main features: the Internet connection, devices connected to the network, the status of all interfaces, and of the NAS and media servers that are built into the router.

The NAS feature allows you to connect storage to the router over USB only and access it from anywhere either over UPnP, FTP or SMB (Windows networking). Other features include Internet-only guest access which disables access to the LAN, an IPSec VPN, and Wake on LAN over the Internet.

The Fritz!Box 4040 is the latest in a long line of impressive wireless routers, continuing AVM’s tradition of high quality hardware and software, and it’s good value at around £85.

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Review of new WD 3TB WD30EZRX disk drive

Quiet and huge describes this new 3TB Western Digital disk drive pretty well. It contains enough data that, if printed out on paper would probably cover the whole of Wales or several elephants, but who’s counting? You could certainly fit well over 500 standard DVDs onto it.

The WD30EZRZ updates the previous model, the WD30EZRSDTL, by upgrading to the latest 6Gbps SATA interface, which won’t make much difference to most people as it will take several drives to fill that data pipe. In other words, the update is largely academic for most users, and the drive is mechanically identical to its 3Gbps predecessor.

What this drive promises is an ability to fit into a range of environments without disruption. If you sit next to your PC all day, you’ll know that the disk drive is one of its noisiest components. And if you have a PC in the living room, you’ll know that when it wakes up and does its stuff, you can hear the drive start rotating and then make a rattling sound when it’s working.

All drive makers have gone some way to making disk drives much quieter than before, with WD’s range of domestically-oriented devices dubbed ‘cool, quiet, eco-friendly’ by the manufacturer. #

So in addition to being quieter, this drive is claimed also to use less power. Fortunately for disk drive makers, the main users of power and generators of noise are the same: the motor that spins the disk and the actuator that moves the drive head — that’s the component that ‘rattles’. So by reducing the power to both of these they can achieve their objectives at the cost of performance. WD doesn’t reveal the speeds its ‘green’ disks spin but one enterprising reviewer calculated it from the sound of the disk at between 5400 and 7200 rpm.

The drive is quiet when idle — within a metre of it, it’s barely audible even while out of the PC case — and you can barely hear the drive rattle when seeking. A sound meter sited the standard distance of a metre away didn’t register the sound in a normal office environment.

But what does that quietness cost in speed? I tested the WD30EZRX using an Intel motherboard housing Intel’s four-core i7-2600K CPU clocked at 3.40GHz and with 8GB RAM. Running the SiSoft Sandra disk benchmark against the drive revealed a data transfer rate, at 100MBps, unchanged from its predecessor’s results. This isn’t the fastest transfer rate there, nor is the drive’s access time of nine milliseconds the lowest, but for most purposes the trade-off is probably good enough.

So if you need a drive to store your DVDs or CDs on, this is close to ideal. But watch out: 512GB solid state disks (SSDs), which are silent and hugely faster than mechanical devices, are commonplace if expensive. And while SSDs will always cost more than rotating media, they’re now approaching the point when you might consider abandoning spinning drives altogether.

In the meantime, the WD is at least as good as its rivals in the places where it matters.