A light laptop for Civilization V
Chris Green's wife wants a light laptop suitable for business travel, but she also wants to run the Civilization IV and V games My wife travels a lot for work, and would like as small a laptop as possible that is capable of running Civilization IV comfortably – and hopefully Civ V when it comes out. Chris Green Gaming laptops need lots of power so they tend not to be very portable. Usually they will have a 17in or similar large screen, a separate graphics card, and perhaps even a quad-core processor. Portable business laptops are at the other end of the scale. Usually they have 13.3in or smaller screens, Intel integrated graphics chips, and nowadays may well use slow but power-efficient Intel CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) processors. Civilization IV is a relatively old game and certainly ought to run on a modern thin-and-light CULV portable, but I suspect it would not be comfortable. I'd look for something with at least a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip and a separate graphics card. There can't be many lightweight laptops that fill the bill, and the one that springs to mind is the Acer Timeline 3810TG running Microsoft Windows 7.
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A light laptop for Civilization V
Apple’s Snow Leopard reviewed
The Guardian's comprehensive review of Apple's new Snow Leopard OS Overview Mac OS X 10.6 – aka Snow Leopard – will be released tomorrow. The truth is that it doesn't contain hundreds of big new features to entice you into upgrading – but it does have one that everyone will appreciate: speed. Snow Leopard is, in fact, blisteringly fast. Booting is quicker, waking from sleep is quicker, and, of course, launching applications is quicker than if you're using Leopard. That's not to say that it doesn't have other, real, new features, too – Exchange support in Mail, iCal and Address Book are probably the most well known in companies. And there's the anecdotal effect: after a few days of using Snow Leopard, sitting down at a Mac running Leopard will drive you insane, just as using a Tiger-based Mac now sets the teeth of any seasoned Leopard user on edge. In place of the big new features, Snow Leopard brings many small improvements. Finder has been rewritten to be much more robust in the face of vanishing network volumes. Your time zone is automatically set based on your location. Preference panes have been reorganised – sometimes only minutely – to make it easier to find the most important settings.
