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conversation during an online meeting.

       Make sure you get multi-touch. Some manufacturers like to skimp and make tablets that respond only to one or two touch points. You need at least four, just to run Windows 10, and ten wouldn’t hurt. Throw in some toes and ask for 20 if you want to be ornery about it.

       The screen should run at 1920x1080 pixels or better. Anything smaller will have you squinting to look at the desktop.

       Get a solid-state drive. In addition to making the machine much, much faster, a solid-state drive (SSD) also saves on weight, heat, and battery life. Don’t be overly concerned about the amount of storage on a tablet. Many people with Windows 10 tablets end up putting all their data in the cloud with, for example, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box. See Book 6, Chapter 1.

       Try before you buy. The screen must be sensitive to your big fingers, and look good, too. Not an easy combination. I also have a problem with bouncy keyboards. Better to know about the limitations before you fork over the cash.

       Make sure you can return it. If you have experience with a “real” keyboard and a mouse, you may find that you hate using a tablet to replicate the kinds of things you used to do with a laptop or desktop PC.

      As the hardware market matures, you can expect to see many variations on the tablet theme. It isn’t all cut and dried.

      OLED VERSUS LED

      OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens are found on TVs, computer monitors, laptop screens, tablets, and even smartphones. Their prices are headed down fast. Can or should they supplant LED screens, which have led the computer charge since the turn of the century? That’s' a tough question with no easy answer.

      First, understand that an LED screen is an LCD screen — an older technology — augmented by backlighting or edge lighting, typically from LEDs or fluorescent lamps. A huge variety of LED screens are available, but most of the screens you see nowadays incorporate IPS (in-plane switching) technology, which boosts color fidelity and viewing angles.

      OLED is a horse of a different color. IPS LED pixels (considered far superior to the older TN LED pixels) turn different colors, but they rely on the backlight or sidelight to push the color to your eyes. OLED (pronounced “oh-led”) pixels make their own light. If you take an LED screen into a dark room and bring up a black screen, you can see variations in the screen brightness because the backlight intensity changes, if only a little bit. OLED blacks, by (err) contrast, are uniform and thus deeper.

      All sorts of new techniques are being thrown at LED, and LED screens are getting better and better. HDR (high dynamic range) improvements, for example, make LED pictures stand out in ways they never could before. Quantum dots improve lighting and color. Many people feel that, at this point, OLEDs have blacker blacks, but the best LEDs produce better bright colors.

The huge difference is in price: OLED screens are still more expensive than LED. The price of OLED is dropping rapidly, though. In addition, OLEDs don’t last as long as LEDs — say, a decade with normal use. There’s also some concern that OLEDs draw more power — and will burn through a laptop battery — faster than LCDs, but some contest that statement. Much depends on the particular LED and OLED you compare.

      Screening

      The computer monitor or screen — and LED, LCD, OLED, and plasma TVs — use technology that’s quite different from old-fashioned television circuitry from your childhood. A traditional TV scans lines across the screen from left to right, with hundreds of them stacked on top of each other. Colors on each individual line vary all over the place. The almost infinitely variable color on an old-fashioned TV combined with a comparatively small number of lines makes for pleasant, but fuzzy, pictures.

      By contrast (pun intended, of course), computer monitors, touch-sensitive tablet screens, and plasma, LED, OLED, and LCD TVs work with dots of light called pixels. Each pixel can have a different color, created by tiny, colored gizmos sitting next to each other. As a result, the picture displayed on computer monitors (and plasma and LCD TVs) is much sharper than on conventional TV tubes.

      

The more pixels you can cram on a screen — that is, the higher the screen resolution — the more information you can pack on the screen. That’s important if you tend to have more than one word-processing document open at a time, for example. At a resolution of 800x600, two open Word documents placed side by side look big and fuzzy, like caterpillars viewed through a dirty magnifying glass. At 1280x1024, those same two documents look sharp, but the text may be so small that you have to squint to read it. If you move up to wide-screen territory — 1920x1080 (full HD), or even 2560x1440 (aka 1440p) — with a good monitor, two documents side-by-side look stunning. Run up to 4K technology at 3840x2160 or better — the resolution available on many premium ultrabooks — and you need a magnifying glass to see the pixels.

      A special-purpose computer called a graphics processing unit (GPU), stuck on your video card or possibly integrated into the CPU, creates everything that’s shown on your computer’s screen. The GPU has to juggle all the pixels and all the colors, so if you’re a gaming fan, the speed of the video card (and, to a lesser extent, the speed of the monitor) can make the difference between a zapped alien and a lost energy shield. If you want to experience Windows 10 in all its glory, you need a fast GPU with at least 1GB (and preferably 4GB or more) of its own memory.

      Computer monitors and tablets are sold by size, measured diagonally (glass only, not the bezel or frame), like TV sets. Just like with TV sets, the only way to pick a good computer screen over a run-of-the-mill one is to compare them side by side or to follow the recommendation of someone who has.

      Managing disks and drives

Your PC’s memory chips hold information only temporarily: Turn off the electricity, and the contents of main memory go bye-bye. If you want to reuse your work, keeping it around after the plug has been pulled, you have to save it, typically on a hard drive, or possibly in the cloud (which means you copy it to a location on the Internet).

      The following list describes the most common types of disks and drives:

       Hard drive: The technology’s changing rapidly, with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) now being rapidly replaced by solid-state drives (SSDs) with no moving parts, and to a lesser extent hybrid drives that bolt together a rotating drive with an SSD. Each technology has benefits and drawbacks. Yes, you can run a regular HDD drive as your C: drive, and it's going to work fine. But tablets, laptops, or desktops with SSD drives run like greased lightning.The SSD wins as speed king. After you use an SSD as your main system (C:) drive, you’ll never go back to a spinning platter, I guarantee. SSDs are great for the main drive, but they may be expensive for storing pictures, movies, and photos. They may supplant the old whirling dervish drive, but price and technical considerations (see the sidebar “Solid-state drives have problems, too”) assure that hard drives will still be around. SSDs feature low power consumption and give off less heat. They have no moving parts, so they don’t wear out like hard drives. And, if you drop a hard drive and a solid- state drive off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, one of them may survive. Or maybe not.Hybrid drives combine the benefits and problems of both HDDs and SSDs. Although HDDs have long had caches — chunks of memory that hold data before being written to the drive, and after it’s read from the drive — hybrid drives have a full SSD to act as a buffer.If you can stretch the budget, start with an SSD for the system drive, a big hard drive (one that attaches with a USB cable) for storing photos, movies, and music, and get another drive (which can be inside your PC, outside attached with a USB cable, or even on a different PC on your network) to run File History (see Book 8, Chapter

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