best laptop | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Tue, 06 Jan 2015 09:31:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png best laptop | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 KitGuru Annual Awards 2014 https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/featured-tech-reviews/andrzej/kitguru-annual-awards-2014/ https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/featured-tech-reviews/andrzej/kitguru-annual-awards-2014/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2015 12:34:11 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=226848 We love this industry and the logic behind that love is quite simple. Billions are spent on R&D each year – much of which goes toward making games run quicker and film/video stream quicker/smoother than ever before. In other words, thousands of scientists around the world are working toward one thing: Making KitGuru readers happy. The …

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We love this industry and the logic behind that love is quite simple. Billions are spent on R&D each year – much of which goes toward making games run quicker and film/video stream quicker/smoother than ever before.
In other words, thousands of scientists around the world are working toward one thing: Making KitGuru readers happy. 
The KitGuru Annual Awards is our way of saying ‘Thank you!' to that huge, evolving body of scientific improvement.  

To help us achieve our goals, gaming and professional, we expect hardware to keep getting faster, more powerful & feature-rich over time. That’s where KitGuru Labs testing comes in.

We also expect to pay less for it – which brings in the KitGuru editor’s ‘value' determination.

In all of these respects, 2014 has been a mixed bag – with slightly more positive results than negative.

Best
While nVidia’s Maxwell architecture clearly moved graphics into a whole new zone back in February, CPU advancement from Intel has been slower than we’d like. At the same time, AMD’s progression has been largely notable for its absence in the mainstream/desktop zone.

We’ve seen major moves from Intel on the platform side of things, including X99 and Z97, but the pricing for a complete upgrade is still prohibitive for a lot of people.

Back in April, Microsoft began to pull support for legacy desktop operating systems, hoping to increase pressure on buyers to choose Windows 8 – while on 1st October it gave the good news that Windows 10 would be here very soon, as it kicked off a major beta test programme. Anyone who has booted Windows 10 to see the return of the Start Button will feel a great sense of relief that Microsoft’s pattern of ‘great OS -> not so great OS’ has continued and that ‘10’ will be a return to winning ways for enthusiasts.

Outside the PC itself, Sky’s inability to deliver broadband to many customers continues (with almost no change in experience from November 2013 to 2014) is a bitter disappointment for thousands of people.

At the same time, we have seen pricing on next-gen wireless routers dropping fast, led by companies like Asus and TP-Link. With David Cameron promising that 800MB films will be available to download in a single second using 5G in the not so distant future, you have to hope that the broadband companies have more up their collective sleeves. We do live in the UK however, so don't hold your breath.

Across the board, improvements are being made and the third KitGuru Annual Awards gives our editorial team a chance to step back from the day-to-day business of in-depth testing and analysis, to instead focus on the ‘Best of the Best’ across a 12 month period.

Enough preamble, let’s get to the results: Which products were the best of the best in 2014?

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KitGuru Annual Awards 2013 https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/announcements/zardon/kitguru-annual-awards-2013/ https://www.kitguru.net/tech-news/announcements/zardon/kitguru-annual-awards-2013/#comments Thu, 26 Dec 2013 21:54:27 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=167797 Every year, KitGuru considers hundreds of products and puts the best into the KitGuru Labs for testing. While you may tend to see things in terms of conclusions and awards, we actually have a pretty sophisticated scoring system on the backend, that allow us to rank everything we have seen. Now it's time for the …

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Every year, KitGuru considers hundreds of products and puts the best into the KitGuru Labs for testing. While you may tend to see things in terms of conclusions and awards, we actually have a pretty sophisticated scoring system on the backend, that allow us to rank everything we have seen. Now it's time for the best of the best to be recognised in the KitGuru Annual Awards 2013!

Well, another year has passed and what a year it has been!

2013 will go down as the year when:-

  • America's spy secrets were laid bare by Snowden – including its desire to eavesdrop on the phone calls of friendly prime ministers.
  • BitCoin‘s totally made up currency boomed from just over $13 to around $1,000 (despite China saying that it is not interested).
  • Facebook overcame the huge slump in share price that followed its IPO, by monitising just about everything and sending the (newly IPO-ed) Twittersphere into apoplexy because advertising and promoting products now cost money on the Zuckerberg platform.
  • As Apple stretched the legacy of Steve Jobs to the iPhone 5c and 5s, Samsung finalised work on its ‘5' series – with the possible inclusion of a Quad HD screen – while Blackberry withered and died like old fruit on a vine.
  • 4K is becoming a reality – just as the newly updated gaming consoles arrived to do battle for the next 6 years – leaving many to question whether Sony and Microsoft had packed enough power into their new boxes.
  • Microsoft was forced to back-track on the Start button for its Windows 8 OS – which has been largely shunned by the PC community.

Specifically in the arena that KitGuru pits gladiator against gladiator, we saw graphics power increase substantially, while desktop processors maintained a kind of ‘year on year balance' that you don't often see in the world of the PC.

Checking any of the high street electronic stores, you will notice that the rest of the world has finally caught up with KitGuru's readers – and Solid State Drives are now (almost) standard on around half the laptops and desktop systems you will see.

An interesting year, tempered by flat sales news from IDC and Gartner – yet buoyed by news from Job Peddie Research that gaming is due for a 3-year boost in sales.

All very interesting, but let's have a quick look at KitGuru's numbers for 2013:-

  • With social networking integrated tightly into everything we do, it was good to see KitGuru become the first of the UK's independent technology sites to pass the 100,000 mark on Facebook – and we're now past 150,000 – so a big thank you for liking our page.
  • In the ~4 years since KitGuru first put electronic pen to paper, our team of writers has produced 9,500 articles.
  • Overall, KitGuru's servers have managed to issue 80 million pages – all thanks to the excellent technical team down at Multiplay.
  • One story in particular caused a spike so large, that we initially thought we were under DoS attack – but Multiplay's backbone happily dealt with just under 500,000 visitors in a 24-hour period.

That's the year … and KitGuru's achievements – but we know that's not why you are here.

You want to know which products have emerged as the ‘Best of the Best'.

We'll make you wait no longer, it's time to slip the clutch and race onto the winners!

KitGuru-Driving-Forward-Annual-Awards-2013

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