It’s Friday. Before you embrace the weekend with arms wide open and tequilla bottle in hand, make sure you stop the ZDNet for some wacky laptop humor and discover how you can use your laptop as hair dryer, rain hat, or a portable camp stool (as pictured).

It’s time that we mobile warriors start showing more love towards the environment. Afterall, mother nature supplies the fresh air when we’re at the park surfing on the net on our laptop wi-fi. One way to do that is to pick up the new ‘green’ Asus U5 laptop. Stuff Mag has the scoop:

Yep, the Taiwanese company is set to blaze new ultraportable-shaped trails later this month with the U5, its first lead- and halogen-free laptop.

2 less chemicals to worry about. But this ‘green’ thing is being taken a tad bit overboard. I understand the need for hybrid cars that don’t emit less Ozone ruining emissions, but what the hell did a laptop fan ever do to the environment? Ah well, it looks like ‘green’ computing will take off in 2006.

A papertowel is the worst way to clean your sensitive laptop screen. A tissue is a little better, but it still leaves bits of fibers that may be noticable.

eHow has a fantastic article on cleaning your laptop screen:

1. Dilute isopropyl alcohol into a mix with no more than 50% alcohol and the rest distilled water.
2. Apply as needed to a terry cloth, like an old T-shirt or other very soft cloth.
3. Wipe cloth against the screen, in a counter-clockwise or other consistent motion.

In my younger days I cleaned my laptop screen with a towel (only if I had known). My mother now uses that laptop, and after a few years of cleaning with a towel, there’s a permanent film on the LCD screen. I’m not sure if the towel cleaning is what caused it, but I’m willing to bet that it was the towel.

Don’t make the same mistake. Use a softer cloth or a very soft old t-shirt.

The fine folks at Notebook Review have put together a Laptop RAM memory guide. They say:

RAM (Random Access Memory) has been widely regarded as the cheapest, easiest way to improve computer performance for the past decade at least. It’s one of the three main components responsible for your system’s day-to-day performance, alongside the CPU and the oft-forgotten hard disk, and too little of it can be a serious bottleneck.

The guide goes onto to discuss the different types of memory along with a discussion of how much memory is sufficient:

512MB: This should be the bare minimum. If you’re running a Windows XP laptop on any less than that, go out right now and buy another memory stick. You’ll notice a huge improvement in overall performance.

1GB: A gig of RAM is slowly becoming a standard. If you multi-task or do any sort of intenstive graphics work, you should be packing some serious RAM power in that laptop.

Finally, the guide recommends that you don’t go for the cheap OEM RAM. Shell out the few extra bucks for an established stick of RAM from a quality supplier like Crucial.

Laptop Magazine has to scoop on this $5,000 piece of mobile machinery. The Voodoo Envy u:703 comes in at 13 pounds. Their verdict on this powerhouse is:

The price of the u:703 is nearly five grand, but it’s one worth paying if you want the ultimate eye candy on the outside and raw graphics power on the inside.

I was digging around on Digg when I found a link that outlines the history of laptops:

It is a little hard to determine what was the first portable or laptop computer, the first portable computers did not look like the book-sized and folding laptops that we are familiar with today, however, they were both portable and lapable, and lead to the development of notebook style laptops.

Laptop screens are going to get larger. According to CNET:

Dell, a major partner of Samsung, could easily adopt the large screen format for its high-end XPS laptops. And, LG Philips is also touting its 20-inch LCD displays for laptops, Shim said.

The problem though is that as screens get larger, the laptop gets heavier becoming too difficult to carry, even to class.

For example, Dell’s high-end XPS laptop starts at 8.6 lbs. Since it’s a power guzzler, you’ll need to take the 3 lb power brick when you travel. Oh, and the premium 17″ laptop bag that holds the beast weights about 6 lbs.

Total weight for a 17″ laptop: almost 20 lbs

I wonder how much a 5th generation 20″ widescreen XPS would weight?

The fine folks at Gizmodo are giving away a brand-spankin’ new Sharp M4000 WideNote laptop (13.3″ screen, 3.9 pounds, 6 hour battery) for the best laptop horror story.

All you gotta do is:

Send a photo of your tired, your poor, your beaten-down laptop. Write a horror story (no more than 400 words long and in English) describing exactly how your precious equipment got wrecked.

Apple launched upgraded version of their 15- and 17-inch powerbooks. The 15-inch laptop now supports 1440×960 resolution and the 17-incher does 1680×1050.

Along with the screen improvements, the powerbooks get an additional extra hour of battery time and dual-layer DVD burner that is now standard issue. The best part of this whole deal is that the price hasn’t changed: $1,999 for the 15-inch and $2,499 for the 17-inch.

The 12-inch powerbook doesn’t get an upgrade, but does get a price drop to $1,499.

This is one for all you DIY’ers out there.

So if you’ve got an old boombox stereo from the ’80s (and who doesn’t), you can try making an laptop case Boombox. Functional and retro.

That boombox not only makes you the snaziest kid on the block, but it also doubles as a laptop bag to carry your notebook.

Pretty cool project.