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Centrino Laptops Reviewed
Jeff Mancuso writes "CNET seems to be the first out with full reviews of the new Centrino Pentium M laptops. The performance looks solid, the features are great, designs are thin and battery life runs up to 4-7 hours on these machines." Yeah, I had hoped that we would make it on the review list, but alas, no such luck. Nice looking machines, though.
Is this a comercial? If so please post the link to the article because I'm to lazzy to browse through CNET.
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
After actually READING the reviews, i just wanted to post a few comments.
first, (as i type this on a G4 PB) it looks like Intel has done a great job with these chips. those battery life stats were just marketing fluff, looks like they're real. (although the 7 hour IBM had a "special" order battery with it that stuck out an inch from the back).
it's good to see the Windows world get some laptops that are actually focusing on what makes a laptop worthwhile, weight and battery life. the alienware machines are OK i guess, but suck as a true laptop IMO.
in any case, these chips look like a real improvement to both performance and to the Intel mindset. i'm happy to see them start working towards real world benefits in their chips over marketing hype and lame numbers games.
Well, it shows the IBM with 416 minutes of battery life, while running a 1.3GHz, 1.5GHz, or 1.6GHz and a 64MB ATI Mobility FireGL. Not too shabby, I say, although it comes with Windows XP Professional, XP Home, 2000, 98 Gold, 98 SE, or NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 6a). Most of our laptops made locally here are getting breanded Linux on them. I buy my stuff domestic.
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It's not so much battery technology as power consumption (and waste) of the battery. That huge 16" on some laptops sucks up watts left and right. That new P4-1.X Ghz pulls away power too. Oh, and don't forget about the GPU and the spindles for the drives.
Out of that list, the three that you could most obviously increase the power efficiency of are the ones where the masses want the latest and greatest. You could make a machine that runs for hours and hours, but it'd have a crappy little i810 graphics chip, and a p3, and a smaller display, which, honestly, is last century's technology, and not as appealing as the new gigahertz monsters.
My VAIO (6 month old GRX), when running at the "slow" speed of 1.1 Ghz with full backlight and 3Com WiFi X-jack card, runs for 2.5 -> 3 hours, depending on how many packets I fling out to the base station, and how much I pound on the hard drive.
If you want to know where your battery's going, it's the new "space warmer" feature that comes standard with most laptops.
Michael C. Hollinger
Seems Intel found a way to dramatically lower power consumption and heat without sacrificing too much CPU power.
I cant wait until we can get flex-atx or something like miniitx boards designed for these centrinos.
I want to put together little console-ish media players and gaming machines to plug into the TV, and VIA Edens offerings so far are just a little to gutless, and Shuttles spacewalker boards are great, but screaming CPU and case fans wont cut it.
I wonder how these things would cluster (yeah, imagine a beow...). Possibilities for my own personal little server farm without having to run another 150 amps of service to my PC room, and wont deafen me (a beowulf cluster of fans I dont need).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I know I just posted a little blurb about this above, but I want to tell you that the fifteen local computers makers here have started putting branded linux as standard on all their machines (other OS are extra). I'm not talking about a wallpaper here, I mean all new icons with the company logo for the menu bar, hand picked apps with modifications, etc... My recent jaunt to the local hypermarket found all six of the desktops and all three of the laptops sporting some kind of branded KDE with Mozilla, Evolution and Gnome-meeting as defaults on the KDE desktop, with the whole system available in Thai. In fact, Thailand's Ministry of ICT is preparing to announce a Linux distro and an OpenOffice fork as the national OS and Office suite, respectively.
I want to put an article together on all this, and am trying to schedule interviews and translate the necessary articles into English this week.
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Fuel cells contain hydrogen and I would be pretty scared to carry around a laptop with that much energy potential in it.
I dunno if I would worry about it too much. First, fuel cells don't have to use hydrogen. A lot of different hydrocarbon fuels can be used, depending on the design of the cell. I believe that the new laptop fuel cells that have been announced will be using methanol (rubbing alchohol) for fuel. Second, you have to keep it in perspective. How many people carry around butane lighters? There is a significant amount of energy in one of those, yet they seem to be remarkably safe. I've never heard of a catastrophic lighter accident, although I'm sure it happens. No reason to assume that a fuel cell "tank" wouldn't be at least as safe.
I have to say, being a lifelong Windows user (I had a stint with Macs briefly, 10 years ago in high school yearbook class, pagemaker and what not) I was getting quite fed up with my 9 pound, 1 hour, Sony Vaio AMD laptop. So last week I sold it and went out and bought a sleek little 12" ibook. Best purchase I've ever made. After the initial learning curve with OS X (why the heck isnt Ctrl+C working? Wait, what's this weird little symbol key?) I am really digging the ibook. It's so beautiful, has great battery life, and does everything I'd ever need in a laptop. I love that I can ssh into my colo box without having to download putty. Little stuff like that.
Anyways, long story short, if I had to do it again now with all these T&L windows laptops out, I would still go with the ibook.
Not to mention 3.12 - 94
Two words: Transmeta Processor.
My new Fujitsu Lifebook P-2000 notebook is a wonderful machine. With the extended main battery I was able to watch all of the Two Towers (single disk 3 hour version) before the battery died.
Take out the DVD drive and put in the second battery and I can listen to MP3s for 10 hours on battery.
Ok, so its not the most powerful processor in the world, but it does allow me to play games, so far I've played Civ III for 2.5 hours and still had 50% battery life left. I'm going to try out Homeworld soon, I'll let you know.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Interesting stuff. This seems like a pretty nice step up from my current system. Question, would we be able to install linux onto these systems? (Will the generic pentium drivers,
Centrino Is a Showstopper
Centrino Special Report
My NEC Versa Aptitude does this automatically - unhook the power and it drops from a PIII 750 to a ~PIII 500. Battery life is a tad under 3 hours in X, or a tad over in the CLI :o)
Two batteries get me accross the atlantic - which is why I plan not to upgrade until the thing dies. It has done 2 years and 90,000 miles so far with no sign of that happening yet though!
Beep beep.