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24 Hour Laptops From HP?
daveyboy79 writes "This article from the BBC shows HP's new laptop, the HP EliteBook 6930p. Configured with several options, such as the 80Gb SSD and the mercury-free LED displays, it allows users to get 24 hours of non-stop computing." The real question is, are we talking 24 hours of word processing? Or 24 hours of actually using your computer?
For many business users, word processors and excel account for the vast majority of time spent on computers, if they managed 24 hours for just that they'd have a viable market.
24 hours of anything is pretty damn good.
If it even gets half of that under normal use, I'll be very impressed.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Jack Bauer should get one!
It probably means low levels of IO and the display cranked to the dimmest levels all while not using the wireless radio. I think we would have heard about an increase in battery efficiency of this scale in something other than an HP laptop.
Get paid to code OSS
standby.
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24 hours of web surfing, or 5 minutes of downloading Windows Updates.
15 years ago, I probably would have bought an Elitebook just for the name.
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24 hours of word processing, or 24 hours of actually using your computer.
Yes.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
A lot of the laptop crowd have those customer relation management packages that can be database intense. And I guess that means the SSD would be working a bit. I wonder if the power consumption of SSDs increase with use?
With Sony having just announced a new method for measuring battery life - drastically cutting their own claims, it will be interesting to see how these laptops compare. And also interesting to see the effect on sales between claiming huge figures and much more reasonable figures.
Even with the efficiency gains they mention, this battery needs to be in the 15,0000-20,000mAh range. While that would be awesome, I'm really skeptical. When high capacity NiMH batteries came out, the gains turned out to cost battery lifetime (charge cycles). There may be something similar hiding behind this announcement.
Politicus
My Nokia 770 does this. In fact, I can work with docs, etc. on it for 2 days no issues... as long as I'm not using wireless or bluetooth. Either of those are battery killers... with wireless on, 3 hours max...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
With Windows software?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Mercury free LED.
This is a clear case of picking something poisonous and then claiming that you don't have it in your product.
Arsenic Free Bread - Lead Free Water...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It is not difficult to get a long battery life if you use a very large battery, so how large is this laptop, and more importantly how heavy is it? I assume it is not quite the eeepc.
CDW specs the battery at 6450mAh and this is an add-on unit so together with a typical 4400mAh battery, that only gives you 10,850mAh of juice which means that the 24 hour run time is only achievable with a marathon typing session where the screen is at its darkest setting. This configuration, which likely also turns the laptop into a beast, would really deliver something closer to 12 hour run time in practice.
Politicus
I thought the Title was
"24Hour, Laptops from HP?"
Im sure Jack Bauer would be happy to answer this question.
wtf are so many people hung up on the cycle length of a single battery pack?
Geez, like you can't simply buy two or three and swap as needed or use a wall socket!
it is just so sad that while people are starving, we waste our resources on crap like this
If the laptop uses less power, it uses fewer resources over the long run.
"...are we talking 24 hours of word processing, or 24 hours of actually using your computer?"
Are we talking about doing actual work or downloading pr0n while you doze in your chair at a conference?
I've seen more people try to weasel out of commitments because there was no recording secretary taking minutes at a meeting than I've ever seen weeping and gnashing their teeth because the 25th PowerPoint presentation of the day died along with a laptop battery.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
was this the box that was shown of at IDF?
Personally, I find modern portable laptops abhorrent in their power consumption. Roll on the domination of the EEEPC (although it's not as power-efficient as you might think) and other small embedded laptops.
Back in the 80's Amstrad made a portable word-processor, spreadsheet, calculator, BBC BASIC-capable computer that you could run off a set of ordinary (non-rechargeable) AA's for several WEEKS of constant usage. There were no moving parts, no excessive heat, and it even printed to Centronics printers and serial ports, and could store data on JEIDA SRAM cards. What the hell happened that we've taken such an enormous step back all in the name of "being able to run Windows"? The ironic part is that most people would pick up the Notepad's functions much quicker, there's much less distractions and it'd do most of what some people use their laptops for (writing up dissertations, books, etc.).
Amstrad got a lot of things right with the Notepad. Unfortunately, it hit a market at the wrong time and was never really sensibly updated (the next version put a 720k floppy in but whacked the requirements up to D-cell batteries and you get less life out of it). Imagine if you could have the Notepad (hell, stick with the greyscale LCD screen if you want, just make it a little wider and a little taller) which used USB flash and could connect to Ethernet instead (wireless might be a stretch because that's quite power-hungry). Authors, casual users, word-processors would be using them everywhere you go. And with modern battery and CPU technology you could have an ultra-light one that worked for just as long as the Notepad did but with more going on in terms of raw CPU power.
My GP2X - a 2 x 200MHz ARM Linux-capable computer, with colour LCD screen can run for about 5 or 6 hours easily from a set of 2 x 2700mAh AA batteries - that's a total of 8.1 Wh, so that's 1.5W constant for "ordinary use" power consumption (which is capable of running a SNES emulator at full speed, or playing full-screen video on it's TV-out). Next to me is an old (1.5GHz single-core) laptop - apparently it has 60Wh batteries that can keep it running for about two or three hours in "extremely low" use (i.e. sitting on the Windows desktop/screensaver). That's about 24W at idle for a "clean" install (i.e. no antivirus etc.). Now I'm not saying that either of those devices are the most or least efficient devices I could find but if you are just typing up a plain text document, consuming 24 times as much power as is actually necessary to get the job done is an incredible waste, not to mention the extra calories it takes to lug the full laptop with all its batteries and chargers somewhere to do it. I love my GP2X partly because it takes plain, ordinary rechargeable AA batteries (it can run off Duracells or equivalent for a similar time but I don't buy one-shot batteries any more) - higher capacity ones are obviously better and are available just about everywhere now because of the advent of digital cameras.
People have laptops not to get work done on the move (because there's almost always a PC wherever you happen to go now, and there are much better alternatives to do it) but because they are a fashion item. Power-hungry, extremely heavy, hard to repair, expensive to buy, fragile... laptops are not a common-sense choice for most things. Even those people who work "in the field" would probably be better off in the long run with the old-fashioned "portable" PC's rather than an ordinary laptop. A lot of people I know have even bought laptops and then leave them permanently plugged in on their desk, because "it looks nicer".
It reminds me of the time a salesman from a large educational company came in to "price up" for the school I work at. He had a top-of-the-range tablet touchscreen PC and all the gubbins (remote control, Bluetooth dongle, mini-Projector in a bag etc.). What did the engineer from the same company who came in to fix the server have when he arrived the next week? An old IBM Thinkpad from the 300MHz era and
I've wondered what the battery life of an old Powerbook Duo would be with a modern design battery. Those machines got great battery life (6+hours) if you did some tricks, like using a RAM disk to avoid HD usage. The oldest ones had passive LCD monochrome displays. A modern battery design, with the expectation of driving Wifi, a bright screen, optical drive etc. for hours would probably be pretty remarkable in either an old Duo or a machine designed to maximize battery life, like this one. So it sounds promising but of course not for everyone.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
They achieve this run time with more efficient parts and ... more battery! I wish other manufacturers (APPLE!) would take this approach. Another pound of battery in laptops, or a couple ounces in phones, and they'd hit a seriously useful run time. In most cases this would more than double their time between recharges.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
That brings us further apart from the ultimate goal: 24 hours non-stop relaxing and enjoying life...
I use my computer for word processing, you insensitive clod!
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Some old slashdot story: Are SSDs Really More Power Efficient? . But that's actually old news now even the 80GB SATA SSDs will be power efficient something like 1.5W while seeking, and being able to push 125MB/s sustained.
Anything much over 10 hours and the user is going to run out of juice long before the laptop does.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
After 3rd party patching, anti-virus, and corporateware are installed, churning on the computer 24/7 anyway? Remember how long your "email machine" takes to boot up this morning?
I tried to bootup my laptop and log-in off-line. The results are the same. It takes a significant amount of time to go through the log-in process, demonstrating that the corporateware is churning away some process unknown to average user. My personal laptop does not take nearly as that long to bring it up and running and it has a much older processor than the Core2Duo in my work machine.
Why would you need 24 contiguous hours of battery life?
Most of us sleep at least 8 hours out of every 24.
The Intel Atom is only half of what it should being stuck to all of those full-sized mobile chipsets. I imagine that it must be using atom+poulsbo to achieve it. I think Intel delayed Poulsbo's availabity just so that they may make all previous Atom products obsolete in one sickening blow...the asshats!
...I value that more than an increase in battery life--not to say that increased battery life isn't awesome, but we all know that no moving parts is teh hawt, holy grail.
On a side note, the dell inspiron mini 9 finally makes no-moving-parts a reality in a mainstream laptop!
If you go to the HP web site and read the specs, you'll see that the internal battery is 55 Wh and the extended battery (which is like a wedge that attaches to the bottom of the laptop and adds an extra 1.7 lb) is 95 Wh and so the total battery capacity is 150 Wh. Divide that by 24 and you'll see that the average power consumption is around 6.25 W which is still pretty damn impressive. That's about 1/3 the power that my 3-year-old laptop consumes on average.
Even with the efficiency gains they mention, this battery needs to be in the 15,0000-20,000mAh range.
Just out of curiousity, how is that different than the 15-20 Ah range? Or do you just really like zeros? I bet you'd love to have a 20,000,000,000,000 pAh battery. I'm not even going to mention the yAh battery because you'd probably be drooling all over your numeric keypad.
You don't have to say some stupid poem when you recharge it do you? Because if you do, I'm not buying.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That would be awesome for those of us who work 40 hour weeks (that's only 2 charges per week!)
Considering that most of the stuff I work on is remote (SSH terminal, web pages, database server), I think the most intense stuff that would be running on the laptop would be Firefox and its JS engine, and Pidgin.
If I only have to charge my laptop as often as I charge my phone, you can sign me up! Especially if it recharges as quickly!
Move all sig!
From the article:
I'm not normally a grammer nazi, but this one has me curious. Is "architected" actualy a word? I'm american, could it be a different dialect (british, ausie, etc.)? It's also possible that the Intel employee quoted isn't a native english speaker but I'd love for someone to clarify.
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...its battery has a heart attack and explodes, guaranteeing that the user will have exactly 24 hours of use.
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One small snag. It has moving parts... the screen opens and closes, so there is a hinge involved somewhere - possibly even a catch to stop the screen from opening accidenatlly, the keys are movable (I hope - none tactile keyboards suck).
And being factious you could argue the electrons are moving as well ;)
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
XP usualy last longer or the same as Linux. I'm not so sure about Vista.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I'm not normally a grammer nazi,
Obviously no spelling nazi either.
OTOH, while I code, I like to listen to music and perhaps have a browser running.
SWF advertisements in a web browser take CPU time. So is it 24 hours of AbiWord, or 24 hours of AbiWord plus Firefox showing GIF or SWF ads?
My laptop uses inch-hours.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"The real question is are we talking 24 hours of word processing, or 24 hours of actually using your computer."
So word processing is not 'actually using your computer', as opposed to, say playing WoW, or slandering people you don't know on blogs...
Or responding to marginal content on /.
Wait. Nevermind.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
the HP EliteBook 6930p
Gotta love HP model numbering.
As soon as you actually try to order something, the item has already been replaced by another model number. And the model with advertised parameters is already sold out, not produced anymore and its support is buried on their site deep in "Old Products" hierarchy.
Turned me off completely from buying HP hardware.
The optional battery might be as thick as a NYC phone book.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The typical laptop claims four hours and gets about two. My iPod claims eight hours and gets about four.
Peace to all the battery hypermilers who can actually get the stated life by turning off this, selecting that, and uninstalling the other thing. I believe you. I'm talking about me and the battery life I get.
HP claims twenty-four hours, so in real life it's probably about twelve. It's still a lot.
In the 1960s I loved an almost-forgotten comic strip called Smokey Stover. (Aha! Not so forgotten! Doesn't seem to be a searchable site... one that I loved and wish that I'd clipped and framed involved Smokey and an assistant are drilling a hole in the ceiling with a brace and bit. Smokey says "That's funny, this one-inch bit is making six-inch holes." In some inexplicable manner, the bit is drilling a perfectly round, clean, six-inch hole.
The assistant says, "Well, try this half-inch bit--then you'll only get a three-inch hole."
(Meanwhile, the OLPC people claimed twenty hours for the XO laptop, but it actually gets about four. That's not "fudge," that's some other brown substance.)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
One thing that has impressed me about the iPod is that the battery life seem to increase, even though the batteries have become smaller.
Anything much over 10 hours and the user is going to run out of juice long before the laptop does.
That's what the PSP fans said to the DS fans when news broke of the PSP's comparatively short play time per charge. But a user might need more than 10 hours if he plans to be away from an AC outlet for hours. This might occur on a long car or truck trip or flight, or if the user is in a place that has power outlets but doesn't make them available to guests.
If the laptop uses less power, it uses fewer resources over the long run.
Unless the cost (in materials and pollution cleanup) of building more power-saving features into the laptop exceeds the cost (in fuel and pollution cleanup) of the energy that the features save.
Technically possible, but practically unlikely, if you think through how power savings are most commonly and effectively achieved. Power saving "features" generally involve software and firmware changes, and the use of smaller, slower, and lower-performing members of a product line (eg, fewer cores, fewer graphics pipelines, lower clock rate, ...). Things like flash drives and other (at least for the moment) exotic components tend not to save much power in practice, certainly nowhere near as much as simply using less powerful parts.
Is that have long I have to take it back and get a real laptop?
There's only one thing that ruined Compaq's line of laptops...HP.
ed duval the very last person
Like ripping my whole CD collection... oh wait nm, it's just this one new CD I got this month, I won't be on for the next 74 hours encoding every CD. Well, playing the music-- oh, decoding takes like 1% CPU. Well browsing the net... er, running Pidgin on 5 protocols... connecting to 15 IRC networks? Oh maybe I can use GIMP! That'll spike the CPU at 100% once or twice an hour for like 12 seconds!
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"The real question is are we talking 24 hours of word processing, or 24 hours of actually using your computer." Na, that's 24hrs for the nvidia chip to die.
I think 24 hours until something breaks. (like my HP desktop--multiple repairs, has worked less than 50% of time used.)
Here; http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13061_na/13061_na.pdf Apparently the ultra capacity battery is 95Watt hours, so average power consumption would have to be 3.958 watts (95/24hrs). It would be difficult to accomplish in Vista, maybe if you cut out all the non-essential background processes, classic GUI mode, had the display at the dimmest setting, and just had Microsoft Office 97/2K open.
Without specifying the voltage of the packs those figures are meaningless, they do not specify how much energy they hold. The 6450mAh pack could run at twice or three times the voltage of the internal pack, giving a corresponding increase in energy storage.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbert!
Still doesn't beat the tablet PC that Dilbert gave to his pointy haired boss: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-04-03/
TFA claims that using the LED backlit LCD display adds 4 hours to the run time. I am highly skeptical of this claim -- when Apple introduced the LED backlight, they claimed a battery life benefit of anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour.
2 battery bays or a second mini battery that allows you to swap out a battery without having to hibernate or shut down would be much more useful to me. I could then carry as many batteries as I needed, AND have my Nvidia 7900GS. Might not work for air travellers though due to retarded rules about the number of batteries you can carry.
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My HP laptop's battery lasts 1 hour with non-intensive tasks and 45 minutes with DVD/DiVX play. Well, kinda, it slows to a crawl that the video skips and audio goes out of synch so you can'r really watch. And I'm talking a laptop that came out only 11 months ago with a Dual core processor and 2GB RAM.
What's happened to all the "But does it run Linux?" comments?
Also, will it blend?
Okay, semi-OT, but what's the state of the miniature fuel cells that Japanese companies were demo-ing a few years back?
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Not only did their "customer service" agent hang up on me - he called me back so he could hang up on me again. "Hello?" HP support here; "CLICK".
Anyone who considers buying a HP laptop should think carefully before buying - why buy an unreliable laptop from a vendor that won't honor their warranty when there's so many better choices out there?
If there's any HP management reading along then they should be aware that I'm just one of many customers that they ripped off. They knew the laptops had faulty chips in them and sold them anyway - and when the customers try to get them repaired all they get is abuse from HP's support. They should also be aware that every time someone posts a puff piece about HP I'll be there to remind people why they should consider a different brand.
Even 12 hours would be good. Most flights longer than that hours stop *somewhere*, during which time you could (theoretically) charge the laptop again and be good to go. In my experience, it's unlikely that a single leg of a flight will last (significantly) more than 12-hours at a time.
Unless you're going somewhere like New Zealand, of course.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
That's a lovely press release. But why's it on Slashdot?