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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.
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.
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standby.
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15 years ago, I probably would have bought an Elitebook just for the name.
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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?
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
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
Well, I think "mercury free" was irrelevant to the battery life issue, but it's relevant for backlights.
Usual backlights do have mercury in them, the LED ones are mercury free, like saying "light" SSD, "fast" discrete graphics, or "low power" Atom CPU.
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!
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.
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!
Assuming Linux can get the correct info from your system, the average Linux notebook is probably configured to use power management less radically. The default power mgt settings for ubuntu under battery power are quite zippy. The CPU went to full speed at any hint of Flash on a web page and the LCD was at 100% brightness. By comparison the "Acer ePower Management" in XP under battery (same system) defaulted to a throttled CPU and a dimmed screen.
Once I changed the Ubuntu settings to control the system the same way, I found very similar performance and battery drain between it and XP.
As far as whether one or the other OS is more efficient I don't know. I haven't compared battery drain while encoding an mp3, thrashing a hard drive or such, but I don't see a difference when I'm just surfing or typing. I would imagine that power efficiency would depend more on the bloat of the running apps than the OS. If you're bogged down with 9 different kinds of anti-malware, running Aero, or that Compiz desktop in Linux, it's gonna take some kind of a hit I guess. I usually turn all the crap off.
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