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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.
Jack Bauer should get one!
My laptop can run in sleep mode for a week. Is that good?
If I only had a moose...
Well, perhaps you should RTFA.
From TFA
The company said the record battery life arises from a combination of HP engineering and energy-efficient notebook components such as Intel solid-state hard drives (SSD) and mercury-free LED displays.
The optional HP Illumi-Lite LED display boosts battery run time by up to four hours compared to traditional LCD displays, while the Intel SSD provides about a 7% increase in battery life compared to traditional hard drives.
It is worth noting that the 24-hour figure can be reached only by purchasing the ultra-capacity battery and upgrading the base model of the 6930p to include the Illumi-Lite display and 80 gigabyte version of the SSD.
The company says in addition to preserving battery life, tests have also shown that the new Intel SSD boosts overall performance by up to 57%, and data transfer rates are almost six times faster than traditional hard drives.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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