Linux Rescues Battery Life On Vista Notebooks From Dell

nerdyH writes "Dell is preparing to ship two enterprise-oriented Windows Vista notebooks with an interesting feature — a built-in TI OMAP (smartphone) processor that can power instantly into Linux. The 'Latitude ON' feature is said to offer 'multi-day' battery life, while letting users access email, the web, contacts, calendar, and so on, using the notebook's full-size screen and keyboard. I wonder if someday we'll just be able to plug our phones into our laptops, switching to the phone's processor when we need to save battery life? Or, maybe x86 will just get a lot more power-efficient. Speaking at MontaVista's Vision event today, OLPC spokesperson and longtime kernel hacker Deepak Saxena said the project is aiming for 10-20 hours of battery life during active use, on existing hardware (AMD Geode LX800 clocked at 500MHz, with 1GB of Flash and 256MB of RAM)."

Comments

Re:For some people this may be enough

[wiz_80]

Strange - my home machine runs OpenOffice instead of MS Office, and I can only remember one PPT that did not open right the first time in OOo. DOCs all come up fine, so much that when I need to do a lot of word processing I do it on the desktop with the nice keyboard and then transfer the file to the work lapdog. Never had any trouble, even with big multi-author documents with all sorts of highlighting and versioning.