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Lies, Damn Lies, and Battery-Life Statistics
theodp writes "What if automakers measured gas mileage by rolling their cars downhill with their engines idling? They might, Newsweek's Daniel Lyons suggests, if they took inspiration from the MobileMark 2007 notebook battery-life benchmark test, the creation of a consortium called BAPCo, whose members are — surprise — computer makers and other tech companies. Laptops score big numbers, Lyons explains, because they're tested with screens dimmed to 20%-30% of full brightness, Wi-Fi turned off, and the main processor chip running at 7.5% of capacity. Professional reviewers see company-generated battery-life claims as a joke. 'The rule of thumb is that in real-world use you get about 50 percent of rated battery life,' says a Gizmodo associate editor. Leading the call for reform is the not-necessarily-altruistic AMD, who gripes that MM07 was created in Intel's labs and rigged so Intel chips would outscore AMD chips, which draw more power when idle."
Captain Obvious?
They would need a really big hill.
Take a look at Anandtech's MBP review. The tagline 'Battery life to die for' sort of gives away the tale though.
Apple claim 5-8 hours. Anand got 4.92 (heavy downloading + XVid + Web browsing) to 8.13 hours (Wireless web browsing) with the screen at half-brightness ("completely useable") and no funny optimisations.
Maybe, just maybe, there's something to this "our batteries are better" thing they've got going; if someone comes out with a spare-battery-attached-to-a-magsafe-connector for those die-hards who absolutely *need* it, angels may sing in the treetops. Personally I've never needed to change the battery in my portable (whatever portable I've had) so it's no big deal to me. Yadda yadda, one datapoint not a trend...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Intel may twist the numbers, but they are clearly ahead of AMD in most areas.
They were behind in P4 times but the got their act together.
AMD better produces some better processors before they are out of the game.
Crying out loud dosen't help even a tiny bit.
Most people expect 2.5 hours of "good use" out of a laptop battery when new. This number hasn't really changed since 1998 or so. I can't remember the last time I used battery life when evaluating a laptop - if you NEED more than 2.5 hours of battery life, you just buy a second battery. People assume half the life stated as rule of thumb the same way I assume real world gas mileage as (EPA gas mileage * 0.8) for cars I drive.
The correct title for this article is "Does anyone still pay attention to marketing hype about batteries, or, how I learned to stop caring and ignore the marketing hype".
moox. for a new generation.
but I get five hours of battery life on a Macbook (last year's model), so I think Apple doesn't lie about its stats (because they don't have to?). Despite all the claims that Macs are overpriced, I think these are among the cheapest non-netbooks you can get with great battery life. IMO, laptops which last only 2.5 hours on a battery should not be sold.
I've never had that probl***Battery Empty: Shutting down**
People "expect" that just because they don't really realize it can be better. Put it another way: they don't expect that at all, they just accept it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I wasn't very careful looking at the battery life, and, to my dismay, I took it home to find out it could only hold a charge for 1.5 hours. This is even on pretty conservative settings with the screen dimmed as low as possible. Now that it's starting to age, I'm down to about 1 hour of battery, which doesn't even last through my 75 minute classes.
Most people expect 2.5 hours of "good use" out of a laptop battery when new. This number hasn't really changed since 1998 or so. I can't remember the last time I used battery life when evaluating a laptop - if you NEED more than 2.5 hours of battery life, you just buy a second battery.
Oh, how I wish that were the case.
Hasn't changed? The hell it hasn't. My new Dell Studio 15, with the standard battery (6-cell, I think), gets three hours and forty-five minutes under regular usage (i.e., not playing Dwarf Fortress or doing something graphically intensive). It'd get more with Aero Glass off.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I have a cheap lenovo from last year and if I am on 50% brightness with wifi on and just browsing web with some videos I can go 3 hours. The battery is rated for 3. *shrug*
https://www.speakservers.com/
i timed how long i get out of battery power and how long it takes to full recharge, one hour each, one hour and the alarm says its time to recharge or die, and one hour to charge back up. its an old laptop i bought used to use because my big desktop generates too much heat for summertime use, it makes my office room too hot and the laptop only generates a small fraction of the heat.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
2.5 hours? Really? What's the point? My two and a half year old Thinkpad T60 gets 5 hours on a bad day. My friend with a similarly spec'd Thinkpad (a bit older) claims to have gotten 9 hours with wifi off and more like 7 hours in reasonable usage (his is tweaked a bit better). Both of us have just the extended battery (there is also space for a second, smaller battery instead of an optical drive).
Instead of complaining that the test is rigged, maybe creating processors that draw less power when idle would be a good idea?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
When I bought my EEE I did so because the website said I would get 7 hours of battery life from it. If this article is to be believed I should be getting about 3 hours of life out of each charge, yet in reality I regularly see 7 hours of battery life from it. Sure, I do keep the screen rather dim (but its still plenty bright to read slashdot) and don't peg the CPU at 100% the whole time, but it seems like common sense that if I did then the battery life would suffer. I can even keep the wireless turned on the whole time.
The summary seems to focus strongly on the setup of the laptops in these tests as optimized for battery life and yet somehow unfair. Meanwhile the article itself spends most of text playing up the bickering between Intel and AMD and in the end isn't really saying anything at all.
Everybody uses their laptops differently; some people use them as portable access to slashdot while others use them as portable desktops. These people are obviously going to see differing battery lifetimes. Instead of trying to come up with a realistic range or average battery lifetime for these different workloads it only makes sense to give the consumer the absolute maximum the battery will last and let common sense tell them that pegging the CPU or bumping the screen up to 11 will give lower times.
I get seven to eight hours of normal use on a 14" T61 with the nine cell primary and the ultrabay battery, using an Intel SSD. I really CAN run my system all day off batteries, if I need to, but given the number of cells I'm using, that's something I really expect to be able to do.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I will never buy a laptop with a non-removable battery even if it gets 8 hours playing MMOs at full resolution. I *have* a Macbook Pro, and if it had an "iBattery" my laptop would have been destroyed when the battery failed and swelled... instead of having the battery pop safely out of its compartment.
Better battery, great, but I'll take a laptop that's a millimeter thicker if that's what it takes to put a door on the battery compartment.
Hey AMD, I have a challenge for you. Instead of bitching about Intel rigging their battery life testing mechanisms, why not design your chips to beat Intel at those very same tests?
Also, frankly, I don't want a CPU that uses a noticeable amount more electricity than others when it's IDLING. So at this point, just for this reason, I'm glad my computer has an Intel chip in it. But if you can beat those tests of Intel's that you say are "unfair", and you win the battery life tests that you say are rigged against you, then you definitely have a one-up on Intel in that rite.
If someone comes out with a spare-battery-attached-to-a-magsafe-connector for those die-hards who absolutely *need* it, angels may sing in the treetops
This is exactly why I don't understand the fuss over non-removable batteries. You get better battery life, and if you need extra power you've always been able to buy external battery packs. They have cable that attach to the Magsafe connector. You can get them in a range of sizes, including sizes that are not much larger than a spare battery would have been anyway...
Similarly there are tons of external packs for smaller devices like the iPhone/iPod (or anything usb charged).
I also have not often found the need for an second battery in a laptop if I can get at least three to four hours out of it. Basically the only time is an international flight, and for that the external batteries are perfect. Heck, until it broke the Solio solar powered recharger I had could even recharge itself in-flight as long as I was at a window!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
2.5 hours? Maybe the norm for non-Apple notebooks, but decidedly below par for a good laptop. Then again, I have a MacBook that gets 4.5 hours, and that is with the keyboard illumination turned on. Apple notebooks may be pricey, but you get quality and long battery life from them.
OSX pwns.
I know it's off-topic, but it's costing me far more $ and time. Even the manufacturers admit they're seeing tons of failures. Is it just cost-cutting price competition that has gone too far? Will any electronics manufacturer please offer guaranteed higher quality- for a few more $? I will pay- gladly. Just please truly make it better.
I will never buy a laptop with a non-removable battery even if it gets 8 hours playing MMOs at full resolution. I *have* a Macbook Pro, and if it had an "iBattery" my laptop would have been destroyed when the battery failed and swelled.
But perhaps the battery would not have swelled had it been designed into the computer instead of being an Apple re-branded battery manufactured by someone else.
Perhaps Apple's move to all sealed batteries is because they got tired of the weakest link in the chain being overly cheap manufacturing processes from other companies bringing their own equipment down...
If for some reason the Apple laptop battery did swell and cause the system to fail, I'm not sure what the issue would be - you'd get a new laptop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We saw the same issue with clock cycles. People misinterpreted, and the marketing drones were more than happy to let them do so, clocking as measure of work. A faster processor did not mean that more work would get done, but the consumer did not know that, so they would pay more for fantasy benefits.
In terms of fuel consumption, and battery life, the reality is more of the horsepower that the gigahertz. As long as one is running comparable tests, then one can assume that a car rated at 20 mpg will run longer than a car rated at 10 mpg, just like a computer that is rated for 4 hours will run longer than a computer rated at 2 hours. The problem, like the horse, is related the terms horse, hour, and mpg to actual physical quantities. We know that the physical performance is actual 20% or so less in real life.
As mentioned elsewhere, what messes life up is companies like Apple that advertise 3 hours of battery life, and, under normal use, actually get it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I totally agree. I like my battery to last long and I can understand when 2h are just not enough but when you buy a Laptop the power consumption is not in the focus. Most end users won't even look at the numbers and expect about 2h. I think this will only change when the majority of Laptop batteries last for 5h+. Give it 2 years after that and the masses will expect 5h. Right now it's still 2h. I'm always watching the battery status and feel sad for every % I lose but that's just my paranoia and most users won't even think something's odd when the advertised 100000h battery time is not met. They just don't care...
20 hours of rugged computing on the go. (Ok...rugged text entry.....) I want a netbook that captures the spirit of the Model 100.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100_line
People are still using them (much less, unfortunately) today. I'd say there is a market for a long lasting computing device that is rugged.
zosxavius photography
In my own experience, I've found there are 3 different battery life numbers you run into with any laptops. These numbers are always significantly different.
1. The life the manufacturer tells you that you'll get /. readers) swear you'll actually get
2. The life every reviewer (and some
3. The life you actually do get
Regardless of 1 or 2, I've found that 2.5 hrs is a good ballpark for 3 when the laptop is new. (ok, for Apple, the newest one I've used is a bit over 2 years old, but was in that ballpark when new. My newer HP w/o the add-on battery is a little better than that, but same ballpark)
Get a voltage regulator and a couple deep cycle marine batteries. You'd be amazed what fifty pounds of battery can accomplish. -_- Maybe the problem here is "Battery life" is a poor measurement in the first place. There's no frame of reference, for one, and for two, it varies by how you use it. Miles per Gallon is also affected by your driving style. Why do people assume statistics for computers would somehow be more objective?
In other news, people use laptops in places without a wall outlet? Inconceivable! I've never seen such madness... ;)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
For most users, the machine is probably at a CPU load of less than 7.5% the vast majority of the time. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to rate battery life on the assumption that the machine will almost always be at the lowest P and C states. The wifi and brightness settings are a bit dubious but, they vendors aren't claiming that this what users will actually get. They are just claiming that this is what the machine is capable of. And it is.
Think of this in terms of benchmarking other things. If a CPU vendor says a chip is capable of 10Gflops based on numbers from their highly tuned LINPACK numbers and you are able to compute that your application is only getting 5Gflops do you feel cheated? Of course not. If you care enough, you analyze your application and tweak it until you start getting closer to the theoretical peak of 10Gflops. If you don't care, you simply don't do anything.
As a side note, these vendors could probably claim higher numbers than they already do if they benchmarked on linux and understood all the power savings features available. Most linux distros come with most or all of the power savings features turned off but, with aggressive tuning, it's entirely possible to actually exceed the vendors "trumped up" numbers under casual but real world usage. Unfortunately, most see linux as a poor platform for power savings because to get right on linux, it needs to be done by hand rather than coming pre-configured that way.
While they don't do that, what they do is almost as bad.
They tune the car perfectly and esentially put it on a rollers in a room. No road, no wind, no hills, just the car sitting in a room under perfect driving conditions.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be "good use". I personally get at least 4.5 hours of use out of my Toshiba A305 while coding and web browsing. Good thing, too, since I'm often not able to find a free power outlet while I'm at school.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Curiously, AMD likes to boast about its IDLE power in servers (which are less likely to be idle), but complains when idle power is used to rate laptops (which are likely to remain idle)?
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~130026,00.html
----
NetBooks @ Feed Distiller
So? My processor is running at 12%, my screen is dimmed to 40%, that's normal. I got longer than advertised battery time for years. (My battery is now old so not surprisingly it is getting less time per charge.) If I want to do hard work I plug in to wall power but if I'm running off battery I'm thankful that the machine tones down it's power consumption. That's good power management. Frankly, this was a whiny say-nothing article.
I have 300, and I can run the refrigerator, my netbook, the toilet, the central heating and the lights for 48 hours before I have to run the engine to recharge. However, carrying around ten tons of steel hulled boat somewhat defeats the portability of a netbook.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Battery tech has improved, but the computer manufacturers use that extra ability to run more stuff. It's just like how computers don't seem to work any faster than they did ten years ago--advances in memory and processor power get eaten up by bloated software and additional "features". And 4-5 hours seems to be what most people consider acceptable; few are willing to trade off power, screen size/brightness, features, etc. for longer built-in battery life.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
I would surmise that this has to do with the fact that Thinkpads seemed to be geared more towards the businessman - there would be hell and a half to pay if your laptop couldn't last for a flight on a plane. Their customers needed long battery life and they got it.
A lot of my friends who have laptops rarely actually have them untethered - they can take them around conveniently, but they always plug it into whatever open socket happens to be nearby.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
"People expect 2.5 hours", speak for yourself. I expect at least 7-10 hours of battery time from a laptop, I usually don't need a laptop, but when I do I'm away from a usable outlet for quite some time. Having an additional battery is of course possible, but those can easily weigh in at 1 kg+, I got enough to log around as it is.
Exactly! I bought a new battery for my old powerbook about 4 years after I got it and the replacement batter had so much more juice that I actually got 2x the battery life out of it that the original battery gave me (when brand new).
The problem isn't that batteries aren't improving, but that battery improvements aren't keeping pace with hardware requirements. The recent shift toward performance/watt and Apple's larger, but not exteranlly accessable battery seem to be aimed at addressing this imbalance.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
If the trade publications weren't such complete and utter whores, they would have developed a legitimate, real-world test of battery life that would drive the industry version into the toilet, where it belongs.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
SSD's consume a lot less power than HDD's, couple your expanded battery capacity with aggressive power management and you might even be able to get more out of it.
WiFi is probably the next huge power sink after the hard drive, turning that off with the physical switch when you aren't actively browsing would squeeze more juice out of your laptop.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I don't know how things are now or if it relates to laptops/iphone. But I heard that iPods usually get over the rated battery life on the box.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Yes and no. SSDs use less power, but make it a lot easier to keep the CPU fed, and the CPU uses tons of power on its own.
In my case, "normal use" means having 802.11 running. I'm sure I could get more out of what I have but not at the cost of the utility of having that machine to begin with.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The number one selling feature for new laptops seems to be weight (and slimness). If "consumers" would be willing to carry the same weight they did some years ago, sure, you could have batteries that would last a long time, even with more modern processors and so on. but they don't, lightweight sells, and people believe the marketing crap about battery life, so there ya go.
An extra pound or two of battery would do wonders, but they can't hide that extra pound or two in the specs, while they can fudge about battery longevity.
Batteries have gotten better, from sealed lead acid to NiMH to LiIon in laptops, but still, if they keep reducing size and weight, your amp hours of storage will never get much better. You can maybe maintain parity, but it won't get better.
I think there would be a market for it, but obviously no laptop manufacturer wants to take a chance on that, they all seem to be on the lighter is always better schtick.(same with cellphones, lighter and teeny tinier) Personally, I think laptops got "light enough to not suck" several years ago, but obviously most people just don't want to carry anything heavy anymore like they did even five years ago. Example, you can get pretty decent notebooks now at around 3 lbs. Add 2 lbs of extra battery, still at five pounds, what was considered really lightweight not that long ago. You'd have pretty good all day long battery then..but would they sell?
And if torture was a crime... :P
What OS are you running? Even though I am primarily a Windows guy (Quite happy with XP x64) I've found that the ultra small Linux distros can squeeze more life out of a battery. I would try DSL, DSL-N, or Puppy, going from least juice to most.
I have had customers bring in laptops in the same predicament and after telling them how much a new battery would cost (and hoping they don't have a coronary) I show them DSL and Puppy and tell them that running one of these instead of Windows could extend their battery life. Depending on the model some have doubled the amount of time they get and they are all quite happy. After all, it is a laptop. you are using it to take notes and read emails, not run Bioshock.
So give them a try. There are plenty of Puplets you can choose from if you need something customized, but for best battery life I would try DSL and DSL-N first. IIRC DSL-N has Abiword included which is fine for note taking in class. Both DSL and Puppy have easy to use instructions for putting them on a USB stick if you are talking about a Netbook or for whatever reason can't use a CD. All it will take is a couple of hours of your time, a few blank CDs and a few hundred MB of bandwidth to give it a go. And if you are down to an hour of time left on a full charge, what have you got to lose?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just a guess, but since they typically dont run an antivirus app in the background, both cpu and disk can idle more.
Not trying to be a macista, but I can only note that I still get around 4h wifi surfing at medium brightness out of my two year old macbook, so apple definitely do give reasonably honest battery estimates.
They listened to those complaints and instituted slightly better "real world" type testing methods, starting with the 2008 model years. However..they still don't do outside the dyno testing, which they should. At best, it is a compromise from the previous which was woefully skewed to make mileage look better.
I primarily run Ubuntu, although I've gotten very similar results from both Windows Vista and Fedora. I never really thought about installing a minimal version of Linux to get more battery life, so I might give that a try after summer break. An editor won't be an issue since I typically use vim. I'm probably going to buy a new laptop or netbook for taking notes, but it's still something I'll look at, especially if it gives me that little bit of extra battery life.
For writing purposes, I'm considering the AlphaSmart Dana. It's a PDA-like portable word processor that gets 25 hours of battery life without a backlit screen, which wouldn't be an issue for me since my favorite haunts (Bookstop cafe at Shepherd and W. Alabama, Agoura coffee house at Dunlavy and Westheimer, Borders cafe at Kirby and W. Alabama) are all well-lighted. The other option is a netbook. I'd really like someone to design a low-power laptop that allowed word processing and ssh access, because that's about all I need or want. (The web is great for leisure time, not work!)
Futurist Traditionalism
Solid 7h on a 5200mAh (70Wh) battery, while browsing, coding and doing other things I usually do when I'm on the university campus a whole day, moving from building to building (there's WiFi everywhere, but almost no freely available power outlets in the older buildings, anyway). PLD Linux, kernel 2.6.27.7, X.org 1.6.0, KDE 3.5.10.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Fuel injected cars don't use any more gasoline rolling down a hill as they do idling, unless you happen to be accelerating down that hill. Doesn't matter whether it's revving or not - if it's getting pulled to raise the revs, then it's not using any more gas than idle.
Why bother installing just to check it out? I'm sure that you have an old spare flash lying around, yes? Both DSL and Puppy have flash installers. Just boot off the CD, run the flash installer, answer a couple of questions, and there you go. The nice thing about running off the flash is if you have more than 128Mb of RAM you can simply have the entire OS loaded into RAM with the TORAM option flag. That way you don't even need that battery sucking HDD unless you need the extra space.
I had a customer whose GF managed to drop his laptop and break the HDD cage. It wasn't cheap to replace that, let me tell you. I told him about running DSL on a flash and he tried it. He liked it so much he went and got a PCMCIA flash adapter so the flash card wouldn't stick out and now just runs DSL-N on it. it gets better battery life than before with XP according to him, and by having the entire OS loaded into RAM it is very fast to respond. So why not give it a whirl on flash? I have ran DSL on 256Mb, but I would recommend 512Mb or 1Gb so you have plenty of space for programs and files. The entire install of DSL with Abiword was something like 96Mb which left plenty on my 512Mb for my files.
All it takes is a couple of hours to play with it and an old flash drive. If it turns out it works well for you then you can swing by Newegg or surpluscomputers.com and pick up a cheap flash adapter for your laptop and an 8Gb card and can unplug your HDD and save even more juice. That way even if you pick up another laptop or Netbook you will have a nice SSD based secondary for a backup.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From TFA:
"The rule of thumb is that in real-world use you get about 50 percent of rated battery life," says Mark Wilson, associate editor at Gizmodo. "It's not that companies are lying, but they're stacking the deck in their favor. [Their claims] are misleading to the general public." That's something to keep in mind next time you're out shopping for a laptop.
Not that they're lying!?! Yes, it is. They're lying and they damned well know it. As long as people, especially reviewers, are willing to give them a pass on clearly deceptive practices like that, they will continue to do it.
They know very well that people's laptops will not be idle with the screen at 20% brightness while in use (if it's going to idle the whole time, why turn it on?). The benchmark was clearly designed to give figures with no relation to reality whatsoever. So, yes, they are lying.
Standardized benchmarks have always been corrupted by dishonesty.
I have a 901HA, which claims a 5 hour battery life under some conditions. I have found that to be fairly accurate. I run the oem xp as well as eeebuntu on here, both of which have a few ways of optimizing the battery life. I may not get 5 hours on the nose, but I routinely get 4+ hours, even using wifi.
Wouldn't this manner of external battery be incredibly wasteful? Assuming the laptop does not have a way of detecting that it is an external battery and not a power adapter, then I would assume it would attempt to re-charge the internal battery.
For whatever reason, external battery packs for the Macbook/Macbook Pro (basically anything with MagSafe) only power the laptop, they do not charge the battery (even if empty). You can read the notes about that on the site I linked to, they spell that out pretty clearly so as to avoid surprised customers.
This is not a case of amazing design but some aspect of the connector that only lets them send the battery power because Apple (AFIK) does not publish enough specs on how the normal power block works to have the battery packs charge, or possibly it's more a case the AC draw + recharge is more than the pack makers want to design for.
I actually count this aspect as a negative myself, even if wasteful I still prefer to keep an internal battery topped off as much as possible. But as I said really you end up needing an extra battery mostly in situations where you can deal with having this extra brick nearby (like a plane).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You should consider getting a used CF-T5. It's a fanless Core Solo model that gets a realistic 12-13 hours of battery life with the regular battery. I used it once on the whole trip from Hong Kong to Berlin and still had battery life to spare! It's not as rugged as the CF-72, though.
The old palms were great for battery life, but at the cost of being painfully slow. 16mhz slow. I used to have one of the redesigned zires or whatever and it was not terribly reliable, nor would it multitask, etc, but it still lasted for days, even weeks on a charge. I felt like that was a cornerstone in pocketable computing, and now it seems like the idea never really gained much traction. Didn't they make palm based watches? and the fossil watches that connected to MSN? Geeky computer watches are cool, but the screens are way too small.
zosxavius photography
I've owned the Jornada 720 and the N800 handhelds, and got to use of Palm's units (though those had plain AA or AAA batteries) for work, and always got equal or greater time out of them than the "expected" battery life per charge.
Exactly! I bought a new battery for my old powerbook about 4 years after I got it and the replacement batter had so much more juice that I actually got 2x the battery life out of it that the original battery gave me (when brand new).
Bullshit.
Batteries have improved. Lithium Polymer cells in particular are much better (although a moot point here, as they are incompatible with Li-Ion chargers). However, batteries have most certainly not doubled in capacity over the past 4 years, and that technology certainly hasn't been backported to replacement batteries for old laptops.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I remember when I was growing up and people told me about the 'truth-in-advertising laws'. I even saw people get angry and take action against marketing lies.
Now that I'm older, all I see is a sea of helpless individuals that grumble, but take no action.
WTF? I'm not even that old.
Don't 'vote with your wallet'; instead, challenge the companies who make these well known lies.
Truth in advertising laws were designed to protect gullible babyboomers who did not grow up with advertising from a young age. Consumers these days are so jaded by marketing and advertising they just ignore it for the most part, or at least do research on the products they buy before plunking down $100+.
moox. for a new generation.
Here is the link for DSL, here is the link for DSL-N, and here is the link of what you get for DSL-N. If the laptop is gonna be used in class I would recommend DSL-N over DSL due to the fact that it comes with Abiword over Ted and Gnumeric, as well as Gaim and pretty much anything else you would need to stay connected. it also runs on the 2.6 kernel as opposed to 2.4 for DSL, which is really for older hardware.
Speaking of older hardware I have an old Compaq 733Mhz desktop with 384Mb of PC100 RAM, and just to give you an idea of the RAM usage with the TORAM flag set at bootup I am using 62Mb of RAM in DSL and 97Mb of RAM in DSL-N with ZERO swap usage in both. This makes even a machine as old as that incredibly responsive and a pleasure to surf with. As I said I have had quite a few customers come to me with the laptop battery problem and having the entire OS loaded into RAM not only helps responsiveness but also helps with battery life since you don't really need the HDD.
Both DSL and DSL-N are so small I've found they run quite well from flash or CD with the TORAM flag and therefor your HDD need never be touched. Unlike many of the "micro distros" DSL and DSL-N are quite user friendly and GUI based so no problems if you need to let a classmate borrow the laptop occasionally. On something like a laptop where every watt counts I would highly recommend them over Ubuntu and Fedora, and since with TORAM you can run off flash or CD Rom without messing up your install all it takes is a little time to play with it and see if you like it. But I can say that my customers with battery issues really like the easy interface and the extended life they get with the DSL distros. And hey, who doesn't like getting some extra battery time for free?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yeah, mod him troll you pathetic hypocrites, you make me sick.
I'm currently browsing slashdot on my eeepc 901 over wifi, it has 82% battery life remaining and varies between 3.5 and 4.5 hours left, and I've been browsing for about an hour.
That suggests around 5 hours battery life using it like you'd expect to use a netbook. I'm running the Windows 7 beta, I'd probably also get more battery life without aero glass, or not using IE8 (which seems to lag when scrolling).
I've also had several hours of playing streaming video over wifi out of it.
It can't play Dwarf Fortress :'(
(something about the laptop disagrees with DF, it gets about 0.5fps, way below playable. It's still pretty bad even when paused.)
So, in short: There are plenty of laptops about with a decent battery life, people shouldn't complain about battery life when they didn't buy one of them.
"What if automakers measured gas mileage by rolling their cars downhill with their engines idling?"
Actually, cars burns fuel while idling to keep the engine running and in some circumstances more than if driving depending on the air/fuel ratio mixture and injectors (for electronic fuel injection).
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
If you're using Ubuntu (and would prefer not to switch your entire OS), you could just try switching GNOME/KDE for something like XFCE, LXDE or something even lighter still. Ubuntu supports a whole swathe of different GUIs, and a lot of them are more resource concious than the big two.
Obviously that doesn't help with anything other than graphics-related battery drain, but having a good cull of background tasks and similar can yield good results too.
The fuss is that batteries have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles. So when your non-removable battery drops to such a short cycle duration as to be a joke, you're pretty much screwed.
Apple has noted the charge/discharge cycles from the internal battery lasts around 1000 cycles, and that traditional batteries have around 200-300 times (before you start losing charge capacity).
In practice this means around five years of life out of the internal battery. That means just once, five years after you buy the laptop, you have to endure a 30 minute session where they replace the battery at an Apple store.
How many laptops have *you* still had as your primary system five years after you bought it?
Even if you want to assume that figure is too optimistic (though remember here Apple is being honest about battery life so there's reason to think the cycle count may not be too wildly off) and have the battery last a mere three to four years, the same argument applies. Most people would have a new laptop before they need a new battery. The benefits outweigh this small issue that few people will ever see - in fact far fewer than with normal batteries since the whole reason you even worry about this is you have had it happen, as I have - from laptop batteries that only last a year or so and at some crucial point crap out on us.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can call me a liar all you want, but the battery I got from a third party vendor gave me 2x the time I got with the factory battery when it was brand new. The total amount of power stored was quite a bit higher than the original battery (71w vs. 55.2w), and it claimed to have some chip that regulated power output more intelligently, so that it wasn't wasting power.
It is definitely possible that I got a lower quality battery to start with, thus skewing my comparisons in favor of the replacement battery. It also wasn't over the last 4 years (although it was over a 4 year period). The PowerBook was a graduation present for myself purchased over the summer of 2002, but was overstock from a recently discontinued model IIRC (Buddy of mine worked at an Apple store and bought it for me through the corporate discount system). The NewerTech 71W batter was purchased in late 2005 or early 2006, because I replaced the PowerBook with a 1st gen Macbook Pro in August 2006 and wouldn't have bothered to spend anymore money on a laptop that I wasn't using anymore.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
What I've done with XP is to use SpeedSwitchXP to cut cpuspeed to 60% on battery, turn the screen down lowest, turn off wifi & bluetooth, remove USB keys and any other removable media, set and use BattStat, which allows me to turn off the screen with f8.
tOM
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
Truth hurts eh AC? He is modded troll because he is one.
The only surprise is he is not trolling the usual Obama crap.
Oh well a good laugh always helps, and trolls like you jst make my day!
Now if you had the balls to post logged in you might (But probably wouldnt) have a point.
Just another RIAA shill and his cronies.