Other than ABP, NoSquint and PushBullet, I don't really have anything of note installed right now, and it's still slow as balls. :(

In theory I would like to agree with this, but Firefox and Chrome say otherwise. In the last year, they've gone from speedy on a Core2Duo to bloated and slow on a modern i5.

You want to know the only machine I have that Firefox runs well on including my extensions? A 5Ghz (heavily overclocked, of course) i5... Even the i5 in my laptop (which turbo boosts up to 3GHz) struggles at times.

Yes, I know, I should pare down my selection of extensions etc. - but shouldn't a 3GHz i5 with an SSD and 16 gigs of RAM be able to run a simple browser without issues? And more often than not, it's the websites themselves that are slowing everything down - Slashdot is fine, but loading multimedia-heavy pages actually puts a noticeable load on a modern laptop CPU, which is quite different from a few years ago.

"Since ~2008 I know they've increased the energy density of their 18650 cells by 20-30%, which would correspond to a 20-30% increase in range no matter what."

Don't they just use Panasonic cells? Last report I saw, they used NCR18650A 3100mAh cells, and I'm guessing by now they've moved on to the newer NCR18650B 3400mAh cells... which would explain the capacity increase. Where are you getting the info that they're manufacturing their own cells?

Agreed. I'm still using my Win7 SP1 installs, and the last time they were reinstalled was when the MSDN SP1-integrated Win7 DVDs came out... still running like champs.

That's actually not true. I'm typing this from a Win8 tablet that gets 10+ hours out of a 30Wh battery... not shoddy by any means.

Of course, if you're running an i5 with active cooling in your tablet a la Surface Pro, you'll see significantly lower battery life. The HP tablets are likely to have very low power parts though.

People who know what they're doing use standby or at least hibernate. The rest boot... seriously, 90% of the people I know with Windows 8 laptops praise them for their fast boot times, because even with XP and 7 they used to perform a full boot every time they wanted to use their device. Years of conditioning ("Windows only runs properly when it's freshly rebooted!"), I suppose :(

I'm running a Windows 8 tablet with a slow ass Clover Trail Atom and 2GB of RAM... for tablet stuff, it's fine. I highly doubt the Hp $99 version will be any slower (which pisses me off a little, considering I paid 700€ for mine :p)...

More like too early, I'd just gotten to work and hadn't had my coffee yet :D

It's a freakin RV with a *server rack* in it - I think we're past decadent...

SSD???

Isn't the recording & encoding part mostly CPU-dependent? And even if the graphics card is used to encode the video, isn't there dedicated H264 encoder hardware on these cards (meaning a budget card from the same generation shouldn't be any slower in this aspect)?

This! Cisco doesn't actually oppose net neutrality, just the abolishment of QoS prioritization... but who the hell wanted to get rid of that anyway?

Oh that's cool, thanks for the info! TIL...

The interesting thing is that I seem to have conditioned myself to only be good at videogames (I play mostly Counter-Strike GO these days) when I've had a sip of beer - not even a lot of beers, just one or two over the course of a few hours of gaming. I can't hit anything when I haven't cracked open a beer, but as soon as I take that first sip, the headshots start coming.

I'm actually sliding down in the ranks slowly because I've been too lazy to buy beer lately...