My laptop's battery generally lasts ...
Displaying poll results.25478 total votes.
Most Votes
- Will ByteDance be forced to divest TikTok Posted on March 20th, 2024 | 13846 votes
- Is NVIDIA: Posted on June 6th, 2024 | 2938 votes
Most Comments
- Will ByteDance be forced to divest TikTok Posted on June 6th, 2024 | 20 comments
- Is NVIDIA: Posted on June 6th, 2024 | 16 comments
Dell e 6400 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
My laptop is connected to a series of turbines run by mind-controlled hamsters: 24 hours (beat that)!
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
My laptop is connected to a series of turbines run by mind-controlled hamsters: 24 hours (beat that)!
Wow, that's impressive since turbines run on liquid forced through by gravity. I didn't realize that hamsters could urinate that much, how many do you have?
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, even mind controlled hamsters can't run for 24 hours. I call shennanigans.
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed you all assume too fast that the hamsters run on a wheel to power my laptop. My mechanism is a complex contraption that only an mspaint diagram [photobucket.com] can show. With enough height on the hamster habitat, the consecutive turbines can spin much longer.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
That was brilliant.
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
Wait a second. Who cranks the meat grinder? The other hamsters? I guess the mind control could take care of that. If not, it sounds like a lot of manual work.
Also, there's no way a Siemens SST-600 industrial steam turbine [siemens.com] like that one would have the proper blade shape to properly recover energy from flowing hamster guts. And the inflow looks backwards. Isn't that the low pressure end of the turbine? Something tells me you made this up. Or are you just trying to protect your proprietary trade secrets pending your patent application being accepted? (If so, sorry)
Wow! Up to 100 megawatt capacity, though. Sweet! Although at that kind of wattage you'd have to have a warehouse full of "Big-Keg-O-Hamsters" barrels and a fast forklift to keep the system adequately fed.
PS: That's a very nice shade of teal in your diagram.
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
Well mr. AC, since you went out and did your research, (and I don't have class until 6 tonight) I went out and did mine. A hamster weighs approximately .12kg, and the height of my zeppelin (how else would it be portable?) is 7700m. Assuming that I used frictionless turbines in a vacuum environment and superconducting wires, the hamsters would take about sqrt(2*7700/9.81)=39.62 seconds to reach the bottom. The power generated is .12*9.81*7700/39.62=228.78 watts (enough to power a laptop). The amount of hamsters I require for the day long supply is 60^2*24/39.62=2180.72 (yes .72, it's en evil contraption, use your imagination). This does not include the hamsters required to provide the mechanical energy to grind up the other hamsters and move them up a conveyor belt. Now you may ask, "isn't this going a bit far? Do you have a grudge against hamsters? Isn't This device terribly inefficient?" Well I just happen to be a humble college student that works part time at a farm that's run near an over-efficient hamster breeder (which is where the mind control device herds them from). Hamsters nearly ruined my dads farm, and the soft hum of my laptop is a nice replacement for the reminder that even though I cant hear the sound of hamster entrails crashing to the bottom of the hamster feeder, those little bastards are paying for what they almost did. And just to shove a little more spite in their face, I waste a profuse amount of time on the internet posting on Slashdot.
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:4, Funny)
No! Really?
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
Assuming that I used frictionless turbines in a vacuum environment and superconducting wires
Let me guess... the hamsters are spherical?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
Your "trade secret" is out. You don't have separate hamsters to do the grinding... you have the hamsters grind themselves. Obviously, they can't finish the job. That .28 left over is made of tiny widdle hamster arms.
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:4, Funny)
"PS: That's a very nice shade of teal in your diagram."
Cmdr. Taco is posting as AC.
I'm on to you~
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
My laptop is connected to a series of turbines run by mind-controlled hamsters: 24 hours (beat that)!
Easy. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
Re:Dell e 6400 (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
My laptop is connected to a series of turbines run by mind-controlled hamsters: 24 hours (beat that)!
Hamsters are too bulky I use gerbals.
Re: (Score:2)
I have the E5400 with the standard 6-cell battery and manage to get just a fuzz under five hours out of it with the WLAN on and the screen relatively dimmed.
What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Cowboy Neal stole my laptop...
Re: (Score:2)
I don't have a laptop you insensitive clod!
Incidentally, do you live in a small village in the north-west of Gaul? Maybe living next to a druid?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:What about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure of that? He is posting on Slashdot, after all.
Extension cord. Seriously. (Score:3, Interesting)
My 6 year old T40 can no longer work unless it's plugged in, so I can truthfully claim to use an extension cord.
Re: (Score:2)
Similar situation here. 4 year old laptop only holds a charge for about 10 minutes, so it stays plugged in. It used to last just over 3 hours.
Re: (Score:2)
Or get the old one repacked...
Re: (Score:2)
This one is crying out for multiple options:
And that's not including older machines. I have a 386 laptop somewhere that is powered by a battery pack which is really just 6 (possibly 8) C cells, and lasted around 15 minutes on a full charge last time I used it (around 2 hours when it
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You must be a reviewer. I have to turn down the screen brightness to break three hours. It's one of the early Celeron models, but are the Atom models really *that* much more efficient?
Re: (Score:2)
More efficient, yes, but that's not the main reason for the longer lifespan. The difference is that from the 901 onwards they also came with a much larger battery capacity. Five hours is about typical for me, running Ubuntu and making no special effort to conserve energy; with low brightness and shutting down Bluetooth and WLAN, I expect I could ma
Re:5+ hours! (Score:5, Informative)
No, he's not a reviewer. "*That* much"? Hell yeah! A simple comparison:
I have an eeePC 900 with Celeron - with low brightness, no WiFi, even no sound and nothing intensive to do (say writing some text in vim) I can break the 3 hour barrier, just like you, but that's it. In the US it's probably somewhat better, I heard they shipped with 5600mAh batteries, but the european edition had just 4400mAh. Oh, well, it's still small and good enough.
When my GF asked for one like that, we chose 901 with Atom. 8+ hours is not a problem, with normal brightness, occasional WiFi access, watching some videos on YouTube, etc., but mainly just playing solitaire. I'm sure it would last 5+ hours under heavy use. *And* it's noticeably faster, both CPU and WiFi!
If battery life is important for you, by all means, get a later one with Atom. IMO the new ones (1000 etc.) suck, they're too big (size matters, not just weight), but the 901 is a huge step forward from 900 and earlier models. Man, I must get one myself...
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, well, it's still small and good enough.
That's what she said.
Wait.
Dang it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Try disabling linux. Xp with eee drivers gets about 20% extra time (uses 20% less power) unless you have specifically gone out of your way to underclock linux.
OLPC (Score:4, Informative)
My XO-1 gets five to six hours per charge. It's not the 12+ hours they were advertising, but it's still far better than most laptops.
Re: (Score:2)
i used my xo last saturday for 7 hours at a gaming session for taking notes. small, neat, quiet. bw screen, wifi off and maximum power saving. left on and using 10-15 minutes per hour leaving the text on screen to read when it was in standby mode. at the end i had 42% battery life. damn that's a good battery life. that's with sugar .82 and according to the blurb on their site they hope to get better battery life with future updates. worth every penny! :-D
Missing Option (Score:5, Funny)
I charge my laptop with my pet electric eel. I carry it with me at all times.
Re: (Score:2)
You need to upgrade to Eel 2.0. Plug it into your USB port and it doubles as a mouse with exciting haptics.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Macbook battery life is insane (Score:4, Interesting)
The sleep functionality and other power saving features on a Macbook work better than any other system i've seen - you close the lid - it's sleeping - you open the lid it's instantly back up and running.
But the battery dying issue it really annoying. It has happened twice to me now and i'm not the only one.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=macbook+battery+is+dead [google.com.au]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thinkpad (Lenovo) sucks my ass (Score:5, Interesting)
Paid a buttload and bought an X61 with the _extended_ battery power, and the damn thing lasts three hours if I'm lucky. To add insult to injury, it gives no warning, and shuts down when it says it's still got 2+ hours of life left in it.
Screw you Lenovo for taking my money and ruining a great laptop brand.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Brand new T500 (Score:3, Informative)
My first Thinkpad. I'm liking it, mostly for the keyboard, the graphics card, and the bright (led) screen.
RH side of the case is weak, leaving the screen to flex a bit when the case is closed... ... but the 9-cell battery is quite awesomely long-lived. 8 hours advertised, and about that in real life.
And the ThinkVantage tools do kick ass.
~4hrs on my last-gen Macbook (Score:2)
Extension cord (Score:5, Funny)
root@desktop:~# hostname laptop
root@laptop:~#
done
ARM (Score:2)
Powertop (Score:2)
Powertop is one of the best applications I've ever come across. From using it, I've turned off usb detection/wakeups as well as other such things which dramatically increased battery life.
If you run linux on a notebook, search the repos for it, install it and sudo run it.
Masters & Johnson (Score:2)
Whoever designed these poll options had an unrealistic view of the average slashdotter's stamina.
Inspiron 1501 (Score:2)
Hour and a half (Score:2)
Toshiba Satellite
Got it June 2007.
It was a bit higher battery life when I originally got it (hadn't been paying too close attention at the time.) I distinctly recall it being over 2-something hours
It came with Windows Shitsta, I got plenty fed up with that for other reasons, ended up nuking the NTFS partition and installing a real OS. Since that (months now), the battery life has held steady at about an hour and a half.
Maybe our favorite penguin preserves batteries, maybe the battery hardware had bottomed o
Not at full capacity (Score:2)
Handhelds FTW (Score:3, Informative)
The closest I have to a laptop is my N800, which will go at least a full 8 hours. It's a stock cellphone battery so that's nice for replacement if it ever does give me grief.
I do have my old Jornada 720 somewhere which is actually more laptop like in form factor, and that'll do over 9. Plus, it's got a separate triple battery pack for a claimed 27 hours!
Then there's the Pandora on preorder, which should get the same sort of lifespan, but is finally a real, honest-to-goodness Linux.
I'll probably need an actual do-real-work laptop this year, but I'll treat it as a luggable desk workstation. If you can't fit it in your pocket, and the battery doesn't even last long enough for taking notes at a conference, what use is it to drag that slab around with you?
Dead weight (Score:2)
Sad part is, my 270$ netbook has a 7.5 hour battery life and is more practical. -_-'
Two Batteries... (Score:2)
I have two batteries for my macbook pro now. One I use between work and home, which I assume is what kills the battery. This one lasts at best an hour with wireless. The Second battery is brand new and is only used when traveling etc...
This is the only way I can figure to manage it. Otherwise I have to shutdown my machine all the time which has a lot of other implications.
Cord - never had to try battery only (Score:5, Insightful)
Tethered (Score:2)
I work from home, so I am always near an outlet. Sometimes I undock to work in another room for a change of scenery, but I still plug it in. The only time the battery matters is walking from one room to another, and during power outages.
Working from home - as Dilbert says, "Clothing is optional."
Depending on which laptop, 15 min to four hours (Score:2)
About 15 minutes on a 2½ year old Toshiba Tecra A8. Was just under 2 hours when it was new.
Just under an hour on a 2 year old HP nx7400 at work. Was just under 3 hours when it was new.
A tad over 4 hours on a ½ year old Asus Eee PC 901.
An hour to three hours? (Score:2)
Tadpole Sparcle 650SX - UltraSparc IIe (Score:3, Interesting)
Newer versions of Solaris are too damn slow, so I'm running OpenBSD on it and it runs nicely. Right now, I'm only getting about an hour and a half, but 4.5 will have support for scaling the processor frequency, so that should make its battery life similar to what Solaris 8 was like, which was about 3-3.5 hours.
Now how would I know (Score:5, Funny)
how long your laptop battery lasts?
4 YEARS bitches. (Score:2)
My laptop is plugged i to a system that had a battery they is charged by hydro power. Hasn't died in over 4 years.
Now is only I could bet a nuclear battery for my house. Preferable one of the new 10MW ones from Toshiba..when, you know, there off the drawing board. *cough
What?
Being consigned to batteries... (Score:2)
...since the Earth's rotation is just enough uncertainty to make positioning it just so that cosmic rays will change bits as necessary, power on or off, I make do with my X61S and the 'big' battery. 5 hours is not uncommon, despite using Virtual PC, having a half-dozen tabs open in each of three IE7 windows, and opening/editing/closing Access databases every half hour or so. And the occasional spreadsheet, terminal emulators of various types, the INCREDIBLE drain on resources called Slashdot, I get a lot
Lenovo T60 and Toshiba X200 (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, my home (ex)-monster with 17" HD bla bla never ran without the power supply.
But here is a tip if you are a frequent flyer:
Ask for an emergency exit seat. After the take off flirt a bit with a hostess, and tell her that you would really appreciate if she would let you connect to the onboard 110 outl
IBM T21 (Score:2)
My IBM T21 lasts less than one second without its battery, so it has to stay plugged into the wall. The problem with that is the wall plugin is missing the middle round (I believe ground) plug, so sometimes it just falls out of the outlet. Kinda sucks when you accidentally kick the cord and the laptop goes off.
Dell e6500 (Score:2)
Dell e6500 here with a 9 cell. With just text documents, RDP or any other simple function I can get around 4 hours...Maybe 5.
With gaming, video or anything else that requires strain on the laptop, maybe 2 1/2 hours. 3 If I'm lucky.
HP nw8240 (Score:2)
If I'm doing anything intensive, then I usually get almost 3 hours from a single charge.
My Laptop is linked to my KVM. :-) (Score:2)
The Laptop I have for work is normally sitting in its docking station and linked to my 8-port KVM along with most of my other desktop boxes. Wired power and network connections as well.
Incredible! (Score:2)
About an Hour and a Half (Score:3, Informative)
Battery life measured in hours? (Score:3, Funny)
Hand crank (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in a 3rd world nation and use a OLPC with a pretty crank on the side.
Re: (Score:3)
Sheesh, I don't know what the crap I'm doing wrong
the most common mistake is to first believe the vendor hype in relation to advertised battery life
Re: 1 hour? (Score:5, Informative)
the most common mistake is to first believe the vendor hype in relation to advertised battery life
The second most common mistake is not to buy an second battery or a special 'travel' battery. My employer issued a Compaq 6710b and this thing is a pretty simple 15" machine, nothing fancy really.
But the nice thing is that you can click a so-called travel battery [notebookreview.com] at the bottom of the laptop. This gives an additional couple of hours of worktime. If you need this extra time, then you can't really skimp on an extra battery like that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
For Li-Ion batteries, if you don't use the spare battery, it is important to store it cold, like in a fridge or freezer, since for storage at room temperature, it loses about 20% of the capacity per year.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is not true. Lithium-ion batteries continually lose charge, and batteries stored in a hot warehouse will typically drop flat within a year or so, rendering them useless (if the cell voltage level drops too low, the cell can no longer be charged.) The GP's figure of about 20% a year is correct [wikipedia.org] for fairly new batteries stored at room temperature. A generation or two ago, Li-Ions tended to lose charge quite quickly - after as little as 6 months, a battery could be dead flat. Storage temperature has much t
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
the most common mistake is to first believe the vendor hype in relation to advertised battery life
Remember: It's not the size of your battery; it's how long you can make it last!
Re: (Score:2)
Sheesh, I don't know what the crap I'm doing wrong
I think you must be turning it on. Remember that to get the vendor advertized battery life you need to leave your laptop in suspend mode.
Re: (Score:2)
The battery life has everything to do with what you're running.
Is the CPU set to go idle and save power?
Is your screen dim? Bright screens take more power.
Do you have a disk in the CDRom? It can (and probably will) spin, drawing more power.
My HP zv6000 gets about an hour, depending on usage. I run it on batteries when I'm sitting outside smoking (like I am right now). It's dark out, so the screen is dim, I don't have a CD/DVD in the drive. I
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when my batteries lasted more than 5 minutes, I used to run them empty, recharge until full, and then run them empty again, even when sitting at my desk (except when gaming). I don't think it helped any. I bought the laptop with two batteries; both of them are dead now, two years later.
Re: (Score:2)
You need to occasionally discharge batteries in order to keep battery life predictions calibrated, but beyond that the idea that you should run until empty all the time is leftover from older battery technology. See nickel-cadmium memory [batteryuniversity.com] and how to prolong lithium-based batteries [batteryuniversity.com]. Battery university is awesome, from laptops to car batteries.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, that's the worst thing you can do. It's the same with mobile phone batteries etc. Anything Li-ion. It's best to keep them topped up. If you run them down a bit, top them up again. It does pay to run them down to shutdown warning point every couple of months or so, but no more.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish people would tell me these things before I've wasted all my battery cycles...
Re: (Score:2)
I'm pleased to say that the battery in my Thinkpad still seems to last as long as it did when i bought it about 16 months ago. I get about 2 hours out of it usually.
It spends almost all day on mains power most days, but i generally run it down to the shutdown warning every couple of months or so, so the charge controller can recalibrate itself. If i run in on battery for a while i top it up again straight away.
Re: (Score:2)
Mine that I bought a year ago is down to maybe 60% of the capacity it had when I bought it. In a year I figure it won't be useful for much more than keeping it alive while I move the laptop from one room of the house to another, then promptly plug it back in.
Re: (Score:2)
Your battery is shot. Go buy a new one. You can pick one up on eBay for about $50.
Batteries, like anything else, have a limited life. Get used to it. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't been quite happy with the netbooks I've seen. Then again, screen size is a big deal to me. I'm not quite happy with my 15" wide screen, because it doesn't give me enough height, and makes it hard to do remote connections to machines with higher resolutions.
Mine is a HP ZV6000 (ZV6170us). Other than the screen size, and the fact the wireless button won't turn on in Linux, I love it.
And on the topic of battery life, I found a Windows application on Sou
Re: 1 hour? (Score:4, Informative)
And on the topic of battery life, I found a Windows application on SourceForge, that'll estimate the time left on the battery. At 63%, it says I still have 1hr 12min. The application is "Tiny Battery".
Wow, you need a third party app for that? Mac OS X comes with this feature built-in; you can choose whether to display the percent charged or the time remaining in the menubar, and the other number is displayed when you click on it (you can also choose to only show the icon to save space, or not show it in the menubar at all). While charging, it'll display the estimated time until full instead of the time until empty.
Unfortunately if you've removed the icon from the menubar and want to get it back, it's not obvious how to do so. They may have changed it in 10.5, but as of 10.4 it's in System Preferences, Energy Saver, select Battery from the "Settings for:" menu, click the Options tab, then check the box "Show battery status in the menu bar".
Re: 1 hour? (Score:5, Informative)
As does Linux, of course.
Re: 1 hour? (Score:4, Informative)
So does Windows. Or at least my battery monitor on laptops has always said something like "50% (2hr 30m) remaining"
Re: (Score:2)
But cannot be made to display only remaining time instead of icon for example. So you don't have to hover with your mouse waiting for the tooltip versus just glancing in your system tray for the remaining time. I'm not quite sure why they never bother to add that functionality in the last 10+ years.
Re: 1 hour? (Score:5, Informative)
XP has a battery monitor, but unless the battery has "advanced features", it only shows a percentage. The applet shows the time based on consumption over time. If it takes 1 minute to drop 1%, then you have 100 minutes of battery life.
I know Linux has better features there, but since the wireless doesn't work, and it can't run my fans property (damned propitiatory stuff) I don't run Linux on this one. I should be trading up pretty soon. I'm handing this one off to my mother in law, for a different one, that I can run Linux on exclusively, and keep Windows in a VM where it belongs. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What self-respecting /.er only owns one laptop? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Great computer.