This is an HP laptop similar to the one that offers 24-hour battery life.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)Hewlett-Packard says it has achieved a mobile-computing milestone by getting the HP EliteBook 6930p to operate continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge. The laptop used in the test is, however, rather different from those consumers would pick up at the store, at least for now.
The machine's equipped with high-end components including Intel solid-state hard drives (SSDs), a mercury-free LED display, and an optional ultra-capacity battery.
The cream-of-the-crop components played a crucial role in making the 24-hour battery life possible. HP says the Illumi-Lite LED display, by itself, boosts battery run time by up to four hours compared with traditional LCD displays, and the Intel SSD provides up to a 7 percent increase in battery life compared with traditional hard drives.
In addition to helping achieve outstanding battery life, Intel's SSDs provide greater durability and reliability as well as faster system responsiveness. HP claims its benchmarks show overall performance boosts of up to 57 percent on industry benchmarks, and data transfer rates almost six times faster than traditional hard disks.
While these numbers and the claimed battery life haven't been confirmed by CNET Labs' independent tests, they'd better be true as the components used in the test unit can easily dig a big hole in your wallet. Take the new SSDs, for example. They cost about 6 to 10 times more than regular hard drives.
Starting in October, you'll be able to purchase an HP EliteBook with the new Intel high-performance SSDs, if you can afford it, as HP is one of Intel's partners for its launch of the new Intel X25-M and X18-M Mainstream SATA SSDs.
Have trouble finding an extra or replacement battery for your laptop? Both Dell and HP say they are experiencing a laptop battery shortage after a March 3 fire knocked out a major supplier of the batteries.
Besides Dell and HP, the fire that gutted a plant owned by South Korea's second-largest battery maker, LG Chem, is also affecting Asus, maker of the popular Eee PC laptop.
"We sell battery packs. The prices of those battery packs for people ordering extra batteries have gone up," Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn told Reuters. "The industry is experiencing battery supply constraints because of these problems, therefore pricing is being impacted by current availability. But we are working with our partners throughout our supply chain to reduce the impact on our customers."
It will take two to three months for the LG Chem plant to get back up to speed, which may be good news for competing battery manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sony.
After last year's long string of laptop battery recalls, this may be a first--batteries catching fire before they're actually in your laptop.
The batteries in laptop computers are expensive (a quick review of prices at Lenovo.com shows they range from $119 to $179), and like any battery, they have a limited lifespan. When it comes time to replace the battery inside your laptop computer, you may be tempted to save a few bucks and buy a replacement from a company other than the one that made the computer.
Don't.
In a widely reported story, someone in Ohio purchased a battery for their ThinkPad laptop from a company called Shentech rather than directly from Lenovo or IBM (in 2005, IBM sold the ThinkPad line of laptops to Lenovo). No doubt they paid less than IBM or Lenovo would have charged. When I checked today, a battery for a T40 ThinkPad that Lenovo sells for $119 is only $65 at Shentech. Was it a bargain? Not at all; the battery caught on fire.
The story made news not because of the fire but because the battery, bearing an IBM logo, was a fake (allegedly). After examining the faulty battery, IBM purchased additional batteries from Shentech, and they too were (allegedly) fakes. Needless to say, IBM is suing Shentech (that they list a Post Office box and no phone number on the Contact Us page of their Web site doesn't inspire confidence).
Unfortunately, the laptop battery igniting in flames was not, in and of itself, newsworthy. After all, last year there were a slew of battery recalls. The big story was Dell recalling 4.2 million batteries made by Sony, but overall approximately 10 million Sony batteries used in machines from Apple, Sony, Lenovo/IBM, Panasonic, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Sharp, and Dell were recalled. In May of 2005 Apple recalled iBooks and PowerBooks with batteries made by LG Chem of South Korea. Lenovo/IBM has also recalled Sanyo batteries. It must be hard to make a safe lithium ion battery.
The lesson here is to only buy replacement batteries from the company that made the computer. Off-brand batteries are more likely to scrimp on safety features.
And, should there be a recall of the battery in your laptop, make it easy for the manufacturer to contact you--register your computer purchase.
Your Battery
If you are curious about the battery in a laptop computer running Windows XP, go to the control panel, open Power Options, click on the Power Meter tab and, finally, click on the battery icon. In the screen shot above, you can see the battery was made by Sanyo.
ThinkPad owners should have a ThinkPad configuration program installed (available from Start -> Programs -> ThinkVantage, at least in Windows XP, I'm not sure about Vista) that shows additional information about the battery. As you can see above, this includes the manufacture date and the first-used date.
The Status Detail tab (see above) also shows, among other data, the current temperature of the battery, which might bear watching every now and then.
If you know of other software that shows important information about the battery in a laptop computer, please leave a comment below.
See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.
This will sound like a pretty good idea to anyone who has ever gone crazy digging around for an elusive A/C adapter while their battery life ticked away.
Of course, it would be great if laptop manufacturers would agree to a standard power cable (like desktop PCs), but we suppose they'll have to get in line behind the digital camera and MP3 player camps. For now, we'll take what we can get.
(Photo: Antec)
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