Over on TheAppleBlog, Liam posted “14 Ways to Be Kind to Your Battery,” a list of simple measures you can take to conserve battery power if you’re away from an outlet. Tips include things like:
- Dim the screen
- Stop playing DVDs/CDs
- Stop playing video/music from the HDD
- Go easy on your CPU
- Switch off the radios
- Ditch the mouse
- Unplug external drives
Check out Liam’s post for the full list of tips and more detail. These tips aren’t only useful for Apple hardware; most of them would work equally well on any make of laptop or netbook. Looking for even more battery life? Check out Sam’s previous posts on the topic.
Share your battery-saving tips below.
I love technology, but not when it comes to switching PCs — moving all the data and applications from one Windows machine to another is not always as easy as it could be.
I thought I’d share some tips gleaned from my latest move to a new desktop. My way isn’t necessary the best way, but it may give you some ideas when it comes time for you to make the switch. Here are the steps that I took.
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My laptop is starting to get a little long in the tooth. But while sometime soon I’ll need to buy a replacement, in the meantime, with a few dollars and some relatively inexpensive and easy-to-install upgrades, I’ve managed to keep the old machine humming along.
Here are some cheap ways to put off the day you’ll need to buy a new laptop. Read the rest of this entry »
In an interesting post over at GigaOM, Stacey Higginbotham notes that at the SXSW conference this year, there were far fewer notebooks on display and, correspondingly, a much larger number of people were using smartphones to stay connected.
This certainly tallies with my experience since owning an iPhone, in that I’m far more likely to only tote my phone and not bring my laptop if all I need to do is keep an eye on emails and a few feeds. While at a conference, especially, I’d far rather not be lugging around a notebook when I can keep up to date via email, Twitter and RSS on my phone. Having to carry it around all day is one thing, but also the point of a conference, for me, is to get out and connect with people, something that’s much harder to do if I’m stuck behind my notebook screen, tapping away.
Unfortunately, I can’t use my iPhone as a general-purpose mobile device for doing “real” work: the screen is too small and the keyboard is inadequate for large amounts of typing. So I’m not ready to drop my notebook altogether just yet. But in situations where all I need to do is stay up to date, answer a few emails or maybe catch up on a little reading (via the excellent Instapaper app for the iPhone), say while on a train journey or at a conference, it’s great to be free of having to lug my notebook everywhere — something that I couldn’t have imagined just a couple of short years ago. Maybe in a few years smartphones will have gotten so good that I won’t need to bring a notebook with me at all.
Have you noticed that better smartphones mean that you don’t need to carry your notebook with you as much?
Image by sxc.hu user tryout0
It’s a lovely spring-like day here in Bristol today, which has inspired me to do some cleaning. But I’m not cleaning my apartment (which is spotless, of course); I’m tidying my laptop, getting it into tip-top shape so that it keeps running as smoothly as possible. As a web worker, having a machine that’s running optimally is critical.
My laptop is a Dell XPS M1210, a traveler-friendly, highly portable old warhorse that’s getting long in the tooth (the model has been superseded by the Dell XPS M1330). As it’s getting a little old, some maintenance every now and again helps to make sure that it’s not getting bogged down with accumulated junk.
The procedure I describe in this post is straightforward and specifically for my Windows XP machine, but you could adapt it for any platform. Note that some of these processes can take a considerable amount of time, and you should make a backup before starting. Read the rest of this entry »
When we asked whether you’d find a $899 MacBook tempting, a lot of you said “yes.” Alas, it turns out that the rumors of a seriously sub-$100 notebook from Apple were dead wrong. Steve Jobs did announce a $899 product at today’s press event – but it’s a new 24-inch display, not a laptop computer.
Jobs did announce a whole bunch of revisions to the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro product lines, including one-piece aluminum shells, glass trackpads with multitouch, dual graphics chips, and bigger drives. Apple is reducing the entry-level price of the white plastic MacBook to $999 – but there’s a lot of psychological distance between that and the $800 price point that was getting kicked around in the blogs.
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In advance of tomorrow’s Apple media event, rumors are swirling about a sub-$1000 laptop – with most sources pegging it at an $800 or $900 price point. This would be a $200 to $300 drop from the current cheapest MacBook – but perhaps more importantly, it would also be the first time for an Apple laptop to break into a 3-digit price.
Of course, there are plenty of sub-$1000 laptops on the market already – you can buy Dell’s Inspiron line at prices from $499 up, and if you’re willing to compromise down to the “netbook” level of machine, with a 9-inch screen, you can find pricing under $400. But those cheaper machines are not, of course, Macs.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
