In an effort to curtail my disastrous gadget spending habits, I’ve decided to take a look at devices I’ve purchased with the stated intent of increasing my productivity, to see if intentions and reality reflect each other at all. Today, I’m turning my critical gaze on my netbook, which I picked up just over half a year ago.
My particular netbook is the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, but the model doesn’t really matter. It’s a light device with a 10-inch screen, a small keyboard and an all-day eight hour battery. When I bought it, it was freshly released, and was generating quite a bit of buzz among the mobile computing crowd. One of the first things I did with the Eee PC was to install the Windows 7 beta, and it’s still running the release candidate today. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Call me crazy, but I love to see what folks have in their gear bags. Personal computing is exactly that, personal. So I find gear bags like snowflakes: No two are alike. We all have differing needs in our travels, so that’s how it should be, right? After seeing Simon and others here at WWD spill the contents of their bags, I knew I had to jump in and share mine as well.
Unlike most people, my kit tends to change frequently. I vary the contents of my bag based on my needs, and my gear has evolved as I’ve ridden the trend from notebooks to UMPCs to netbooks and back again. Let me give you a glimpse as to what I mean, as my bag has evolved many times in the past few years.
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The notion of ‘all-day computing’ and a notebook battery than can last a full twenty-four hours – without recharging – has long been a pipe dream of the mobile computing industry.
Back in 2004, Intel set itself the goal of achieving eight-hour battery life by 2010, using a combination of battery innovation, software optimisation and power management technologies.
Though Intel has succeeded in continual innovation of its chipsets, and users have become accustomed to carry multiple or more powerful batteries amongst other power management strategies, it doesn’t seem as though we’re any closer to the goal of all-day computing…and Intel only has a little over a year to get there!
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
