2. Control your power
Adjust your notebook's power settings to find a comfort zone where you're using as little power as possible with no interference in your computing tasks. The path to the control panel will vary according to your operating system and setup, but for Windows XP Home and Pro users, follow these steps: Go to Start / Control Panel / Performance And Maintenance / Power Options. Set the LCD screen to go off after 5 minutes of inactivity, let the hard drive stay active for 20 minutes, and store the system's contents in RAM when it shuts down. If your notebook goes to sleep too soon, adjust the settings.
Adjusting power and other options in the Power Options Properties dialogue will improve your battery life.
3. Dim all the lights
Your LCD's backlight uses up to 10 watts of power, a huge battery drain. Lower the screen's brightness to where it's comfortable to view without squinting. In addition to the Power Options settings detailed above, most notebooks have convenient function keys for controlling screen brightness. Look for the function key with the brightness icon and a down arrow next to it (this is the F6 key on many systems). Also, some new notebooks, such as Apple's MacBook Pro, adjust the screen's brightness to suit the conditions.
4. Be battery smart/> Know how much power remains by checking the battery power icon in the system tray. Or buy a notebook with a battery that features a charge-level LED gauge on the battery itself so that you can just flip over the system to see how much battery life remains. If you really want to see tons of detail on what your battery is doing and how much life is left, take battery monitoring to the next level with PassMark's BatteryMon utility.5. Double or triple your pleasure
Some notebooks let you double up with a second battery that fits into a modular bay, nearly doubling runtime. A few systems can even take as many as three batteries, if you include the docking station, also called a media slice. The IBM ThinkPad X41, for instance, can be fitted with a large-capacity battery in place of its standard battery, and it has a connector for an additional bottom-mounted external Battery.
6. Charge when you can
Before leaving the home or the office with your notebook, fully charge all of your batteries. If you're travelling, look around for a wall outlet to give your batteries a refresher charge when you can, because every little bit helps. Some third-party devices will help you charge on the road, such as iGo's Juice 70. This versatile device does it all: it's a regular AC adapter, as well as a car converter, and it will work on many airplanes. With the right plug, it can even charge your phone or handheld.7. Check the CMOS battery
If you have to reset your notebook's clock or your system BIOS, you may have a bad backup battery. Also called the CMOS battery; this secondary battery, which powers the clock when the system is not in use, can sap the main battery power if it's dead. The good news is that this battery is inexpensive. The bad news is that you'll likely have to dig around inside the system to find it. Some vendors put the backup battery under the memory chip slots, while others stash the CMOS battery under or next to the main battery. Check your manual or the vendor's technical support Web site for details.
8. Shut down unnecessary programs
When you're running your notebook on battery power, turn off devices and programs you don't need. When not connected to a wireless hot spot, turn off the Wi-Fi hardware. If you access wireless networks with a PC Card, remove it when not connected. Listening to music via the CD-ROM drive and watching DVDs are also big battery drains.9. Start with complete battery drains
To ensure long-term battery vitality, do the following: when first using your notebook on battery power, let the battery completely drain before you recharge it. Don't recharge when the battery is only half drained. Do that for at least the first two sessions. Also, avoid temperature extremes. Don't leave a notebook in a hot car or use it outdoors in extremely cold weather; hot batteries discharge very quickly, and cold ones can't create as much power.
10. Terminal care
Make sure the battery contacts that connect your cells to the notebook are straight and clean and free of grime, because the last thing you need is a bad connection. Most contacts are flat, copper-coloured metal strips, but they might be hidden between pieces of protective plastic. Every six months or so, give the contacts a cleaning with a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol to remove electron-sapping dirt and grime. A bad connection can keep you from getting the most out of a battery.Cells are individual cylindrical compartments in a battery that produce power. As many as 12 cells are used in a notebook battery.This refers to the amount of energy a battery contains. The typical notebook battery has between 2,000 and 6,000 milliamp hours (mAh) of capacity. See milliamp hours.This is a battery that can be used repeatedly by adding power to it when the cells are drained. These batteries typically can go through a few hundred charge cycles before they start to lose the ability to hold a charge.
Acer's new Timeline series of laptops, including the 13-inch Aspire 3810T, aims to combine the thin, sexy designs of more expensive laptops with cost-saving, low-power processors. But that's a direction many PC makers are moving in, thanks to budget-friendly CPUs such as the AMD Neo and Intel CULV family, so Acer needed a bigger hook, such as the Timeline's claims of all-day, 8-hour computing.We generally take such claims with a grain of salt, as they usually require a fairly rigid set of preconditions: Wi-Fi turned off, screen brightness turned way down, and so on. However, the $899 Aspire Timeline 3810T managed to impress us with its 5-plus-hour battery life in our much more rigid testing regimen (and it would probably get closer to 8 hours under casual use). Add in the decent industrial design, light weight, and reasonable (at least compared with other slim 12- and 13-inch laptops) performance, and it all adds up to a compelling 13-inch alternative.
Note that Apple's basic 13-inch MacBook offers similar battery life for only $100 more, plus includes an optical drive, but that system weighs more and has less RAM and a smaller hard drive, making for an interesting tossup between the two.While perhaps not as striking at the MSI X340, another recent inexpensive, thin, 13-inch computer, the Timeline's gray metal lid and overall sturdy construction give it a more professional feel. It's slightly lighter than Dell's upscale 13-inch Adamo, and the backlit LED screen helps keep it fairly thin (but not in the same category as the MacBook Air or Adamo).The large, flat keys will feel familiar to anyone who has used an Apple or Sony Vaio laptop, and typing felt comfortable and natural. The touch pad is smaller than you'd find on a MacBook, but still usable. We weren't crazy about the single rocker bar that acted as the left and right mouse buttons; besides simply preferring separate mouse buttons, it stiff and unresponsive--you have to make sure to give it a solid press in order to register. The touch pad understands a few multitouch gestures, such as pinching to zoom a photo, which is useful, but the implementation is nowhere near as seamless as what you'd find on a MacBook.
Above the keyboard, a small row of touch-sensitive quick-launch buttons control the Wi-Fi antenna, a built-in backup program, and a power-saving preset.
The 13.3-inch wide-screen LED offers a 1,366x768-pixel native resolution, which is standard for a 16:9 screen this size. More common are 16:10 displays at 1,280x800 pixels. Text and icons were highly readable, and while still glossy, the screen was not as susceptible to glare as most.The two big things you'll find missing on the Timeline 3810T are an optical drive and Bluetooth (although both are available in related 14- and 15-inch configurations). We're perfectly happy to skip the DVD burner, but Bluetooth is very handy for tethering a 3G smartphone, or for connecting a travel mouse.Intel's single-core SU series CPUs (part of the Consumer Ultra-Low-Voltage line, or CULV) have been generally lackluster performers, but the dual-core U9400 version in the Timeline 3810T provides a much more usable overall experience. It easily out-performed the single-core MSI X340, and in anecdotal use it felt perfectly capable of performing standard tasks smoothly, such as Web surfing, working on office documents, and media playback. Of course, adding 4GB of RAM also helps--both the MSI X340 and Dell Adamo had only half that.
The Timeline's main selling point is its battery life, and while we didn't get the advertised 8 hours, we were still very impressed. The 3810T ran for 5 hours and 29 minutes on our video playback battery drain test. That test is particularly intense, so you can expect longer life from casual Web surfing and office use. That's about 30 minutes more than Apple's $999 white MacBook (but about 20 minutes less than the 13-inch MacBook Pro, with Apple's improved nonremovable battery).One of the most common criticisms levelled against netbooks is that they're essentially all the same. MSI is out to prove the critics wrong with the Wind U115 Hybrid. Not only does it have both solid-state and hard disk drives, but it's also got a graphics chip that can help speed up high-definition video decoding. With a price tag of around ¡ê460, standing out from the netbook crowd obviously doesn't come cheap, so is the extra outlay worth it?
Under the bonnet, this netbook differs from rival models in a number of significant ways. Firstly, it uses Intel's new GMA 500 graphics chip, designed to speed up HD video decoding -- something that the vast majority of netbooks on the market today struggle with. The idea is that, when you watch a video that's encoded in HD, instead of the processor handling the load, it passes the hard work over to the graphics chip, leaving the processor free to keep other background tasks running without any slowdown.It's worth noting, though, that this decoding acceleration only works on video that's encoded in MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV 9 or H.264, and the software video player also has to support the graphics chipset for it to work, so you don't get the benefit of the hardware decoding under all circumstances.
The addition of the GMA 500 graphics chip also means that MSI has had to use a slightly different main processor. It's still an Intel Atom CPU, but, instead of the more commonly used N270, it's a Z530. This is clocked at the same 1.6GHz as the N270 though, so you won't notice any difference in performance.
The other big difference between the U115 and other netbooks is the presence of two storage drives. MSI has kitted out the U115 with an 8GB SSD which is used to store the Windows XP operating system and most of your program files, and a 160GB HDD which can be used for storing larger files, like movies and music. This way, the system spends most of its time accessing the SSD, which is much easier on the battery, and only calls the HDD into play when it needs to fetch your documents. MSI has also implemented an eco mode. When you turn this on, it forces the netbook to rely solely on the SSD drive in other to eke out as much life from the battery as possible.But how does the combination of SSD and HDD work in practice? Brilliantly, is the short answer. The U115 has simply amazing battery life. In Battery Eater's intensive Classic test, it managed to keep going for an astonishing 7 hours and 9 minutes.
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