** Wayne Stallwood wayne.stallwood@btinternet.com [2003-08-06 09:18]:
On Tuesday 05 August 2003 22:14, Paul Tansom wrote:
is 3-400 cycles typical with a laptop battery? I've been told this by Dell now that my two batteries have given up and was quite disgusted. Traditional Lithium Ion batteries are quoted at around 1000 cycles iirc. That's not a particularly good value for money when a battery costs around 77 quid plus VAT and delivery for my Dell (or about 249 quid I've seen quoted for for one). That's not cheap to keep my laptop going when I have to buy a new one each year - on current evidence. That coupled with the fragility of the power connector for the charger has put me right off Dell kit which I always used to think highly of (oh, and an increasingly dodgy connection to the screen).
Seems pretty typical in my experience.
The 1000 cycle thing is assuming ideal circumstances. Things like current drawn and the operating temperature of the Battery can effect the assumed life of any battery technology, as does the design of the charger.
For example in my youth I used to race scale model radio controlled cars, your batteries could win or lose you a race so serious competitors bought the very best and matched the cells carefully. If I got 30 races out of a ?50 pack I thought I was doing well. But then the batteries were being used under harsh conditions (heat and charge/discharge rate) and at the time we were only allowed to use NiCd technology.
I used to race radio controlled yachts myself which didn't have the same battery drain! Nothing 'scaled' about them though, with the sail areas, keel depth, etc. scaled up they'd make the extremese of the Americas Cup yachts look rather normal! Racing machines through and through. I haven't raced for years now though, and things have gotten even more serious now with Kevlar sails and carbon fibre hulls for maximum performance - sort of priced me out the game even if I had the time!
As to Dell laptops, I too am rarely impressed by them. The price/performance ratio isn't too bad but IMO the build quality of the machines leaves a lot to be desired. In my previous job we had a pool of 10 Inspiron A400's, after 18 months the only one working properly was the one I completely rebuilt after a Coke spill. It was not unusual for me to have to go around every 6 months tightening case screws that were nearly falling out, replacing floppy screen hinges, dead batteries, broken keyboards.
I went round their factory in Ireland many years back and was much impressed by the processes they used - far better than the now defunct AST factory I also saw.
IMO Sony's aren't too bad, Toshiba's are good, Compaq/HP have improved a great deal and are currently my favourite, Thinkpads (apart from the Acer built ones) are king (at least for X86 laptops anyway).
Having worked for IBM with many Thinkpads I thought the best way to use them was without software of any kind ;-) I hate them with avengence having spent some years evaluating modems, network cards and the like to find out whether they acually worked with them - and having a 'Thinkpad certified' logo was no guarantee either. The best OS to use with them was OS/2 in most cases - Windows 3.1 and 95 (shows how long ago it was - 486 and early Pentium machines) would have screen driver problems and there was a definate art in any PCMCIA card used with them. If you could find the right incantation you'd get it to work, otherwise send it back to the supplier. The next unit of the same model with the same card would have a whole new set of problems, even with the same clean install process. Trouble is I got a reputation for being one of only two people on the site that had much success installing them, so I spent far to much time with them, even to the extent of dual, triple and quad boots with Win31, Win95, WinNT35 and OS/2.
Mail me off list if you want as I can get Laptop spares and I may be able to source you a new screen connector (depending on the model it's reasonably easy to fit)
I may do, I'll need to work out what is causing the problem first - probably connector as a sharp thump in the right place usually works. The main way I notice it is that the writing in my Putty session becomes unreadable - the rest of the Windows (spit) screen is fine though. It's probably Windows 2000 realising I'm spending most of my time in a shell to a Linux box and objecting!
** end quote [Wayne Stallwood]