Please have your boredom pass ready

Now leaving at Gate 13, Monday's Column.

http://bit-tech.net/column/20/

 

I had the same problem on the train....

*must squeeze out couple of minutes!*


oh, and no pics of the staff meet... err I mean pee up?

 

Roll on fuel cell technology. And you got to admit there's something cool about pouring a shot of alcohol into your laptop. "Vodka please, stewardess. No ice please, it's not for me, it's for my laptop...".

 

eddie was trapped in a mac muwha

 

oh the humanity of it all... I should be thankful though... nah

 

'nuff said.

 

I feel as a stout PC user I should defend the wintel laptops corner spouting on about centrino based systems and such like, but I would feel like a hypocrite, writing this post as I do from a Powerbook G4 on its 4th hour of web browsing on wireless :/ cmon Sony where are you when we need you?

 

how possible would it be to put Windows on a Mac? Why does a WinPC have to be ugly?

PS - I don't believe that there weren't any plugs in the departure lounge. You even get them on the new Virgin trains...
(actually maybe that would be a terror-risk! )

 

That would be the case for my column, however it's a little tricky to play solitaire or watch a DVD on a pad.

 

OK, I can't help you with the DVD, but a deck of playing cards doesn't need batteries.

 

I love my IBM Thinkpad Centrino. Five to six hours of battery life is way more then enough for me. It does all of the power trotelling automaticly shuting down the PC cards and the wirelles to save the batterys if you are not using them. Go PC's!

 

suppose you could carry a generator!

But yeah, centrino laptops aren't half bad.

Bought a spare battery also, I know they cost alot and you shouldn't have to, but it's an option.

 

Unless you use a vpn

 

Battery life has always bothered me too. Of course the first laptop I used had a monochrome screen, some work laptop my dad had. When I finally inhereted some of the older units his office had been toting around for too long I was happy that I could have a portable computer but they had the Ni-Cd curse of memory on battery life. Forget minutes, the batteries in it didn't give it enough power to POST at full charge. Not that they were always that bad..

But last year I got my own laptop. And I'll tell you, gateway designs their laptops to start getting screwed up literally the day after the warrantee goes. The LCD backlight has a flaky connection, the power button only works half the time and the software is becoming wierder and wierder (blame MS on that one though). But I was blessed with battery life. Not a ton, but I could move around the house, maybe watch 1.5hrs of a movie.

Regardless, my next move is a Centrino setup, no question about it. Maybe A64 if I can find a good price (both of which underclock themselves at low load to save power). I decided some time ago that I just don't need power for mobile gaming, if I wanna goto a lan and move my case around a lot, modding on a handle hardly bothers me. My main problem is that as an enthusiast, I know too much about computers to get a lower-end model that will suit my needs. The battery life of a centrino based system is delightful, but the 400MHz FSB of that compared to four times that on an A64 system (which would cost a good deal more) just bothers me. I can't convince myself that I don't need that bandwidth to watch a movie or write forum posts and whatnot. My problem is that I just want the best and I'm not quite satisfied till I get it. And even if I manage to convince myself otherwise, I just have no idea how a 1.6ghz pentium M performs relative to a P4 chip.

Saddest thing of all, I have 4.5 computers in my room (3 PC's, laptop and another half a laptop, some of its parts went to another system, and there are another 3 desktops in the house) but I still do almost all of my planning, writing (non-forum, etc) and whatnot on a pad of paper. The autoformatting on word is just idiotic now and I've never really gotten the hang of a CAD program well enough to make it more useful than sketching.

No idea what the point of that rambling was really but oh well. Maybe my point ended up as computers are made to make our lives easier but all that we end up doing is spend more money on them.

 

Had the same problem, flatt batery, waiting for the plane, lucky for me I paid full price for the plane (or the company I work for..) so I got acces to the lounge(spelling?) and guess what, I could charge my laptop, have free beer and food...

The last time my plane was late, I powerd on my laptop (IBM T40 something centrino) logged on the airport wlan, and played counterstrike for one and a half oure, got some stranges looks as I was shouting instructions for my team, lol.... "Terrorist at bombspot1!!! move move move!!"

Now, the company has decided that we have to fly "low-price" so the nexttime, I have to twin my thumbs, read books or something else...

\\Balder

 

Centrino is amazing. I can play UT2003 for more than four hours on one charge!

ch424

 

luckly my ipod im getting i can just plug it in to a free firewire port and fill it up, now all i have to do is find a firewire port at the airport

 

Me, I think Electrovaya have got it especially right with their "Scribbler" range of Tablet PC's (Take, say This one, with a run-time of (Wait for it) 12-16 hours, or This one, with a runtime of 9 hours). They also do battery packs for regular laptops and Mobile phones.

Not even the Apple crowd can beat that... yet...

 

There are two reasons Macs are so good with battery life. First off, they just use less power. The CPU uses less power anyway, and being as Apple carefully designed every last part of the hardware it's all optimised for battery life. The Mac architecture has been engineered to support turning things off and slowing things down without problems, something that is a bit of a hack in the x86 world.

The other reason is simply that Apple know about the user experience, and go a long way to make sure it's good. They use more expensive hardware to help acheive that, and you pay a bit/lot more, but it just works. It's like a lot of the supposed "iPod killers", sure they have fancy features, play OGG, have 80GB of storage and cost 10p, but their designers didn't spend enough time worrying about the interface, battery life, sound quality, even the looks of thing...

As for Mac OS X on the desktop, I think it's actually far superior to Windows. Not only can you run MacOS apps, of which there are many good ones, but you can run BSD and most Linux stuff too. You get the best of both worlds: commercial apps, media players and game (yes, there are more than you think) from the Apple end and all the power of UNIX / Linux and the vast amounts of free software from the open source end.

When I finally save up for a laptop, it will be an Apple.