Posts Tagged laptop
A failing battery?
So I’ve been noticing that along with the previously mentioned problem of GNOME not knowing when my AC power is plugged in or not, my battery’s life seems to have been cut in almost a third. I used to get approximately 3 hours of runtime on battery, but lately I have been getting just about 1 hour. The time to charge the battery to full has also increased by a pretty significant amount of time than I remember.
GNOME’s battery applet and acpi -V show the battery doing fine up till about 65% charge and then it just plummets to 5% battery and low battery warnings appear. That’s quite a drastic drop.
For instance, here’s some of the graphs from GNOME today of my battery:
5 minutes later:
Looking at those graphs makes me believe that my battery may be standing on its last leg, but I’m not really that knowledgeable about laptop batteries.
Is it time for me to start looking for a replacement battery at this point? Or is there possibly some way to salvage this battery. It’s not really that old, about a year old if I remember correctly. Is it worth trying to recalibrate the battery or is it just shot? Any help is appreciated.
The laptop search continues…
So my ongoing search for a laptop still continues. I have made some progress however.
I have decided on a 15.4″ laptop, and definitely want a laptop that can at least run Supreme Commander well. Basically, the laptop has to have a dedicated GPU, not integrated crap.
Recently, the Dell XPS M1530 has caught my eye. I have customized it to my liking and it seems great, besides the high price…
The quest for a laptop
So as college starts rapidly approaching as the year passes on, I realize I need a new laptop. I’ve been looking for awhile and playing around with laptops at stores. As of now, I’m pondering the HP Pavilion dv6700t notebook. It seems like a nice 15.4 laptop that can be upgraded pretty decently without breaking the bank. My only concern is the glossy screen on the new laptops and if I will be able to use them in day to day activities. Hopefully the reflectiveness of the screen won’t give me headaches if I decide to buy one.
My other choice was a new ThinkPad, but they seem to be more expensive than I’m willing to spend. I know they have great quality and everything… but the trackpad is so small, and I don’t really use the trackpoint that much. The keyboard on the HP wasn’t that bad either. I just hope that whichever laptop I decide to pickup in the near future has decent battery life. I’m aiming for at least 3 hours with nvidia graphics, but that may be hard without a battery that sticks out of the frame.