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LCD on the Wall, Which Netbook Battery Lasts the Longest of Them All?

tom — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:32:41 +0000

On the hunt for a travel netbook? After testing out early models with squished keyboards I decided to wait for a model with useable size and 10″ seems to be about perfect. I originally thought I wanted a fully loaded netbook until I realized that wasn’t the point. Netbooks are not intended to replace laptops. They are intended to be ultra portable with prices making them nearly disposable. Netbooks are perfect travel companions for photographers who need to dump the days pictures onto a backup external hard drive and review images on a screen larger than the thumbnail preview on the back of their camera.

Since a unit’s size is an important feature, how much juice can you realistically expect from the form factor? Find the list of which models last the longest after the jump.

A recent article was posted with a chart of netbook battery life of popular netbook models. They identified the MSI Wind U115 Hybrid as the pack leader (thanks to it’s 6-cell battery and use of SSD hd to save power) however, other upcoming models that look promising such as the Samsung NC10, the Asus 1000HE (E for extended battery) and the Dell Mini 10 were not tested.

Model	Life
Samsung NC10	N/A
Asus 1000HE	N/A
MSI Wind U115 Hybrid	6:56
Asus Eee PC 1000HD	4:12
Asus Eee PC 901	3:59
MSI Wind U100	3:40
Asus Eee PC 1000H	3:33
Asus N10J	3:05
Dell Inspiron Mini 9	3:05
Asus Eee PC S101	2:41
Acer Aspire One AOA110	2:19
Toshiba NB100	2:14
HP Mini 1001TU	2:05
Lenovo IdeaPad S10	1:55
Dell Inspiron Mini 12	1:47

It’s interesting to note how poor the Dell Mini 12 performed. The larger screen and higher resolution is likely to blame. This highlights an important decision future netbook buyers will need to consider: Longer battery life or a better looking screen?

[LINK]

OS X 10.5.5 Update Released

tom — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 23:07:16 +0000

Release Notes

xkcd true-ism’s

tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:56:01 +0000

Moving

Why freeways should be conveyor belts

Detecting bad TCP sessions

tom — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 05:03:44 +0000

Here’s an idea:

Why not develop a feature into personal firewalls that tracks active tcp sessions (via netstat) but with some intelligence. The idea behind intelligence is to not spam the poor user every single time an application wants to talk on the NIC. How would that work?

Well, it could associate keystrokes / clicks with network events. If there is a new tcp session established or new listening local port, challenge the user with the application name associated with said session or listening port.

It sounds so simple it just might work. Do you see any false-positive scenarios?