Understanding Your Battery

Before you can maximize your battery life, you must first understand its status. There are two ways of finding out this. The first way is by just looking in the menu bar at the top right corner. You can get more detailed information from the battery icon by clicking on it, go to “show” and get it to show percentage. You also have the option to see how long you have until the battery is out. This is the easiest way to check the status of your battery, though the information is not enough to determine the lifespan of your Apple A1185 Battery.

The most informative way is by clicking the “Apple icon at the extreme far left -> About This Mac -> More Info…“. From there, click on “System Report”, and finally click “Power” under the “Hardware” section. Here, you can find out the number of charges, the battery condition, and more. This is essential in knowing the exact problem that your Mac may be experiencing, or how long you have until your Mac will burn out. Most Macs burn out after a thousand or so charges.

Some Maximizing Battery Tips

First of all, you should never let your battery stays on the charger longer than what’s needed. This will essentially kill your battery faster than it should. Battery is meant to be charged and discharged. When connected to the charger, your Toshiba pa3285u-1bas extended battery stays at 100% constantly due to the fact that your battery is taking up more energy from the outlet to keep it constant. This will essentially fry your battery over time and it will give out.

In addition, you should charge your battery in full and let it run its course over the day. When you get the alert that your battery is 10% capacity, then bring out the charger. This is the true time when your Mac is preparing itself to shut down completely. A second tip is to monitor the lifespan of each discharge cycle. Charge your battery to full and run the course of the battery life until it shuts off. Jot down how long it took. Overtime, when you notice that the time it takes to shut down decreases drastically, you know that it is in for a repair.

Recommended Settings

One setting that can affect your Sony vgp-bps2b battery life more than anything is the screen’s brightness. Whether you are typing a paper in Microsoft Word or playing a battery intensive game, the screen’s brightness can still play a huge factor. For this reason, you should access your “Energy Saver Preferences” and enable the automatic brightness settings so your Mac can go to sleep after a certain amount of time of inactivity.

You must also remember that your Mac’s applications run in the background when not in use. This means that, even though you exited out the window, you must still click “Command+Q” on most applications to successfully end them. To make sure that the applications you want to quit are, in fact, ended, you can look in your dock. The applications that have a light under their icon are still running. You can quit them by also clicking the icon with two fingers and pressing “Quit”. Always quit Bluetooth and WiFi when not in use.

When the Time Comes to Change

A Mac will usually reach the end of its life between two and a half to three and a half years or longer from original purchase, depending on the usage frequency. At this time, you are at the dilemma of having to replace the battery or just purchasing a new Mac all together. In this economic time, it’s cheaper to replace the battery when the external condition of the Mac is still quite usable. If you do choose this route, you should remember to get your battery replaced professionally by Apple and their authorized dealers. This will prevent a lot of headaches if someone not authorized did it incorrectly. You also won’t have the damage officially covered by Apple.The average cost of getting a battery replaced ranges from $120 and up to $300. This means that you are saving close to $600 and $900 by purchasing just the purchasing a new battery rather than purchasing a new laptop outright.

Conclusion

As you can see, while the hard drive may be the memory of the Mac, the battery is the heart. Without the battery working properly, your Mac’s activity may range from a few glitches to a full on system problem. You can make sure that your Mac is in perfect operating condition by doing regular checks in “System Info” in the “About This Mac” section. When your Mac’s battery eventually dies out, the Apple store can be there to repair the battery correctly. While it is a bit costly, it is worth it in the end, preventing you from hundreds of more dollars in repairs.

Qosmio F750 design

The metallic finish, with its blue and purple hues, really does look good. It’s a far cry from other Qosmio system’s we’ve seen previously, such as the Qosmio X770, for example, which has more of a gaming focus. The F750′s lid opens to expose a glossy chassis, a glossy screen, a glossy bezel and a glossy palm rest. Reflections from room lights can be very annoying when they hit this laptop, but especially the screen. You’ll want to leave it at maximum brightness and adjust its angles as you change your viewing position in front of it. The palm rest has a pattern underneath its glossy finish and it features a relatively small (83x44mm) touchpad for such a big notebook.

The keyboard isn’t backlit, which is a drawback if you happen to be used to working in the dark, but the board itself has keys that are soft and responsive. They are flat and very smoothly finished keys, which can sometimes feel slippery and lead to miscues, but overall it’s a good board. It features a dedicated number pad and there is a utility installed that shows which functions the F-keys control when you press the Fn button. Above the keyboard, there are capacitive controls for the volume and Wi-Fi, and they make an annoying beeping sound when pressed.

We found the Synaptics touchpad to be a little unreliable in our tests. It’s a small pad that feels a little rough and it has a light above it that shines annoyingly when the pad is enabled. The pad supports gestures such as two-finger scrolling and three-finger flicking, and these worked well for us. However, the pointer sometimes became erratic and bounced around the screen during general use. This was fixed by restarting the computer and it was a frustrating thing to experience. Because it’s a desktop replacement unit, you’ll want to use a mouse with it anyway.

Qosmio F750 features

Around the edges of the Qosmio F750, you’ll find a usual set of features, perhaps with the exception of the full-sized TV antenna port, which isn’t very common in the laptop fraternity. You get four USB ports, with two located on each side of the unit, but only one of these is USB 3.0. You also get a VGA port, HDMI, headphone and microphone ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an SD card slot and a Blu-ray/DVD burner drive. It’s a decent configuration all up, but we wish there were at least two USB 3.0 ports instead of only one — especially because the machine is likely to be deskbound and used as a primary computer in some cases.

We found the wireless networking performance of the Qosmio F750 to be relatively slow thanks to its single-band Atheros AR9002WB-1NG 802.11n Wi-Fi module, which always reported a link speed lower than 90 megabits per second (Mbps) to our router (and sometimes as low as 60Mbps), despite boasting a strong signal strength. You could argue that Wi-Fi on a big unit such as this isn’t that important, but good Wi-Fi would give you the freedom to plonk this machine anywhere in your home without having to worry about wires for reliable data transfers and we think it’s an area that could be improved.

One area in which the Qosmio is better off than most laptops is speaker output. Its Harman Kardon stereo speakers are located above the keyboard and they don’t have a sub-woofer or a fancy equaliser. They provide good loudness and clarity, perhaps enough to fill a decent-sized lounge room, depending on your environment. They lack power in bass department, which is to say if you want a “boom” you’ll have to plug in external speakers. That said, their frequency range is above average compared to most of the laptops we’ve experienced and they make for enjoyable casual listening.

While listening might be enjoyable, viewing the screen can be a little less so. It has a native resolution of 1366×768, which is standard for most laptops on the market and not high enough for a notebook with the specifications of the F750. We’d like to see a higher resolution panel, but also one that has better vertical viewing angles, and which isn’t as susceptible to reflections from room lights. Reflections really made it hard to view photos, videos and live TV unless we were in a dark room. Incidentally, the notebook has a hybrid TV tuner installed, which can tune in to both digital and analogue stations. Using Windows Media Centre, it found all of the digital stations in our area and played them without any difficulties. There is a built-in infrared receiver for a remote control, but our kit didn’t come with one.

Qosmio F750 performance

There is no doubt the Qosmio F750 is powerful enough for most work loads. Its Core i7-2670QM CPU has four cores as well as Hyper-Threading, and it can process up to eight software threads simultaneously. It’s perfect for multitasking, and with a regular frequency of 2.2GHz and a Turbo Boost of 3.1GHz, it has enough speed to make light of tough tasks. Of course, it helps that it also has 16GB of DDR3 SDRAM and a 1TB hard drive with a high data density.

In our Blender 3D rendering test, the Qosmio put up a time of 22sec, which is very fast, while it recorded an expected time of 55sec in our iTunes MP3 encoding test. We couldn’t run our usual AutoGordianKnot DVD-to-Xvid conversion test due to problems with the configuration. In CrystalDiskMark, the hard drive, which has a spin speed of only 5400rpm, recorded a sequential read rate of 104 megabytes per second (MBps) and a write rate of 101MBps. These are excellent results in this test considering the spin speed of the drive; the dense 500GB platters in the hard drive no doubt helped. In our own data copying tests, an average rate of 111MBps was achieved. The more data the drive is packed with though, the slower it will perform.

As far as gaming grunt is concerned, the F750 isn’t powerful enough to entice serious gamers; its GeForce GT 540M provided rates between 20-30 frames per second in Battlefield 3 when it was run at the native 1366×768 resolution of the screen and with auto image detail levels; it recorded a score of 9284 in 3DMark06, which certainly isn’t high enough for a true gaming laptop. It’ll do well when running games at medium settings or lower and can be used for role playing games, racing games, and first-person shooters (if you’re not the competitive type).

While the CPU and graphics are working hard, the fan in the machine will do its best to push all the warm air generated by these components through the vent and heat sink on the left side of the unit. It can get noisy during these times.

Notebook Battery life

The Qosmio actually features switchable graphics, which means it can use integrated Intel graphics when it’s running on Dell inspiron 1525 notebook battery, rather than the more powerful NVIDIA adapter. In our battery test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise screen brightness and loop an Xvid-encoded video, the notebook’s 48 Watt-hour Acer As07b31 Notebook Battery lasted 2hr 19min. Toshiba laptops aren’t well known for having stellar battery life, but almost two and a half hours for a 15.6in model with a full allotment of RAM and a Core i7 CPU isn’t terrible, and it’s not like it’s a laptop you’ll want to use far away from a power outlet anyway.

Conclusion

What the Qosmio represents is a good all-round machine, rather than a product that’s dedicated to gamers. It can be used for gaming in a pinch, but it can also be used to view and record TV shows, in addition to being a powerful computer for tasks such as media encoding, video and image editing and, of course, essential office applications. It looks good, albeit with too much glossiness, and its build quality isn’t overly creaky. We just wish its screen was better, that the touchpad was more reliable and that the wireless adapter was of a higher calibre.

The company noted that the message is new to Windows 7, so folks upgrading from XP or Vista may be taken by surprise when they are told their HP nc8230 battery is a paperweight. Of the 20 support inquires related to this message, all of them have turned out to be age-degraded batteries.

As for the sudden loss in Dell inspiron 9400 battery life and wonky performance issues? “We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 ‘causing’ the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case,” said Windows division president Steven Sinofsky in a battery blog post.

If you’ve experienced the alert first hand, did it disappear after replacing your HP elitebook 8530p battery?

HP Pavilion m6 comes in the form of a machine with a large display but super-slim in design. The machine packs 15.6-inch diagonal LED backlit high-definition (HD) BrightView display, while special Beats Audio, dual speakers and subwoofer enhances the audio front.

With eight hours of HP probook 4525s battery life these machines are powered by latest Intel and AMD chips.

To keep good company, HP Pavilion dv series machines comes with the refreshed look of the tapered chassis, new metal finish, coupled with a soft-touch panel at the base of the display cover.

However, no worries since the design overhaul has not touched the Beats Audio experience on these devices. Moreover, HP offers adding optional NVIDIA GeForce GPUs for an enhanced graphic experience.

The machines going school also includes redesigned HP Pavilion g6 and g7 which comes with a bowl-shape keyboard deck, textured touchpad and better audio in trendy shades like ruby red, linen white, sparkling black, winter blue and bright purple.

There is no clue on pricing for HP Pavilion m6 which will be available this summer. Pavilion dv4, dv6 and dv7 will be available in the US on June 20 with prices of $549.99, $549.99 and $799.99, respectively while g6 and g7 will come only on July 25 with starting prices of $449.99 and $499.99, respectively.

iPhone 5: Liquidmetal Concept Design Makes Us Wish It Was Real

After various recent rumors indicating that Apple may completely redesign the next-generation iPhone and integrate new materials, a French designer went a little further and came up with an impressive concept design for the much-anticipated iPhone 5, by adding a splash of Liquidmetal.

French designer Antoine Brieux developed a gorgeous concept design, illustrating how the next-generation iPhone could look like. Based on recent reports suggesting that the new iPhone will be thinner and lighter than its predecessors, Brieux created a concept design featuring the iPhone 5 in a Liquidmetal alloy casing.

iPhone 5 LM

Brieux’ design, called the iPhone 5 LM – where, of course, LM stands for Liquidmetal – features a 4.5-inch display, a virtual home button rather than a physical one, and a set of wishful specifications. With no physical home button, the concept design suggests that Apple could increase the aspect ratio of the display to 16:9, thus allowing for greater screen real estate while also maintaining its form factor. In addition, the virtual home button could be removed from the screen if an application needs to make use of that extra space.

According to several reports, Apple is unlikely to ditch the physical home button anytime soon, but Brieux’ concept points out just how much usable screen area the physical button takes. On the other hand, the physical home button on current iPhones is almost like a trademark, making them easily recognizable.

See also

15 tips to maximize your iPhone battery life

Wishful Specifications

The French designer’s iPhone 5 LM concept illustrates other rumors as well, such as a quad-core A6 chip, a 10-megapixel camera, and embedded SIM card, and the exquisite Liquidmetal case. Liquidmetal is a trade name for a new metallic alloy that could make tougher and smoother cases. The material is very tough, resilient, scratch and corrosion resistant, which would make it ideal for a top-notch iPhone. Apple has exclusively owned the license to Liquidmetal since last year, but so far it has only used it for the SIM card eject tool.

However, while rumors indicate the next-generation will feature a Liquidmetal case, Dr. Atakan Peker, the inventor of the technology, recently told Business Insider that Apple still has a long way to go before using the alloy in large scale products. According to Peker, the Liquidmetal technology “has yet to be matured both in manufacturing process and application development.”

Antoine Brieux’ concept design is truly inspiring and impressive, but at the end of the day it is only another concept design of what the next-generation iPhone could look like. Apple is not likely to employ the Liquidmetal technology in an iPhone, at least not yet, and a 4.5-inch display seems even less likely, considering the previous generations of iPhone boast of 3.5-inch display. If Apple were, however, to make the next-generation iPhone with a sleek Liquidmetal casing, it would crush all competition and be the undisputed king of high-end smartphones.

Samsung Galaxy S3 is no more a mystery as the manufacturer has just unveiled the most anticipated Android handset 2012. The phone is powered by a quad core Exynos processor running at 1.4 Ghz each core. The phone has everything to satisfy the fans desperately waiting for the new Galaxy S3.

Comparing the new GS3 to other available top rivals will help you decide on your next smartphone this year. As with the processing power, the phone clearly beats the competition. However, the huge display on GS3 comes with 306 pixels per inch, which is less than that on HTC One X, the other top Android phone with very strong battery backup.

However, Samsung GS3 is still superior when it comes to contrast, especially with black. You can check the table below to compare the new Galaxy S3 vs iPhone 4S, and GS3 Vs HTC One X.

Put images of the ill-fated Hewlett-Packard TouchPad out of your memory. The purported design and specifications of the forthcoming HP Slate 8 powered by Windows 8, expected out this fall, points to a robust mobile computing device that will appeal to consumer and business users alike. Our speculation: The Slate 8 will become a part of the accessory options of business users.

Plans for the HP Slate 8 were leaked over the weekend and quickly went viral. The device is as large as the Apple iPad with a 10.1-inch screen, but thinner and lighter. It sports 8 to 10 hours of battery life, and includes both touch and digital pen interfaces. And, for business users, it includes easier integration with Windows-based networks and applications.

All this should make the new tablet attractive to business users, but equally usable by consumers.  While HP is saying nothing publicly about the tablet or its reported features, expectations are for the tablet to hit the market sometime late in the third quarter in time for the holiday shopping season.

HP hasn’t said much about its tablet strategy in the channel. Perhaps that’s part of the hangover from the disastrous tablet experiment known as the HP TouchPad. For that product, HP promised a concerted channel push, hoping partners would drive the WebOS-powered device into the enterprise and steal share away from the vaunted iPad. HP, a channel-centric company, will likely engage partners through the newly formed Printer and Personal System group under channel chief Mike Parrottino.

Around the same time HP releases Slate 8, it will be among the throng of vendors releasing new Intel-powered ultrabooks – thin, lightweight and powerful PCs that share many of the attributes of touch-screen tablets and conventional notebooks. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently dismissed the ultrabook concept as unworkable. He said combining a tablet and notebook would be like “combining a toaster and refrigerator.”

Cook is wrong on so many levels. At the recent Intel Solutions Summit in New Orleans, the chipmaker had several ultrabook concept and working models on display. The idea behind the ultrabook is sound, as it provides options that are currently unavailable in desktops, notebooks or tablets. At the same time, Intel expects a huge uptick in the adoption of All-in-One PCs, desktops that also share touch-screen interfaces in a consolidate form factor.

Since everyone is speculating about the future of tablets, ultrabooks and mobility, let’s take the Slate 8 value proposition to a new level: a mobile accessory. In fact, many mobile devices will become accessories no different than bracelets, rings and watches.

We’re already seeing evidence of this among business users. Increasingly business travels are leaving their notebooks at home in favor of tablets.  If they need just enough access and power to check email and read documents, why carry a 2-pound, inch-thick laptop? When at home or in the office, business and consumer users want power, so they’re increasingly turning to desktops – most notably the AIO variety promoted by Intel. And, of course, users need power and mobility, which will breathe new life into conventional laptops and ultrabooks.

The future of mobility may not be in the displacement of incumbent devices and brands, but rather complementing them by giving users choice. The average user will likely have multiple tablets, computers and mobile devices that match their varying needs. They will pick their computing device off the shelf like they do cufflinks and earrings to match specific circumstances. And they’ll do this thanks, in large part, to Moore’s Law, which is continually increasing processing power and lowering the price of these devices.

For the channel, this is all good news. It means they won’t have to defeat an incumbent vendor or device platform when selling new mobile devices. Rather, they will have to promote integration, portability and ease of use. And, of course, cloud-based storage, applications and file synchronization services will make multiple mobile devices more appealing and provide solution providers with recurring revenue.

The HP Slate 8 will likely find a market ready for its design and functionality. But it will likely take its place alongside multiple other devices in the users’ growing mobility arsenal.

Toshiba‘s slimmest notebook can cost as little as $1595 for an Intel Core i3 model,an Intel Core i3 model, or as much as $3877.50, for an Intel Core i7 model with a 256GB SSD drive. There are models everywhere in between, with many different combinations of processor, storage and built-in 3G.

What they all have in common, though, is extremely light weight — around 1.1KG — and fairly slim profile — 1.7cm at the thinnest point, 2.6cm at the thickest. They all include a DVD writer, which is handy if you tend to attend events with handout CDs. The 13.3″ matte screen has a good resolution of 1366x768px — the same as many 15″ notebooks, so you won’t find the screen cramped. The case is finished in brushed-black.

The Portege R700 also runs full-speed Intel CPUs — not the ultra-low voltage varieties often used in very slim notebooks due to their lower heat output.

In terms of convenience features, there’s an SD camera memory card slot (Toshiba confusingly calls it a “bridge media slot”), an HDMI port for connecting to home or hotel TVs, a VGA port for connecting to meeting room projectors and a webcam for Skype video chats.

Toshiba says the included Toshiba pa3285u-1bas battery will give you eight hours’ runtime and an optional larger notebook battery will give you 12 — but take these figures with a grain of salt; manufacturer battery life claims are often twice as high as real-life.

Toshiba’s warranty is worth mentioning — it comes with three years’ international warranty, including courier pickup/return if you have a problem that needs technician attention within Australia. Toshiba also offers a good range of extra-cost warranties such as Australia/New Zealand on-site laptop batteries repair for up to four years.