Thursday, February 12, 2009

Laptop battery life

The new generation laptops use Li-ion batteries for the power. I have observed that these batteries go defunct within a short time (~1 to 2 years) based on the usage.

As per my usage characteristics, I was assuming that the laptop remains hooked to the docking station most of the time and the discharge cycle from the battery is very low. Very rarely the battery gets discharged completely. And thus this affects the battery life.

On reading a few articles, it seems that Li-ion batteries does not suffer from the "memory" effect. But rather the heat generated from the laptop is the one that reduces the life span of the battery. More over these kind of batteries has the aging effect.

If you use keep your laptop hooked to docking station most of the time and have a reliable UPS backup, then remove and store the battery in a cool place to get most out of it.

Monday, February 02, 2009

Googling glitch

On Saturday night IST, when I was searching for something in Google, all the results churned out of google had a warning and the link did not pass through. I had very little suspicion on google. I overruled the warning in certain cases as I was trying to load pages from wikipedia.

Finally the news turned out to be a google glitch. This reminds me the horror stories of hi-fi science fiction movies, where the computer takes control of everything and restricts/controls access.