23 Mar
2010
23 Mar
'10
2:47 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Arachelian" <ray at arachelian.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 3:17 PM
Subject: Re: Disc analyser news update
I suppose not, but.... *see below* (the point about the battery!)
Yes, the screen saver is only running whilst I'm away for a few minutes
(e.g. eating a hot meal) and I'm usually downloading something at the time.
Now you see theres the other problem. This is an old 2nd-hand laptop and the
internal battery is all but gone - it lasts about 5 minutes after the laptop
as been switched on. When I got it the battery lasted about 40 minutes.
Foolishly, I got a replacement from China. I haven't used the replacement as
i) it looks suspicious too me (and being from China is probably fake/faulty)
and ii) the power ratings on it differ to my official battery and I wouldn't
want anything to happen to my laptop.
So how long does a "good battery" normally last? I know modern laptops can
last up to 8 hours or so (assuming I'm not mis-remembering).
I rarely have many applications open. Maybe 5 at most - Firefox, WinUAE
(Amiga emulator), Outlook Express 6, Flash video player (or VLC) and the
volume controls.
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk
Andrew Burton wrote:
> - Never use sleep/standby, as when I'm finished with my laptop I
usually
end up playing
videogames, with the games console being powered from the
socket that the laptop plug was occupying.
It still doesn't prevent you from telling your machine to hibernate or
sleep. > - I let the display go to screen saver, but
never use sleep. See
previous
point.
Why? It's much more environmentally friendly to tell the machine to go
to sleep than it is to run its screen saver. I can understand if you're
letting it run something in the background that's time consuming - say
rendering video, or downloading, or backing itself up to an external
drive, but otherwise, if it's not in use, an idle machine running just a
screen saver is a waste of electricity, and you're better off telling it
to sleep or hibernate.
> On the few occasions it goes to sleep mode (usually just as the internal
> battery becomes critically low), mine also takes 2 seconds to wake up
(plus
a few extra to
log back in).
Why not just do that all the time? Explicitly tell the machine to
hibernate or sleep instead of shutting it down? That way, when you come
back, everything is as you've left it and you don't need to relaunch
everything.
Sleep uses very little battery, most machines can sleep for several days
on a good battery before having to hibernate. I can understand if
you're low on disk space, you might not want it to hibernate, but that's
easily solved too, make room by archiving unused files elsewhere.
This isn't an new concept. Both the Lisa and the
Canon Cat have had it
back in the early 80's. The Newton had it in the early 90's. I'm sure
there were others that may have had this feature earlier.
(The Lisa didn't actually hibernate or sleep, it just remembered the
state of what documents were opened at shutdown, and simply reopened
them at startup. The Cat saved its state to a floppy the same way as
modern day hibernation.)
Most PC's and modern Macs have had these features since 2000 or so. It
saves you a lot of time not having to reopen everything and everything
is just where you've left it.
That's good to know. I may use the feature when (if) I get a decent battery!
> Who says I waste time whilst booting up or
shutting down? I'm usually
> watching TV when I switch it on, and usually going to bed when I shut it
> down - I trundle downstairs for a drink and by the time I return it has
shut
down :)
How about the time it takes you to bring up all the apps you had
running, remember which documents you've had opened, and reopen them, etc?
How about the electricity you waste as the machine starts up from
scratch and then sits around and waits for you to come over and relaunch
everything back to where it was before you powered off?