our electronics

Although some users have been grumbling about a variety of battery issues related to Windows 7, Microsoft says that its testing shows that nothing is amiss.
The software maker initially thought that there might be a problem with the firmware in some PC models causing an error message to appear where one was not warranted. However, Microsoft now says that it believes that the operating system is behaving properly.

In a blog posting on Monday, Windows division President Steven Sinofsky said that the company’s follow-up research shows that those seeing a notification that their batteries need replacing are getting the message because, in fact, the ibm laptop battery are not performing up to a certain threshold.

“To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state,” Sinofsky said. “In every case we have been able to identify the ibm thinkpad r50 battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement.”

He noted that the error message is new to Windows 7, so people upgrading to Windows 7 may indeed see the message where no warning appeared before.

“We recognize that this has the ibm thinkpad r50e battery appearance of Windows 7 ‘causing’ the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case,” Sinofsky said.

The company and PC makers have received a total of 20 support inquiries related to this error message, all of which have turned out to be older batteries whose performance had degraded, he said. Although there have been complaints on Microsoft’s TechNet and other forums, Sinofsky said it has not seen anything in the cases it has followed up on to suggest anything other than the system correctly identifying underperforming batteries.

Sinofsky said it is actually seeing a smaller percentage of systems producing the error message than it had during the testing of Windows 7, in part because more and more new systems (with new ibm thinkpad r50p battery) are running the operating system.

“Only a very small percentage of users are receiving the ‘Consider replacing your battery’ notification, and as expected, we are seeing systems older than (around) 1.5 years,” he said.

MSI  just keeps breeding that Wind family. Today the Taiwanese company unveiled it Wind U110 ECO, which sports a similar chassis to the Wind U115 but is slated to get 9 hours of battery life.

Using Intel’s Menlow Atom family of processors (the 1.6GHz Atom Z530), which is optimized for Satellite A100 battery savings,  and a higher capacity battery, MSI is confident that the ECO will be one of the longest running netbooks on the track.

Other than its predicted Satellite A105 battery capabilities the 10-inch LED Backlit U110 ECO has the run of the mill netbook specs including an 1GB of RAM and Windows XP. It will have a US15 chipset which uses Intel’s GMA 500 graphics.  Early reports indicated that it would have an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3200 Graphics chips are responsible for processing all images sent to your computer’s display.

Learn Moregraphics card. Andy Tung of MSI confirmed this was a misprint on the company’s Website.

Similar to the U100 it has a 4-in-1 card reader, 3 USB, Ethernet, mic and headphone jacks.  It also has a 1.3 megapixel camera, Satellite A80 battery, Satellite M100 battery,Bluetooth 2.0 and 802.11b/g/n options. According to MSI U.S. they are undecided at the moment if the U100 ECO will hit domestic shores.

Panasonic announced on Tuesday that the company has begun manufacturing a new, safer laptop battery, which will hopefully reduce the number of battery recalls we have seen in recent years.

Numerous companies, including Packard Bell, HP, Dell, Sony,and others, have recalled laptop batteries due to them posing a fire hazard. Panasonic’s new battery design hopes to reduce the risk of batteries short-circuiting and leading to a fire.

The new standard-size battery design (pictured) makes use of a new metal oxide layer placed in between the Sony VGP-BPS9 battery’s cathode and anode. Acting as an insulator, the new metal layer keeps the battery from overheating should it short-circuit.

Panasonic’s new design is not only safer, it also has a longer run time. Battery cells found in laptops currently store an average of 2.9Ah per cell, whereas the improved cells can now store 3.1Ah of power.Sony VGP-BPS9/B,Sony VGP-BPS9/S，Sony VGP-BPS9A，Sony VGP-BPS9A/B.

HP nixed the VIA C7-M processor it used in the 2133 Mini-Note for Intel’s reliable and power-efficient 1.6-GHz Atom N270 processor. Along with 1GB of RAM, the Mini 2140 provided the typical netbook performance we’ve seen in many similarly configured systems. We couldn’t run our usual PCMark05 test on the system, but in our hands-on experience, the machine’s Windows XP performance was snappy. Firefox and Windows Media Player opened quickly, and we saw no performance hit when conducting video calls over Skype, surfing the Web with multiple tabs open, and writing this review in Microsoft Word 2007.

The Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics chip with 64MB of memory delivered a score of 748 in 3DMark03 and 125 in 3DMark06; the former is about 70 points below the category average, and the latter is about 130 points below average. Still, the Mini 2140 scored higher on 3DMark06 than the ASUS Eee PC 1002HA (678) and the hp 372772-001 battery Samsung NC10 (730). Watching an episode of Heroes using an external DVD drive at full-screen was smooth.

Hard Drive Performance
The Mini 2140’s 160GB, 5,400-rpm Hitachi SATA hard drive (which is protected by HP’s 3D DriveGuard accelerometer) booted Windows XP Home in 57 seconds; that’s a few seconds better than the average netbook. The LAPTOP Transfer Test (copying a 4.97GB folder of mixed media) took a speedy 5 minutes and 22 seconds, a rate of 15.8 MBps. This is higher than the category average of 13.2 MBps and right smack hp 417066-001 battery between the Lenovo IdeaPad S10’s 17.4 MBps and the Samsung NC10’s 12.4 MBps. As with the HP Mini 1000, the Mini 2140 will also be available with a solid-state drive option.
Ambient Heat
Compared with the 2133 Mini-Note, which got extremely warm during heavy usage, the Mini 2140 stayed relatively cool. The keyboard and touchpad remained at room temperature during frequent use. However, the bottom of the Mini 2140 got slightly warmer than the rest of the system, registering 96 degrees during our battery test.

Battery Life
The HP Mini 2140 outshines not only its predecessor when it comes to endurance but all other netbooks equipped with six-cell batteries. On the LAPTOP Battery Test (continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi), the system lasted a very impressive 7 hours and 19 minutes. This runtime blows away the mini-notebook average of 3:48, and it beats out even the Samsung NC10, the longest-lasting mini-notebook to date, by 45 minutes. If you can live with the added bulk of the six-cell hp 367759-001 battery, it’s more than worth the $30 premium. Still, the smaller three-cell battery lasts a solid 3 hours and 32 minutes.

HP also includes its Fast Charge technology in the Mini 2140, which can charge the netbook’s primary battery up to 90 percent within 90 minutes when the system is off. A completely drained six-cell hp f2024a battery on the Mini 2140 took 98 minutes to charge up to 98 percent with the system powered down; by comparison, the ASUS Eee PC 1000H (also with a six-cell battery) recharged up to 84 percent in the same amount of time

Kindle owners rejoice: Amazon announced an upgrade and an add-on that should please current owners of the device and tempt a few more consumers into the fold.

Kindle engineers have been hard at work on a firmware upgrade that will increase the life of the device when wireless is turned on. Instead of lasting four days, Kindle will now last 7 — an 85% increase. Battery life with wireless off remains around 2 weeks.

Amazon is also adding a native PDF viewer. Now Kindle owners don’t need to convert PDFs to Kindle files in order to read them on the device. This works for both files loaded via the USB cable from the D5318 or those emailed to @Kindle.com addresses.

These updates will come via an automatic Whispernet update for current Kindle owners.Inspiron 6000 battery，Inspiron 9300 battery，Inspiron 9400 battery.

Mary Lou Jepsen and her team at start-up Pixel Qi have their display-screen technology in several products being shown at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and plan to put a DIY (do it yourself) screen kit on the market early this year.

Jepsen, formerly the head of Intel’s display division and chief technology officer at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), has focused on lowering the battery drain by LCD screens and making them useful as e-readers in addition to normal computer use.

The GK479 company’s first screen, at 10.1-inches, is being displayed by several companies at CES, including in a multi-touch tablet PC from Notion Ink Design Labs called the Smartpad.

Pixel Qi also hopes to make the screen, called 3qi, available to anyone with some engineering savvy who wants to use its DIY kit to switch out their own netbook screen or try to create their own computer.

“We just think it’s important to give everyone an opportunity to innovate, especially [considering] our roots at One FK890 Per Child,” Jepsen said in an interview at CES, “so we’ll be announcing soon a way people can just buy the screens and mod their own notebooks or make their own systems.”

Pixel Qi hopes to have DIY kits out by the end of the first quarter or early in the second quarter of this year, she said.

Jepsen’s goal is to extend the battery life of laptops to 20 to 40 hours by lowering power consumption by the display screen. She said production of the new screens will ramp up quickly in coming Inspiron 1721 battery months.

The initial 10.1-inch screen uses LCD technology so it matches current manufacturing procedures, yet costs less to make than traditional LCDs and uses about a tenth of the power.

The screens are designed so people can read them in direct sunlight, turn off the LED backlight to view black and white text, like an e-reader, and offer a fully saturated HDTV-quality color mode for video.

Pixel Qi used Lenovo Ideapad netbooks at their CES suite to show off the black-and-white Inspiron 1720 battery mode because the LED backlight on the Ideapad can be turned off, a feature few netbooks offer.