HP offers day-long battery life… but not for Vista
By John Lister
There’s good news for road warriors as HP announces a laptop with a whopping 24 hours battery life, reportedly a first. But it’s bad news for Vista users – the full day’s charge only works when you run XP.
The not-so-snappily named EliteBook 6930p starts at $1,199. As you’d expect, the 24-hour battery claim comes with a host of conditions. Most importantly it requires the purchase of an additional battery, which currently retails for $189. You’ll also have to choose a customised version of the laptop to include a solid state drive (SSD) and a special LED display designed by HP.
The SSDs, which don’t have to be spun like traditional hard drives, are the main power-saving trick, along with the display. But to get the full 24-hour life, you’ll also need to download an HP-produced BIOS (the system which runs when you turn your computer on and before Windows has loaded) as well as the latest Intel graphics driver.
And the big catch is that the 24-hour claim only applies to users running XP. To some extent this is down to the increased power demands of Vista, particularly when the Aero graphics system is enabled. However, it’s also possible there may be some effect from Vista not being fully optimised for SSDs, a problem which caused complaints from SanDisk and prompted talks between Samsung and Microsoft.
SSDs have been at the centre of recent attempts to boost battery life. Dell used the drives as part of a range launched last month which included claims of a 19-hour running time.
HP has put together some neat stats about how the 24-hour life would benefit travellers. It points out this could cover the longest commercial flight (the 18 hours 40 minutes Newark-Singapore route), or five round-trips on the London-Paris train. The list also suggests a passenger could use the laptop continuously on a drive from Maine to Florida, which doesn’t sound a great idea for anyone with motion sickness.
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September 9th, 2008
Will be good to see if this lives up to the claims - battery life claims are often not achievable in ‘real world’ conditions. Having to use XP is certainly not a downside either!
September 11th, 2008
What about battery life for Linux users?
xubuntu is fantastic and highly stripped down, if you can get 24 hours of use from this laptop using XP, then I’d imagine you could get up to 30 using xubuntu or other stripped down versions.
It would run very smoothly too.