Portable Ops

Right, a post that isn’t some kind of review. What the fuck!

I thought now, typing this on a train, would be a good time to give a big thumbs up to whoever it was that decided we should be able to lug our computers around with us and thus complete work in any place we happen to be. Its damn handy to be able to just pick up your laptop and work (I mean, blog) anywhere you happen to be. Well for an hour or two at least.

That leads me to a big thumbs down to whoever it was that was meant to build the tiny little portable nuclear reactors we need to keep a laptop going for a reasonable amount of time. Someone dropped the ball there. Instead we are struck with batteries which generally last for about as long as it takes to type up a long and important document and generally fail just before you hit save.

A lot of newer laptops have ‘battery management software’ which is supposed to ‘intelligently manage power consumption’. What it appears to do is turn the laptop off if you don’t do anything for a while. It probably uses more power working out when to turn off the power than it saves. This fantastic software also lets you know when your computer is about to run out of battery and die on you.

Nothing warms my heart more than seeing a little box pop up in th middle of your screen saying “Battery power is low. Save all work im...”. That’s as far as I have gotten cause then the fucking battery goes flat.

Real useful warning that is. The warning is apparently supposed to appear at 10% battery life remaining. So either the software thinks the laptop has a useable battery life of about 10 seconds, which clearly isn’t the case cause I can’t type ‘that’ fast, OR The software has an incredibly loose interpretation of 10%. 10% is fucking 10%. If you have 2 hours of battery life then 10% left would be 12 minutes, not 2 fucking seconds.

The moral of the story, bash on your save button like schizophrenic chimp.

DTN.