Tag: BATTERY

Just recently, the Opera 11.10 release candidate was made available for download. It brought a handful of important feature additions -- like HTML5 File API support and IMAP enhancements -- and loads of bugfixes. Nestled in amongst the other details in the Opera team's announcement is one more interesting tidbit: Opera 11.10 offers improved battery optimizations. The timing here is certainly ...

Over on the Internet Explorer Blog, Microsoft has posted results from an extensive comparison of the top five Web browsers. The goal: to determine whether Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Safari 5, or Opera 11 is able to squeeze the most life out of your laptop's battery. A baseline was determined with test systems sitting idle, and then browsers were pointed at about:blank, a ...

If your Android phone shipped with the Amazon MP3 app pre-installed, you may have found yourself frustrated by a couple things. First, it's not so easy to remove. Second, the app had a nasty habit of starting up automatically when you power on or reboot your phone whether you wanted it to or not -- making the fact that you can't remove it even more vexing. Fortunately, Amazon has finally ...

I've got an old Toshiba laptop. It's a workhorse, and I take good care of it. But as a laptop ages, one thing invariably happens: Battery life grows shorter and shorter. It's a matter of chemistry, and no amount of prudency seems to keep it from happening. So as your laptop ages, intelligent power management becomes increasingly important. The question is "how do I keep this thing from hogging so ...

A growing contingent of new laptop users are experiencing extremely poor battery performance, and complaining about it loudly online. The thing is, the problem doesn't seem limited to be any one laptop manufacturer, or even any one battery manufacturer. It's starting to look like the only common denominator for the users experiencing problems is Windows 7. While it's still too early to say with ...

SetPower is a utility that lets you choose different power management profiles for your computer based on the time of day. So, if you want your computer to stay on during the day, but sleep overnight, that's not something you can do with the built-in power management functionality in Windows. SetPower adds the ability to control which profile is in effect at a given time. As the world becomes more ...

If you use your laptop primarily for web browsing, the browser you choose could make a difference in how long your battery lasts. AnandTech tested out the latest versions of the most popular Windows browsers on three different laptops, and it turns out that - when it comes to battery endurance, anyway - IE 8 is the champ. It yielded 5 to 10 minutes of additional battery life compared to ...

Sure, Windows will do a decent job of estimating how much juice is left in your laptop battery and let you adjust your power management settings accordingly. But BatteryCare goes a few steps further, by providing you with information like the battery's total capacity, voltage, CPU temperature, and manufacturer, if the information is available. The program also tracks your battery's discharge ...

Just about every operating system out there includes some basic notification for a laptop's battery level. For Windows users who want to go beyond basic, give BattCursor a try. One of the app's coolest features is the ability to warn you when your battery is low by altering the color of your window borders. By default it's set to yellow for low and red for critical, but you can specify any mix ...

The battery meter that comes with Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7 is alright for giving you a rough idea of how much time you have before you have to make a mad dash to the electric socket. But BatteryBar goes a few steps further, by providing you with a new toolbar icon that shows detailed battery info at a glance. Once you download and install BatteryBar, you'll need to right click on the ...

Most mobile users are interested in knowing just how well their battery is faring. On the Mac, a great (and thankfully, free) option is a utility called coconutBattery. This small and unobtrusive utility tells you the easy stuff, like what the current battery charge is (in milliamp hours, or mAh) and whether the battery is currently charging or not. But it also gives you some interesting ...

So now we have another manufacturer who is recalling Sony batteries for its laptop computer products. Lenovo has issued a voluntary battery recall for over 500,000 batteries. Where does the carnage end? Will Sony still provide batteries for laptops after this, or is this a minor set-back? I know mistakes happen, but I don't know that Sony can afford another big battery catastrophe like this if ...