It’s the bane of all notebook computers: just when you think you’ve liberated yourself from the tyranny of the desktop…the battery dies. The result is that instead of being free and liberated and able to take your computer with you anywhere, your life devolves into a mess of power adapters, cables, extra batteries, and constant paranoid glances at your battery indicators.
Although battery technology has yet to experience the sort of leapfrogging advances enjoyed by say microprocessors, HP does want notebook users to know it feels their pain…and that, correctly configured, it has shown that its EliteBook 6930p can run up to 24 hours on a single charge.
How did HP pull this off? Well, first, HP offers a 12-cell ultra-capacity battery as an option: the battery adds up to 10 hours to the notebook’s battery time but (of course) adds a bit to the unit’s weight. Second, HP offers an 80 GB SSD with the notebook: although they offer less capacity than standard hard drives (and still cost a lot more on a per-GB basis), they also use far less power than a conventional drive, extending the 6930p’s range even further. And third, HP credits its own Illumi-Lite LED display, which saves even more power through LED backlighting rather than traditional fluorescent screen lighting.
There were a couple caveats to HP’s announcement, though: the Illumi-Lite LED display won’t be available to consumers until 2009, and HP achieved its 24-hour battery life running Windows XP, rather than Windows Vista.
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