» Laptop - Simon Lau

Dell XPS m1210 9 Cell Replacement Battery

While on my Europe trip, my laptop’s battery got its biggest workout since I’ve owned it. As a matter of fact, today marks the 1 year anniversary of my laptop.

Nearing the end of my trip, I booted into Ubuntu and it reported that my laptop’s battery only had 34-36% effective life. There was over 60% degradation in one year of very little battery use. I had noticed the battery performance degrade and on maximum charge I was getting just under 2 hours. When I first got the laptop, I was hovering around 3-3.5 hrs, still less than what a 9cell should provide.

I gave Dell a call two days ago to report my issue and after a lengthy discussion with technical support, they offered to ship me a replacement battery. Not bad giving I had 2 days of warranty left at that time.

The new battery arrived this morning and it just finished its first charge.

new battery

new battery

New Battery Label (left) & Comparison of the batteries (right)

The original battery:

batterymond

nbc

With a wear level of 63%, I was only managing 1 hour 50 minutes under idle conditions in windows.

The new battery:

new battery

nbc new

With the new battery the full capacity is almost the same as the design capacity, short by only 200 mWh, unlike my original battery where the difference was around 55000mWh! Under full charge, the battery is slated to last in the range of 4.5 hours. This is under idle conditions, CPU throttling, wifi enabled and BlueTooth disabled. Once I get some new results, I will update with another post.

Tags: battery, dell, Laptop, XPS m1210

. 13 Jun 08 | Technology, XPS m1210 | Comments (0)

BlueLounge Pop

Manufacturer: BlueLounge

Price: $9.95 from Bluelounge

Introduction

I’ll admit it, when I was asked to take a look at “some cable management products”, I was not at all excited. Cable management products are a stark contrast from the types of toys we usually play with here at Overclockers Online!

So who is Bluelounge and what exactly do they offer? Bluelounge was established as a multidisciplinary design studio by two designers, Dominic Symons and Melissa Sunjaya. This unique union of design and art has turned its spotlight to pursue elegant solutions for every day problems.

Bluelounge’s purpose, creed, and while origin is unknown, this famous quote which is often attributed to Einstein holds an incredible amount of truth. In humanities ever insatiable desire to learn we tend to over synthesize and over compound ideas, to the point where they become unrecognizable to the state in which they were conceived.

Today we will be taking a look at the POP by Bluelounge which is aimed at tackling the age old problem of tangled ear bud cords.

Package and Contents

One of Bluelounge’s goals is to “[...]to transform even the most everyday items into objects of desire.” Bluelounge follows through with this even down to the packaging.

While the front does not give away too many clues, the back of the package does an excellent job describing the products function, simply put: pop, wrap, clip.