Hurry Up and Type

Thank you Mark Wilson! You are one of the few that believe in this theory that companies stack the deck in their favor. I totally agree! It is insane that thing you read about battery life especially. I have never believed the numbers, just expected to be disappointed. Now as far as Intel and AMD go, the are competitors and that's that. Someone is always going to pick on the bigger dog for instance BestBuy and Walmart. They are always fighting one another someway, you have seen the ads. I have even heard shots taken at repair centers like the GeekSquad, made by no name or much small businesses. One claim was that "we are not a big box store" or "No lube, needed." i actually took offense to that was going to call the radio station on it, because I found it inappropriate to air. case and point without competition there would be no advancement. I just wish there was more truth coming from each manufacturer. Then again how can we trust those reviews? What sort of things are being done to test the battery life?

So what exactly is AMD's beef? A standards-based test will give a true comparison laptop to laptop. If the test isn't a good indication of real-word usage, or it uses settings the average user will not be familiar with or implement, then that may be misleading. What isn't misleading, however is the fact that the test does give accurate differentiation to the battery life differences from one system to the next. I suspect AMD doesn't hold up well in these comparisons.

So what exactly is AMD's beef? A standards-based test will give a true comparison laptop to laptop. If the test isn't a good indication of real-word usage, or it uses settings the average user will not be familiar with or implement, then that may be misleading. What isn't misleading, however is the fact that the test does give accurate differentiation to the battery life differences from one system to the next. I suspect AMD doesn't hold up well in these comparisons.

Garbage. The CNET test Lyon's cites (4 hours on the Apple laptop that claims an 8 hour battery) is a "Video Playback" battery drain test. Google it. Effectively driving your car w/ the pedal to the metal- would you expect to get good milage? This jerk (Lyons) has got us tilting at windmills. He implies that such would be average use. For more shining examples of this creeps "quality" journalism check out his "fake Steve Jobs" blog. Yep, he's at it again, lampooning a hardworking poor SOB who just endured a liver transplant. I expect more of Newsweek.

Also, need to discuss why batteries won't last more than 1 year. I think it is a game plan by these pc makers to cheat consumers. I bought one laptop for 1700 $ and after 1 yr battery stopped working. Got in touch with computer manufacturer they they i need to replace battery and cost around 300$. This is just crazy and gimmick. Somebody got to stand up and fight for consumer rights. These batteries should last long since it is rechargeable. it was like that in 2000-2002 periods. since my other laptop i bought in this period still runs on battery. but not the one I bought in 2006. raise your voice and let these people pay price for it and stop cheating public.

Re: ""It's not that companies are lying, but they're stacking the deck in their favor. [Their claims] are misleading to the general public."
Sir: A lie is a lie, is a lie, is a lie.
The American Heritage Dictionary definition : "Disposed to or characterized by untruth..." fits!!!

Don't get any portable device unless it has/uses an OLED (Oraganic Light Emitting Diode) screen. Current LCD and Plasma screens are power hogs. Research, for yourself, the many totally mind boggeling advantages of OLED technology. Does NOT require power sucking back lighting. Cheep to make. Screens can be spray painted with an ink jet printer. Picture much brighter and colours richer. Contrast ratio is not a mere 800 to 1 to 3000 to 1, but 1,000,000 to 1. No picture loss when viewed at angles. Screens can be applied to flexible plastic mylar or cloth. Screens can be transparent. Screens can be used as light sources like light bulbs, but using 100% of the electricity into light, not 20% or less that light bulbs use. And on and on. Batteries on portable devices with OLED screens would last for many hours, even days of actual usage.

At least the Dell Dude got it right in what customers are looking for .... seems like Dell was the only PC Manufacturers with the balls to comment on this.

Elizabeth & Archie

Battery life has increased dramatically and weight of the batteries has plummetted. Pick up an old laptop with a NiCad or even a NiMH battery and see how much more it would weigh per watt hour of energy. You would be amazed. Modern Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer chemistry holds so much energy that a shortedd out battery will start a laptop on fire. Those YouTube videos aren't all fake. I've used LiIon batteries to power exotic flashlights. You must be extremely careful with them both on the charge and discharge side, and the sad fact is that most still can't give more than 500 charges. Many can only give 200. It's the nature of the chemistry. If you hooked up a modern laptop with WiFi, Blu-Ray, 17" Screen, 7200RPM Hard Drive, etc. to an old Nicad battery pack you'd weep at how little they lasted. And then you'd treck over to your chiropractor to have him take the kink out of your neck from lugging the battery around. Don't you remember the old brick-like portable cell phones or even the bag phones compared to what we have today? They were one huge battery. Lithium chemistry is partially responsible for allowing a battery to have an incredible energy density at a reasonable wieght, as is shrikning electronics and better power management. It's not a conspiracy theory.

As a commodities trader, I watch the release of government statistics every day that I know are absolutle lies. However, the lies are consistent.

If we can't get the truth, it's not that bad in cases such as these to settle for the consistent lie. For example, take the BAPCO score and cut it by 1/2 or 2/3 for each of the reoughly same class of machine you are looking at buying.

Another good alternative is to go to the tech sites that perform their own "real world" tests of putting a DVD in a player in a laptop at full brightness. Or surfing the web until the battery dies. Those reports are out there and not that hard to find if you are willing to look. Why anyone would believe anything Best Buy publishes is beyond me anyway...

Remember the class action suit that was leveled (and won) over how the screen size of the old crt monitors was advertised. And that was a pretty small scale scam. Underreporting battery life by a factor of 2x seems pretty significant. I suspect option #3 is probably looming. Why do lawyers never learn from experience?

Judging this article on the basis of the headline, I expected to find "why" the battery runs out so fast. The article just told me what I already know: it does. I was hoping you would tell me that it is possible to make a battery that actually would last longer but the battery companies have conspired to sell us lemons. Now THAT would be a news article.

I am more surprised that the issue of battery life did not include the fact that after one year most laptop batteries are toast. I have scoured the consumer complaints for Dell and there are MANY who say that they pay $150 for a new battery and it will MAYBE last one year before the battery will not even hold a charge any more. I opted to not pay an additional $150 every 12 to 18 months for "mobility".

This article does not fairly present the issues. Let's take the car analogy -- my car is rated at 27mpg highway. That's what I get, on cruise control, at 55mph. At 80mph on cruise control, i'm down to 20. If I floor my accelerator from every stoplight, I'm down to 10.

Computers are exactly the same. If you're typing a Word document, offline on an airplane, you'll probably get more time out of any good machine than it's rated at. If you're playing a video game, watching a Blu-Ray, or doing anything else that's highly disk and processor-intensive, of course you're going to drain the battery more quickly -- sometimes dramatically more quickly.

Some manufacturers may fudge the numbers a bit - and shame on them - but your car analogy works just as well the other way.

While the average "open the box and turn it on" consumer won't see the best possible battery life, any PC user with familiarity with the Control Panel and the Power Settings can squeeze a lot of time out of a laptop. I bought a Dell Inspiron 600m years ago that claimed four hours of battery life based on the benchmark tests. When I used it, I regularly got six hours of use during the first two year, and closer to four hours after that. My secrets? I made sure the power saving settings were set to their most aressive options--screen blank and hard disks off after 5 minutes, Stand By after 10 minutes, etc. Also, I set the display to run at its dimmest setting (it took a day or two to get used to it), and I changed the default Windows color scheme to use black backgrounds whenever possible (no power is needed to light a black pixel on the screen).

As to the commenter who mentioned camera batteries--typical alkaline batteries drain like water through a seive. Get a set of rechargable NiMH batteries. I regularly get around 200 shots (50% with flash) on a single pair with my Kodak 10 MP camera.

I agree that this is a great idea. My HP laptop claimed 3 hours of battery life, but I couldn't get that much even with the screen dimmed and the wifi off. Strangely enough, my Toshiba actually gets more than advertised, with which I have no problem.

Not only laptops. My camera needs new set of batteries every time I want to take a picture. Now comes the electric cars. All the lies about electric car performance. But reality: Picture the traffic jams with all these electric cars dying in traffic.

I agree with he previous comments, concerning "what I thought the article was about" and the extended warranty rip-offs. Back to battery life, I wouldn't buy any major piece of electronics, like a computer, without reading a test report by PC World or CNET, for example. PC World always lists the actual battery life they obtained - in normal use - in their tests. It's really just part of being an informed buyer - and not going by sales people's or manufacturer's claims.

The title of this article is a bit misleading. I was expecting an article about battery technology and why we can't make batteries that last longer. Instead it's actually an article about misleading business practices. A better title would have been "Why computer companies lie about battery life"