Hewlett Packard announces laptop with 24 hour battery life

In a press release yesterday, 8th September, HP announced that it has achieved 24 hours of battery life for a laptop PC. This extended run time was achieved partly by through the use of high energy efficiency components and partly through using a large, ultra-capacity battery.

Ted Clark, senior vice president and general manager, Notebook Global Business Unit, HP said "All-day computing has been the holy grail of notebook computing," – "With the HP EliteBook 6930p, customers no longer have to worry about their notebook battery running out before their work day is over."

HP used its current EliteBook 6930p as the basis for its long run time design. This was fitted with its new Illumi-Lite LED Display, which will be available as an option in October and this alone extends the run time by 4 hours. HP says it is committed to eliminating the cold-cathode fluorescent tube backlights from its displays by 2010, because of their use of mercury vapour. The Illumi-Lite displays use conventional LCD technology for imaging, but with LEDs for the backlight. Apart from efficiently converting electrical power to light, the brightness of an LED backlight can easily be modulated to produce very high contrast ratios and even greater power savings.

A further 7 per cent power efficiency was achieved by using a new Intel 80GB SSD drive rather than a mechanical hard disk. The SSD drives too will be available as an option in October. HP is a launch customer for new Intel X25-M and X18-M Mainstream SATA SSDs.

HP says that in addition to helping achieve outstanding battery life, these new Intel SSDs provide greater durability and reliability as well as faster system responsiveness. Internal HP benchmarks show overall performance boosts of up to 57 per cent on industry benchmarks, and data transfer rates almost six times faster than traditional hard disks. However this figure is likely to be in comparison to the slowest of laptop hard drives, which are noticeably slower in performance than recent SATA drives fitted to desktop PCs.

Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager, NAND Products Group, Intel said "Intel architected its new line of high-performance solid-state drives specifically to bring a new level of performance and reliability to the computing platform and make significant impact to the way people use their PCs," – "The HP milestone is an example of the impact of this new level of performance that specifically delivers on lower power consumption for longer battery life."

Battery life for laptops is greatly affected by the power management policy and HP say that the latest Intel graphics driver – the 6930p is available with a choice of Intel or ATI graphics system – and the latest HP BIOS were used to achieve the claimed 24 hour run time. It seems likely that a fairly aggressive power management policy was used to achieve maximum battery life. HP also qualifies that component power consumption does vary from one machine to the next due to normal manufacturing variations, although it doesn't give any figures on the variation, or reveal if a particularly low consumption unit was selected for its tests. Rather than Microsoft Vista, which is the operating system the 6930p normally ships with, the test laptop was running Windows XP.

The base weight for the 6930p is given in the current specification as 2.1 Kg, but HP did not include any details in the press release of the size, weight or charge time for the ultra capacity battery used in its tests. Given the high cost of the high capacity batteries it might be more economic to buy two smaller batteries and accept the inconvenience of changing batteries.

(Terry Relph-Knight)

(trk)