|
|
Home | Switchboard | Unix Administration | Red Hat | TCP/IP Networks | Neoliberalism | Toxic Managers |
| (slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and bastardization of classic Unix | |||||||
|
|
C610 is an updated version of C600 and like its old cousin is reasonably priced at Ebay auctions ($200-$350 as of May 2006). Higher end versions look like:
Dell Latitude C610 1.2 GHz Pentium III® CPU: 512 MB RAM, 30 GB Hard Disk, Swappable DVD/CDW Drive, Swappable Floppy Disk Drive, USB 1.1 Port, S-Video (TV Out), 14.1" Active Matrix Display, Integrated 10/100 Network Interface, Integrated 56K Modem, Touch Pad and Track Stick Integrated Pointing Devices, A/C Adapter, Software: Microsoft® Windows XP Pro + MS Office Professional
|
|
Low end D610 notebooks with 1GHz CPUs and 256M of memory are cheap ($200) and you sometimes can buy it with Office XP. In addition to typing your document in MS Office it can be used as player as they have S-Video port (which can connect directly to a TV). For example one recent offer on eBay for $150 + $40 shipping was:
Despite the price is it very competitive with modern laptops that cost 5 times more. It has reasonably fast 1.2GHz Pentium III CPU and higher end C610 have 512K RAM and DVD reader/CD writer. I strongly recommend it to the students, especially those who are difficult financial conditions due to rising costs of education. The ability to save $1K is worth minor inconveniences that comes with using older equipment. Reliability record of this laptop is proven and good as it was used in many corporate environments for many years. Till 2004 it was probably the most common enterprise laptop.
Like C600 it suffers from absence of UCB 2.0 ports. The latter problem can be partially resolved by buying docking station and installing USB 2.0 card in it. Belkin cards are reasonably cheap and work well. There are also Belkin PCMCIA cards with two USB2.0 ports if you need them during travel (for example for backup, although during travel I recommend burning incremental backups on CD-Roms.
You can add second drive into the second PCMCIA slot (5 or 7G) to use as Norton Images backup or other purposes.
The best internal harddrive that can be used with C610 is 40G 7200 RPM drive. You can have two of them if you replace CD-Rom with the drive module. Module for the additional harddrive was around $40 on eBay in 2005. Note that old 20G Travelstar drives used in many C610 are very unreliable.
With any drive, you need to have daily incremental backups and weekly full backups to prevent data loss. horror stories when the drive became writing to the disk very slowly and then stopped to be recognized on the next reboot are all too common.
For some unknown reason a very good docking stations C Dock/II that are compatible with Dell C600, C610 as well as C800 and C810 are dirt cheap on eBay. If you take into account that it contains a built-in SCSI controller and additional Ethernet adapter you can assume that dock station itself is free :-). C-Dock additional bay is hot-pluggable and un-pluggable (if you do not close the docking latch) and that's a very convenient feature as you can have configurations with two CD-ROM writers, additional harddrive or DVD reader/writer. .
Internally the docking station has enough space to add an additional internal SCSI drive or IDS drive, but the best solution is probably to buy Sun SCSI drive enclosure (or some other dirt cheap but high quality SCSI enclosure) and connect it to the external SCSI interface. It sits perfectly on the top of the docking station. Try to search "Sun External Ultra SCSI hard drive case", "Sun DDS3 external drive/enclosure" or any substring on this. They are often ~$10 with shipping ($1 + $8 shipping).
Please note that C610 recognize adding CD/DVD reader/writer or second harddrive to in the internal bay or C-dock bay on the fly, so those devices can removed/added without rebooting. Like in case of UCB devices you need to disable them first via "Safely remove hardware" icon in the tray.
At the same time none of C-dock devices except scsii drive and USB connected devices is recognized if you boot in DOS. I noticed this problem when I worked with Ghost 2003 and tried to copy image on the second drive that was placed in C-dock slot. Devices in PCMCIA slots are not recognized too.
Touchpad interferes with typing on internal keyboard. If you
use internal keyboard touchpad interferes with you tying. The best way
to deal with this problem is to disable touchpad in BIOS by selecting
PS/2 mouse setting. In this case if PS/2 mouse is present touchpad will
be disabled. Cheap Microsoft wireless mini-mouse works excellent and
is much better pointing device then touchpad in most circumstances.
Laptop is too slow.
One problem might be Synaptec driver . Dell driver support is not impressive and if you plan to use touchpad (I don't) I would recommend to update Synaptic drivers to the recent version from the Synaptic site (not from Dell's site). Older versions of driver from Dell goes into periodic dead loop consuming 100% of CPU. Actually Synaptic drivers should be disabled in docking profile (they are useless) and can be disabled in undocked profile is you do not use touch pad.
If it is enabled and you use internal keyboard then often
it moves the cursor when you are trying to type something on the
keyboard. See Synaptec
driver problem
Wrong power scheme used. Check what is the CPU speed is
used Control Panel/ system/General. It should be 1.2GHz. If
not you need to go to Power Options and set Desktop power scheme
(especially if you are using docking station).
No audio from the dock connector Typical
C/Dock II Audio problem (no audio
from the dock connector) is resolved by installing the specific (older)
version of the driver that does not have this problem (see below).
Laptop speed is OK, but
startup and shutdown
is too slow. Usually this happens gradually as you install more
and more software on the laptop. Often this is due to network drives
reconnections when the server with those drives is down. In this case
simply delete those drives. It also can also be the sign of
Spyware infection.
See Startup
and shutdown is too slow.
Laptop life using battery is too short. See Dead Batteries. You can also generic external batteries instead of internal to save money on replacement.
|
|
Switchboard | ||||
| Latest | |||||
| Past week | |||||
| Past month | |||||
 |
 |
 |
This year, my mouse is on the fritz. It's the worst kind of problem where the mouse 'drifts' on its own while idle. I don't know if it's divine intervention - No, don't click there on that evil spot - or whether my magnetic personality is getting in the way <g>.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Using Intel?s advanced 0.13-micron process technology with copper interconnect, the Mobile Intel® Pentium® III Processor-M offers high-performance and low-power consumption. The Mobile Intel® Pentium® III Processor-M (hereafter referred to as ?the processor?) is based on the same core as existing Mobile Intel® Pentium® III Processors. Key performance features include Internet Streaming SIMD instructions, an Advanced Transfer Cache architecture, and a processor system bus speed of 133 MHz. These features are offered in Micro-FCPGA packages for socketable boards and Micro-FCBGA packages for surface mount boards.
The Low Voltage Mobile Intel® Pentium® III Processor-M will support both a 133-MHz and a 100-MHz bus speed. The Ultra Low Voltage Mobile Intel® Pentium® III Processor-M will support both 133-MHz and 100-MHz (see product features section for specific supported frequencies) bus speed. The Low Voltage and Ultra Low Voltage Mobile processors will be available only in the Micro-FCBGA package. All of these technologies make outstanding performance possible for mobile PCs in a variety of shapes and sizes.
The processor, when used in conjunction with the Intel SpeedStep® technology applet, supports Enhanced Intel SpeedStep® technology, which enables real-time dynamic switching of the voltage and frequency between two performance modes based on CPU demand. This occurs by switching the bus ratios, core operating voltage, and core processor speeds without resetting the system. The processor also features a new ultra low power state called Deeper Sleep.
|
|
|
Q: I used two drives on my laptop (C610) one as system drive and the second as the drive with all my data (in the bay instead of CDW-DVD). I backup the second drive each Friday. This Thursday the drive started to behave strangely: first it start to write data very slowly and then stopped writing them at all. When i rebooted the laptop the drive stop to be recognized at all and start to generate strange clicking sound. What are my options? I put a lot of new information exactly this week including several important programs and to recreate them I will require another 40-50 hours overtime. I do not have this amount of time and the project is due soon. I am really desperate. Please help...
A: In all such case the drive usually start clicking on boot-up (click'o'death; http://www.jeff7.com/anandtech/hitachidrive.mp3 has the sound).
The most reliable way to recover data is to use professional restore services it is important to minimize the psychological which is often more severe that data lass. That they are expensive and unless your information is worth several thousand dollars you probably should not use data recovery services (if data are worth that much you should not attempt to do anything yourself as each click increases the damage to the data; around 20% of the hard drives received by data recovery services are not recoverable due to excessive platter damage). Google is your friend and you can learn a lot about this problem by searching "IBM Travelstar click of death".
Outside paying recovery services your options are really limited. According to internet folklore sometimes cooling or even freezing the drive sometimes helps to revive it for a couple of minutes but in most cases that's it as the reason might be that magnetic substance is gone from the plate and no amount of freezing can change that.
Still this cannot hurt and according to enthusiasts you need to get an external USB enclosure, then slowly cooling the drive first on the lower shelf then up to the freezer (to avoid condensation, if this is possible at all). After 24 hours take either try to run it while it is still in freezer (need a long USB cable) or get it out with a couple of cool packs and try to power it up and read. Again this is mostly folklore...
In case drive is at least partially readable there is also a trial version of Dmitriy Primochenko's HDDREGENERATOR from http://www.dposoft.net
The best strategy in such situation is to keep long time perspective and try "don't sweet the small staff and its' all small staff". Don't overreact. View the situation from the point of view of one year later. This way you can protect yourself from many useless or even harmful steps people do after losing important data. I know cases when people in a frantic activity after the loss lost even more data.
Now about your options. As I mentioned they are few:
- As this is your second drive some files might be preserved on the C: drive as temp files or backups (depends on your programs settings). A pretty exact list of the files that you worked during the week can be found in Recent folder. That can help a lot. Actually redoing files is much quicker that initial creation; also a quality of second variant is often much higher: been their done that :-)
- Some files might be preserved in the Trash folder.
- If your C drive is FAT32 formatted then Norton disk doctor can retrieve deleted temp files that might contain the earlier version of files that you lost: most Microsoft Office programs write in the temp folder. Search Google for the restoration of NTFS files.
- If you use mail often it might be that you send some files as an attachments. That happened to me.
But the most important is to find a reliable way to avoid this situation in the future: you need to do daily incremental backup (Types of backups) and not only to USB drive like many users, but on DVD or CD too. Please remember that USB drive also can fall from the table or just fail. Like with laptop drives there is no guarantee...
Daily DVD or CD backups are some kind of guarantee. They are pretty reliable long term storage of your data and now are reasonably cheap to use one or even two a day. For most of us the daily working set of files is really small (5-10M). Windows XP Professional has free backup utility but it is limited and I recommend RAR. If you have Microsoft Services for Unix installed you can use tar and gzip or zip. Your mileage can vary. There are many good incremental backup programs both free and commercial (just do not buy them from Symantec's Save and Restore -- this is in essence rebranded Ghost and in comparison with Ghost 10, NSR is pretty backward, unreliable and very slow :-) Actually classic Microsoft command like utility xcopy can also be used to copy files to special folder and then burn them as it has option of copying the files that were modified today.
I know that information about such problems evaporates in a year or two but please switch to daily incremental backup in addition to weekly full backups. Our data are worth more then we usually assume and if you ever to hear that "click of death" coming from your drive, you'll be happy to know your most precious data are safe. This peace of mind worth quote a lot.
|
|
|
Q: Message: Thanks Dr Bezroukov, for your article about GHOST backup. I am currently using Ghost 2003 to back up my laptop (about 30GB of data) to an external IDE hard drive in a USB 2.0 case. The data transfer rate reported by the Ghost screen is 31MB per minute. The process is taking about 14 HOURS. Am I doing something wrong???
A: Looks like you are using USB 1.0 drivers. This can be due to the fact that your laptop has only USB 1.0 ports (many older laptops for example Dell C600 or C610 suffer from this).
In this case you need PCMCIA card with USB 2.0 (for example from Belkin, approximately $30 on Amazon; can be cheaper on eBay) ports to speed things up.
Also in Ghost during the dialog that asks about USB drivers you should specify USB 2.0 drivers in "Advanced options" dialog. This should be done each time as for some reason Norton ghost GUI does not remember previous setting.
In November I purchased and downloaded the Early Access version of Solaris 9 for x86. Where I work I support a large UNIX environment (300+ servers (primarily Solaris and AIX). Having Solaris x86 available is extremely valuable since it is very cost effective to run Solaris on fast/inexpensive PC hardware. My UNIX support group uses Dell Latitude C610 Laptops. The laptops have 1.2 Ghz PIII processors, support 1 Gb of ram, and the ATI Radeon Mobility graphics chipset supports 24bit color at 1400x1050 on the 14.1 inch lcd display. I run Gentoo Linux as the primary OS on my laptop. I run Linux because it supports all the hardware and peripherals I need. The corporate desktop is Windows 2000. I now run both Windows 2000 and Solaris 9 in vmware. To effectively use Solaris under vmware (in graphical mode) you need the XFree86 vmware video driver. Sun provides all of the XFree86 drivers for Solaris x86 in the binary version of their XFree86 Porting Kit; however they didn't include the vmware driver in their packages. I used their source package to build the porting kit on Solaris 9 x86 and modified the package to include the vmware driver. With the porting kit installed and proper kdmconfig settings you will get reasonable graphics performance.
[X] MultiFrequency 76kHz (up to 1600x1200 @ 60Hz) [X] 14-inch (36cm) [X] 1280x1024 - 65536 colors @ 70Hz [X] 1280x1024
Latitude C610 Debian On My Laptop
Dell Latitude C610 Specifications
Pentium III 1.2GHz
512MB memory
20GB HDD
Sound is AC97, ICH3, Cirrus Logic SC4205
Video is ATI Radeon Mobility, 16MB
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet 3COM 3C920
Integrated Modem (WinModem)Installation
The latest Debian Installer is still considered to be in "testing", but it's works really well. You can download the lastest iso image of the Network Installer, which is around 200MB, here. All you do is boot to the CD you create with this image, and it will provide you the means to install a base system on your machine. After the base system is installed, it provides the means to install packages from the Internet mirror sites. Read the Installation Manual from the link above.
Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2432 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
/dev/hda1 1 322 2586433+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 323 506 1477980 83 Linux
/dev/hda4 507 2431 15462562+ 83 Linux
Belkin UCB cards can be used to solve the problem with old USB-1 ports on C/Dock
One does need SP1 to be able to use drives over 137gigs in XP, but will still need to make changes in the registry for the changes to take effect. "How to enable 48-bit Logical Block Addressing support for ATAPI disk drives in Windows XP"
Synaptic drivers supplied by Dell are not working with XP (100% CPU consumption). I have a better success with native Symantec drivers but probably I should just disable this sucker in the docked profile.
syntpenh - syntpenh.exe - Process Information
syntpenh - syntpenh.exe - Process Information
Process File: syntpenh or syntpenh.exe
Process Name: Synaptics touchpad tray iconDescription:
syntpenh.exe is a process installed alongside the Synaptics TouchPad for laptop computer touchpads. Provides additional configurations and support, and is essential on some machines for the functioning of this input device. This program is a non-essential system process, but should not be terminated unless suspected to be causing problems.
For More Information About syntpenh.exe - Get WinTasks 5 Pro Now!Recommendation for syntpenh.exe:
Should not be disabled, required for essential applications to work properly.
To get control over your running programs we suggest WinTasks 5 ProSynTPEnh.ese using up CPU - Latitude - Keyboard-Pointing Devices - Dell Community Forum
My CPU usage is at 100%. Under task manager I have found that SynTPEnh.exe is using up 99%. I have a Latitude 610, and I run Microsoft Windows XP, 2002.
I tried to find drivers on Dell's site to update my system, but I couldn't find anything that sounded right. I also checked the Synaptics site, but I didn't find anything that sounded right, and they warn that their drivers are generic and it is better to update from your manufacturer's website.
What do I do?!
Welcome to the Forum, Assume you are speaking of a C610? I have had better results using Drivers from Synaptics than the Dell supplied Synaptics.
If you have a D610, then you need ALPS, only from Dell.
Nate Lawson nate at root.org
Tue Jul 20 12:03:15 PDT 2004
- Previous message: Dell Latitude 610 CPU clock rate degrading (debug info included)
- Next message: Dell Latitude 610 CPU clock rate degrading (debug info included)
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Ted Faber wrote: > My Dell Latitude 610 is having its clock rate go from 1000 Mhz to 733 > Mhz under -CURRENT that was cvsupped and installed yesterday. I'm > honestly not sure how long this has been happening, since I only got the > clock speed monitor (the one that runs under gkrellm) hooked up a couple > weeks ago. I hooked it up because the machine seemed slow. It had been > happening for a couple weeks at least. > > The rate seems to change after using the CPU hard for a while - a big > compile, like make buildworld seems to do it, though even a few minutes > of compilation seems sufficient. > > When the CPU speed changes I get a message in the logs saying > > cpu0: Performance states changed > > The state never seems to change back to a high performance one. I've > configured the BIOS not to do power management with the AC connected, > and this happens with the AC connected. This transition is being done by the BIOS for passive cooling. We can't control it until the cpufreq driver is committed. When the system gets hot, the BIOS steps the processor down to 733 mhz but the timecounters have no way of knowing it happened. > I tried booting without ACPI, but my time of day clock ran consistenty > slow - which might mean that the same degredation was occurring without > the OS readjusting for it. In any case it wasn't clear that no ACPI > helped. Same problem. What timecounter are you using? Switching away from TSC would help this. > Attached are a sysctl hw.acpi before and after the speed change and a > dmesg from a -v boot up to when the states change. The attachments are > in that order. ASL is at > http://www.isi.edu/~faber/tmp/faber-dell-L610.asl > > Please let me know if I can help debug this. -Nate
[Dec 20, 2005] audio output from the C/Dock II to work.
Although the internal audio output from my notebook works fine (docked or undocked), I can't seem to get the audio output from the C/Dock II to work. When I initially purchased my notebook, my network administrators insisted on taking Windows XP off, and installing Windows 2000. XP was later installed when the network started supporting it. I know the C/Dock audio worked fine under Win 2000. I think it stopped working when XP was re-installed. I had originally thought this was a hardware problem, but I recently noticed a Knowledge Base article regarding Latitude C600 and C800 portables (Document TT1061041). It addressed this exact problem (loss of C/Dock II audio functionality with upgrading to WinXP), and recommended upgrading the audio driver from the Upgrade Drivers and Utilities CD. Unfortunately, I don't have an Upgrade Drivers and Utilities CD, only a Drivers and Utilities CD that came with the computer that is only for reinstalling drivers, not upgrading them. When I go to upgrade the driver from this CD, it does not offer me the choice recommended in the Knowledge Base article (ESS Maestro 3i (Audio Only)/M3WUA09A). It only offers me a Crystal driver.
Is there a driver that will help me with this problem? If so, how can I find it? Any other suggestions?
Thank you for the help.
Crystal CS4205 driver for XP v.6.13.10.4159, A09
Crystal CS4205 Driver
Release Title: Audio: Crystal CS4205, Driver, Multi OS, Multi Language, Multi System, v.6.13.10.4159, A09 Release Date: 10/21/2002 Description: Crystal CS4205 WDM Driver
By downloading, you accept the terms of the Dell Software License Agreement.
File Name File Size Download Time (56K) File Format C5mua09i.exe 1 MB 3.9 min Hard-Drive
Download Now Add to My Downloads
FTP Download Release Title: Audio: Crystal CS4205, Driver, Windows XP, Multi Language, Inspiron 4100, Latitude C610, v. 6.13.10.4151, A04 Release Date: 11/19/2001 Description: Crystal CS4205 Windows XP Audio Driver
By downloading, you accept the terms of the Dell Software License Agreement.
File Name File Size Download Time (56K) File Format C5mua04i.exe 1 MB 3.9 min Hard-Drive 
Download Now
Add to My Downloads
FTP Download Recommended Links
Dell support, utilities, programmes, drivers and help pages laptopsolutions uk
Dell Latitude 610 CPU clock rate degrading (debug info included)
Dead Batteries
Dell C610 batteries does not last long. Expect to change them each two years if you need a long battery life. This is a common problem with other laptops too. See Dell Laptop Battery Blues - Rick Strahl's WebLog
# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues 9/9/2004 10:52 PM Mike HutchisonWOW! Within the past 24 hours, I have learned quite a bit about this battery problem. I bought a CPtC locally without battery. I then found a used battery on EBAY and had a wonderful year using it in my video business (hobby). Recently, I decided to give this DELL to my niece for college and I wanted to include a few spare batteries. I bought two more on EBAY hoping that one might work. Neither of them will charge on my laptop, despite the sellers' claims that they were working fine before.
Being a natural cheepskate and letting curiosity get the better of me, I looked into repairing or replacing the LITHIUM cells. I have developed a limited knowledge of LITHIUM CELLS that might be helpful for some. My videography hobbies keep me looking for cheaper LITHIUM replacement batteries for my $5,500 and $17,500 camcorders. You think you hate when your laptop battery reach its 300th cycle and croaks, try feeding your camera gear 15 batteries a year at $480 a pop! Anyway, there are some points that might help you and other points that MUST be noted.
First of all...LITHIUM BATTERIES EXPLODE...REALLY!! That little warning on the side of the battery isn't just an idle threat. I've let the magic smoke out of a few LITHIUM-ION batteries and gained new respect for that warning label. I'm not warning you off, though. By all means, play with your batteries, but know that you are fiddling with a bomb (esp. battery modules used in laptops, camcorders, and cell phones...they are made to store more energy for a longer use-cycle).
Second, that circuit board within the battery module monitors the CRITICAL items such as the maximum allowed rate of charge, rate of discharge, voltage levels, load distribution between the cells, temperature (both inside and outside of the battery module), and yes, the number of times the cells have been cycled. Every LITH-ION cell has a "maximum cycle" number as determined by its manufacture. Research testing data determines this number. Once this maximum number of cycles has been reached, the individual cells might begin to fail. These failing cells may stop acting as batteries and slowly become more like resisters. Like a team of horses pulling a load, a cell in a series circuit can go from being part of the power to being part of the load; eventually bringing the whole power source to an abrupt failure. If the charging and discharging of a failing battery module was allowed to continue, the resulting activities would produce a small war inside your laptops power circuits. There would certainly be overheating of the battery and a destablizing the sensitive voltages inside the CPU. You can see why DELL and the others would just as well leave that feature alone. It all might be designed-in defects to keep us buying more from the manufacture, but I hope a clearer understanding of the technology makes the bitter pill easier to swallow. So why can't DELL provide this information?
We have addapted all this wonderful technology to our daily routine so completely that we cannot remember when it was only part of a STAR-TREK fantacy. Though, we yet have to solve the lacking of a "perpetual-portable-powerstation."
THE BAD NEWS: the IEEE engineering standard that responds this and other prudent bits of knowlege has actually increased the cycle limits on these LITH-ION batteries so you will be seeing more battery replacements in the future.
THE GOOD NEWS: because there are more and more of us buying replacement batteries and because they are also making the batteries smaller and the laptops more efficient, the price of the battery modules continue to fall.
I am going to continue fiddling with my battery modules and see if I can replace the cells. Here are some interesting websites that helped me:
http://www.powerstream.com/LiPSO2.htm
http://www.laptopbatteries.com/ # re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues 9/21/2004 10:02 PM Julian
Having a degree in Electronics and now doing my masters means I do know something about the nature of electronics.
Li-Ion are special batteries, using constant voltage and constant current charge. That circuit you talk about is to insure the proper chargine of the circuit and to give out battery information. Shorting the circuit is dangerous because it basically shut off the output if you exceed the current spec for the battery.
Why does a light bulb suddenly blow? Why do the batteries in a TV remote suddently die? If you have digital tv, the signal can just cut out while an analogue signal will degrade slowly.
Same goes for this, it DOES degrade over time slowly but you don't notice it, Li-Ion is very picky technology, it will just pack up like that. I was using my Dell and the pc shut down suddenly because the battery showed no charge even though it had been running for 10 mins.
I had the battery for 2 years so not bad I thought for a battery. Considering the load that are involved.
I would not be surprised if there is a circuit that monitors the health of the cells and decides that once 3 out of 4 are down that it should shut the battery off. It is true about the resistive load of the battery. As a cell dies it becomes a load. So what happens when this load is enough to heat up the remaining cells wnough to make them explode?
Look on ebay for the batteries, they are cheaper and dell released some longer life ones since I bought mine.
Now my power adapter dies when I plug it into my laptop *damn* 3 years, not bad I guess.
# Battery Life 6/9/2004 5:51 PM Krystal
I suppose we should consider how long these batteries should last. Considering what the batterys role is and all the power it must consume and handle (It's running a COMPUTER, unlike a small CD walkman), one must wonder how long a battery should last. Has any manufacturer labeled how long its life should be (or is)? Not that I've noticed.
Its technique of just "Stopping automatically" is a little illogical, however. It have made more sense for the battery to slowly lose its up time. Batteries are finky things though and we musn't assume because it's a huge thing, that can power a laptop for a few hours, that it can last forever.
Most of us are talking about 1-2 YEARS battery life before it karks it. YEARS. Beats any other battery out there on the market for anything. Aside from watches and internal battery for the computer clock. Their life is obvious.
If you pay one to two hundred dollars every two years or so, is that so bad (considering you'd pay that in electricity consumption from AC power over the period of time. Prices should be a little lower, though. It's a little ridiculous.
On a final note, for those with dead batteries, have you considered getting their cells repacked? That method is not only cheaper but guaranteed to be better than a brand new battery. Worth a try if you need a working battery for less money. If it's guaranteed to be better, how can you lose?
# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues 8/3/2004 9:07 PM DavidThis all may seem so simple now but has anyone here heard about the Dell Battery Recall? Well I just read it tonight. Calling Dell in the morning to arange replacement. Get two good batteries back for turning on one. Recall effects the following systems/batteries:
Latitude CPiA, CPiR, CPtC, CPtS, CPtV, CPxH and CPxJ, and Inspiron 3700 and 3800.
With battery codes:
DP/N "01691P" or "001691P" or "0001691P" and "42011, " "42012," "42013" or "42014" as a separate code, and one of the following codes: 06F, 06J, 06K, 06M, 06N, 06Q, 06S, 06T, or 07I (letter "I"), 073, 074, 075, 07A, 07R, or 081 (number "1"), 082, 083, 084, 087, 088, 089, 08A, 08B, 08C or 08L.
Go to Dell.com and in general search enter "battery recall". :)
# re: Dell Laptop Battery Blues 8/4/2004 1:57 AM Richard
You can go to http://www.batterysavings.com and order a replacement, which is what I did. It was much cheaper then the Dell and I just use the old ac adapter in the docking station.
Etc
Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
Copyright © 1996-2021 by Softpanorama Society. www.softpanorama.org was initially created as a service to the (now defunct) UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) without any remuneration. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.
FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...
You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors of this site Disclaimer:
The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.
Last modified: March 12, 2019
