Linux Rescues Battery Life On Vista Notebooks From Dell

nerdyH writes "Dell is preparing to ship two enterprise-oriented Windows Vista notebooks with an interesting feature — a built-in TI OMAP (smartphone) processor that can power instantly into Linux. The 'Latitude ON' feature is said to offer 'multi-day' battery life, while letting users access email, the web, contacts, calendar, and so on, using the notebook's full-size screen and keyboard. I wonder if someday we'll just be able to plug our phones into our laptops, switching to the phone's processor when we need to save battery life? Or, maybe x86 will just get a lot more power-efficient. Speaking at MontaVista's Vision event today, OLPC spokesperson and longtime kernel hacker Deepak Saxena said the project is aiming for 10-20 hours of battery life during active use, on existing hardware (AMD Geode LX800 clocked at 500MHz, with 1GB of Flash and 256MB of RAM)."

Re:eh

[Gewalt]

It doesn't need to be pretty - if I can turn a system on in near-zero boot time and do useful things like access email or open a document... Point me to the cash register, I'm ready to hand over my wallet.

Ok, *points to store.apple.com* My laptop takes about 2 seconds from "open lid" to "network interface is up and browsser is online" and "documents can be opened".

Now, granted, that's using sleep, not shutdown. But seriously, when sleep actually works as advertised..... Why the fuck would you ever want to shut down?

Re:eh

[Corporate Troll]

A bit expensive... My Asus EEE 701 4G boots up incredibly fast. 5 seconds to the Xandros password screen.

That's cold boot because the sleep functionality sucks seriously on the EEE. ("sucks seriously" as in "sucks battery for breakfast")

umm

[RMH101]

...you are aware that a good proportion of Windows Mobile devices run on OMAP processors, right? Like the venerable HTC Wizard etc?

Re:eh

[I.M.O.G.]

Good point, Apple's sleep mode actually works as advertised. Bit I and most others in business aren't in the market for an Apple laptop to do real work on (not counting marketing, etc... I said "real" work).

On a windows platform, sleep and hibernation have been sketchy, mainly due to questionable drivers. Add to this the fact that even if it does come out of sleep correctly, things feel a bit sluggish still and it altogether just doesn't feel snappy.

Give me web, email, and documents in a snap, with the opportunity to also boot a full OS... And I think thats adding something valuable to a Windows OS. In business environments where its gotta be Windows for whatever reason, I like this option.

Re:eh

[Gewalt]

In only ten seconds more I can launch Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion and have a fuly integrated Windows XP environment that runs at full speed. That's 5 seconds to launch the host and 5 seconds to unsuspend the guest. You can shave the first 5 seconds off by never shutting down the Host application.

Re:For some people this may be enough

[wiz_80]

Strange - my home machine runs OpenOffice instead of MS Office, and I can only remember one PPT that did not open right the first time in OOo. DOCs all come up fine, so much that when I need to do a lot of word processing I do it on the desktop with the nice keyboard and then transfer the file to the work lapdog. Never had any trouble, even with big multi-author documents with all sorts of highlighting and versioning.

Re:eh

[R3d Jack]

Have your brother run Ubuntu and run XP in a virtual machine. I do that at home with the family Mac and Napster (keeps my kid satisfied and legal).

Re:eh

[TheRaven64]

Out of interest, have you tried using Windows on an Apple laptop? Apple does something quite neat with sleep mode, where they begin suspend-to-disk when the lid is closed but don't turn off the RAM until the battery is low, so you have suspend-to-RAM which changes to suspend-to-disk if the battery goes flat. I've never actually had my battery go flat while in sleep mode, however, so Windows' suspend-to-RAM ought to work. I believe the drivers for Apple hardware are fairly good (although I've not used them).

Re:Freedom from x86

[TheRaven64]

ARM (or OMAP

OMAP is an implementation of ARM. The current generation is based on the Cortex A8 series, and comes with a nice DSP core as well (some also come with an OpenGL ES 2.0-capable PowerVR GPU) in a package that can have a 128MB RAM chip clipped on top, so you don't need any motherboard traces for RAM unless you want more than 64MB. If you want one to play with, there's quite a cheap development board [beagleboard.org].

The next generation is to be based on the Cortex A9 MPcore architecture, which supports 1-4 cores on the same die, and they are rumoured to have 256MB RAM chips ready soon.

Re:umm

[SQLGuru]

While not what MS intended, I don't see why someone doesn't do something with Windows PE ( Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment [wikipedia.org] ). It'll pretty much run anything XP will, has full networking support, etc. All without the normal Windows bloat.

I first learned about it when I bought a copy of Active@Boot Disk ( http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm [ntfs.com] ) to recover data from a corrupted / failed hard-drive. [Works great, BTW.]

Layne

Re:umm

[Constantine XVI]

In this case, the problem is that WinPE still is x86 only, and x86 still has a major disadvantage in power draw compared to ARM-based chips like the OMAP.