Battery Life, and Miscellaneous
Let's talk about something a lot more interesting, and less irritating, than Internet Exporer security holes, shall we?
There have been a couple of questions about battery life in my new HP Pavillion dm1-1020ez, with the Celeron DualCore Su2300 CPU. After a few days of use, I can comment on that a bit more. For comparison, I'm using my HP Pavillion dv2-1020ez, which has an AMD Athlon Neo CPU. The batteries seem to be roughly the same - both have 6-cell Li-Ion battery packs. I know that's not terribly specific or scientific, but I can't find better specs on the HP web site right now. The screens are also slightly different, the dv2 has a 12.1" 1280x800, while the dm1 has an 11.6" 1366-768, but I suspect those are close enough that it doesn't make a significant difference in battery life.
What I have found is that the dm1 is good for about an hour longer of what I consider "typical use" than the dv2. In my case, "typical" means the system is continuously active, the screen saver seldom comes on and the disk seldom gets to spin down. Under those conditions, the dv2 is good for about 2.5 hours, and the dm1 about 3.5. Obviously, this can vary by as much as half an hour either way, but their relative performance stays about the same, the dm1 lasts about 30% longer than the dv2. I believe that most of that is down to the difference in the CPU, but I can't document it.
Other notes about the new dm1. There is something funny about the keyboard/touchpad, causing the mouse cursor to occasionally jump wildly while I am typing. I can't tell yet if this is a defect in my system (I think so, and hope so), or a generic problem (I certainly hope not). I'll probably take it back for repair or replacement this week. Other than that, I still really like it. Besides the longer battery life, the dm1 is clearly faster than the dv2, or any of the other netbooks/sub-notebooks that I have. Mandriva 2010.0 still seems to be working flawlesly on it, and Ubuntu (and its derviatives) work just as well once I installed the Broadcom STA wireless driver. I haven't had any luck at all with the b43 driver, I assume that is because the wireless adapter is a bcm4315, rather than the 4311/4312 that the b43 driver is known to work with.
The bottom line is that I like the dm1 so much that I am reluctant to take it back, even though the keyboard/trackpad problem is very irritating. It has been quite a while since I picked up a new system that I immediately liked so much better than anything else around.
jw