Entries tagged with batteries - Channel 10

InstaLoad to Revolutionize Battery Installation

Sarah Perez — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:50:00 GMT

What’s this? A technology that will forever change the way you insert batteries into any device? Apparently so. Microsoft recently announced a something called “InstaLoad” that allows you to insert batteries into any device without having to worry about the battery’s orientation and lining up the negative and positives correctly.

With InstaLoad-enabled devices, as long as the batteries have juice, it doesn’t matter how they’re inserted – the device will work. Not only is this a simple convenience for the majority of consumers out there, it’s especially helpful for those with disabilities that prevent them from seeing the sometimes very-hard-to-read battery diagrams on various devices.

Microsoft has already made the new technology available to third parties for licensing, and is offering a royalty-free to suppliers and manufacturers of accessibility devices for those with hearing, vision and learning disabilities.

Windows 7 PCs Offer Better Battery Life

Sarah Perez — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:22:00 GMT

A a recent press demo, Microsoft principal program manager Ruston Panabaker showed how Windows 7 computers have better battery life than their older Vista counterparts. In general, the new OS will provide anywhere from 10 to 20 percent better battery improvement when watching a DVD. For the demonstration, two identical laptops playing the same DVD were compared, one running Windows Vista and the other running Windows 7. The Windows 7 PC lasted 20% longer.

These improvements have been made possible through joint efforts from both Microsoft and Intel who have worked together to bring better performance to the Windows 7 OS in areas like virtualization, power management, and performance. Also demonstrated was a PC that was able to boot up in 11 seconds. Although it’s important to remember that boot speed in the real world will be determined by a number of factors including hardware, installed applications, and system settings.

Air Travel Gets More Complicated

Larry Larsen — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:39:00 GMT

Just in time for CES, the DOT is limiting the size of lithium batteries you can take with you on a flight starting January 1. Most important, all batteries that are not in a device have to be in your carry-on luggage. (groan, my back!) Next, you can only bring batteries with up to 8-grams of lithium or 100 watt-hours, and up to two batteries with over 8 but not over 25 grams or 300 watt-hours of lithium. As for lithium metal batteries you can bring up to 2 grams per battery either installed in a device or as spares, but no more.

Hopefully the TSA knows more about batteries than I do because my go bag could power a small village and the giant batteries for my video camera neither say what type of battery it is nor how many grams of anything are in it. This is going to be a mess. For now, if you have a lot of big (probably expensive) spares you might want to travel with a folded self-addressed Fed Ex box with you or save the trouble and ship them ahead of time. As for total grammage of lithium, it looks like you're only limited by what your LOLpaca can carry/pull/roll and/or fit in an overhead and underseat stow area. The good news is that soon we'll be able to buy lots of cheap Lion batteries at auction.

The Incredible Black & Decker Nano Battery

Larry Larsen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:44:00 GMT

Here's something for your holiday wish list that you may have never heard of. The Black & Decker VPX AC/USB Power Source is awesome, it uses a123 Systems batteries, which are nano-technology batteries with twice the power of regular lithium-polymer batteries. They can take rough abuse (can be shot clean through with a nail gun and not burst into flames - always a plus in my house) and can dump all their power in minutes.

The Black & Decker Power Source has a standard USB plug to supply power to gadgets (Zune, iPod, phone, etc...) AND an AC plug. Yeah, that's right, like a wall plug -- it has an AC inverter built into it. So if you can't plug it into the USB port to charge it, then just use your standard wall wart to charge it using the AC plug. The VPX AC/USB Power Source + 1 VPX battery can be bought together on Amazon for $39.

RC hobbyists are buying the battery packs and ripping them apart to get at the batteries. They are claiming 400+ charge cycles and still 100% power (the manufacturer claims 1000+ charge cycles before they start taking a performance hit.) They are charging them at 8 amps, which is insane, but they take the abuse really well. And they have very little internal resistance, which means they can hold a charge for a long time.