Dev.igner

DealExtreme.com 10400mah Eee PC Battery Review

Al — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:34:55 +0000

I have been a long time fan of netbooks and have owned an Eee PC 701 since its launch in November 2007. These little laptops are great for anyone on the go that wants to do light computing tasks like email, taking notes or web browsing. As a student and someone who had long commutes in the summer, my Eee PC comes with my everywhere as it practically weighs nothing and can fit in even the most packed full of backpacks.

Netbooks are an obvious draw to people who like to hack and pimp out their devices. They are cheap and practical devices. I have decided that a year and half later, I would dive into the modding scene with my Eee PC. I have planned to add a touch screen, internalize some USB drives and to get a new bigger battery.

Third party Eee batteries have been around for a while. I have followed some threads on eeeuser.com about people ordering third party batteries over Ebay. There were mixed reviews about how good the batteries were and there were even some scams. Hearing these stories made me a little hesitant to get a third party battery, even though I would love to get more than 2 hours out of my machine. I noticed that DealExtreme.com started selling aftermarket Eee PC accessories. It was comforting to buy from a website rather than an Ebay store and the reviews of Deal Extreme itself are positive. Deal Extreme also has free shipping on everything on their site. The company is based in China, so do not expect overnight delivery. I found that the user reviews of the different products on Deal Extreme helpful and the 10400mah battery I was eying had good reviews. I went ahead and purchased this battery.

I received my package the other day, less than 2 weeks after it was shipped. Reviews are giving the battery a 6 to 8 hour life. My hopes are to stretch my battery over a whole 10+ hour day of school by suspending my EeePC to RAM while not in use and while I am on the move. I am currently running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) installed with the Eee specific Kernel from Array.org (thanks to Array.org for their awesome service to Eee owners). Ive decided to properly benchmark the battery and post the results as I have yet to find reviews online doing so.

To benchmark my battery decided to run an XvID movie in a continuous loop in VLC. I had the screen brightness set to 50% the volume set to 75%, and WiFi was turned on. This models one of my personal use cases for me on the EeePC; watching movies on long car or bus rides. Here are my results:

Stock 5200mah battery: 2 hours and 38 minutes.

Deal Extreme 10400mah battery:3 hours and 44 minutes.

I was actually quite surprised by these numbers. I did not expect that the stock battery would last so long. This may be because I have only recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 after running Windows XP for the last few months. Many benchmarks are putting Ubuntu on top for getting the most battery life out of your laptop and it shows here. I did not get the double battery life I was expecting from the double amp hours, but I am still happy. Also, my day to day use results are promising with the new battery. I have no numbers yet, but I will update this article when I get some solid numbers.

The build quality of the battery seems good and the connection to the laptop feels secure. The battery protrudes out the bottom, rather than out the back as many of other extended batteries do. This is both a pro and a con. It does increase the overall thickness of the Eee, but it does form a nice gap underneath the laptop while in use. This provides better airflow for the laptop which is always a plus.

I would recommend this battery to anyone who needs longer battery life for commutes or cant guarantee having a wall socket like in a lecture hall. The price in my opinion is great and the free shipping is a big plus.

Ubuntu 8.1 (Intrepid Ibex) and Firefox 3.0.3

Al — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:53:14 +0000

I just wanted to share a little gem of knowledge with anyone who runs into the same issue I did with running Firefox 3.0.3 on Ubuntu 8.10. On a pretty much fresh install of Ubuntu, I opened up Firefox and noticed that my Back, Forward and Stop buttons along with my History were all disabled. I looked around Google for an answer and found it a little tricky to find a fix. On the Firefox forum, they were dismissing the ticket as no reproducible and blamed it on broken plugins. But that is not the case. If you have this problem, you need to run Firefox as root once in order to get it working. Once you run it as root once, it will work fine normally after that. If you don’t know what it means to run as root, open up a terminal and type this in:

sudo firefox3.0

It will then ask you to type in your password. Do so and Firefox will open and all of your buttons should be working now. Hope this helps anywho who was as confused as I was when this happened!

How I am Making the Best of a Practicum

Al — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:52:09 +0000

This year at school I have been able to take part in a two semester practicum. A group of my fellow students and I are tasked with creating a piece of software from the bottom up following all of the Software Engineering principals that we have learned in school. Each group of students in my practicum course had to find a client who needed some software built for them and elicit requirements from them. Then from there they start the whole process of designing software; making system diagrams, designing objects, planning databases and so on. The students then move on with the development of the software (the fun part). The students then end the project with a one hour presentation to the department faculty, industry professionals and fellow students about their software and their experience. I wanted to share some of the things that my group and I did to make the best of and learn the most from our practicum.

1. Start early

We actually started talking to our client during the summer. This helped a lot as we had a much better grasp of the problem as September rolled around and the clock actually started. We actually have proof of concept code code written the third week of school for some components we knew had to be in the our project. Starting early also helped us and our client “buy in” to the project early. All of us have cared deeply for the project since the first day back to school and our client still continues to give us good ideas and effective criticism.

2. Leave your programming comfort zone

We took this opportunity to learn something new and try something neither of us have done before. We decided to build the whole project on bleed edge .NET technologies in C#. None of us had experience with C# or .NET. Yet today we use ASP, WCF and WPF in our project. We had to plan in a lot of extra time into schedule for learning everything, but is has certainly paid off and we all now have new skills to put on our resumes. Ill write more about what our project is about in a post soon.

3. Spend lots of time together

During the first semester of our practicum, we spent 10+ hours a week in scheduled meetings. During those meetings we discussed design/architecture, we programmed individually and we did some paired programming too. All of this time together was great because we could bounce ideas off each other very quickly. Since we were all learning something new, we also all got a chance to teach the other members of our group something we just learned. It may seem like overkill, but I strongly suggest planning as much time as possible to be in the same room together and just work together. It is just much easier to communicate face to face instead of in IM/Email.

Anyone else who has done a practicum in school, I would love to hear your story about it in the comments! Also, if you are thinking about doing a practicum and have any questions fire those off in the comments too!