Re: Why no third party solutions?

[george@cs.nps.navy.mil (Robert George)]

> I think this is because the Thinkpad is a relatively new
> machine, and also because the Thinkpad battery is probably one of the
> most sophisticated around (and thus harder to reverse-engineer and
> bring to market).
> 

The reason that the ThinkPad has such great power management, and a weak
explaination for why the batteries cost so much, is that they contain a
microcontroller (I think it's an 8051) with voltage/current sense 
circuitry.  I'm don't know about the Toshiba, but most of the clone
notebooks have lousy power management.  The Acer notebooks we have can
not sense the battery level - they beep when you only have minutes left.
They also cannot charge while the laptop is on.  These are all things
that alot of ThinkPad owners take for granted.  

It's like systems engineers or hockey goalies: when things work well,
nobody notices, when things don't work so well, people bitch...

 
 


| Robert George            |  Army Research Laboratory              |
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