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All posts tagged "power"


Monday, July 25, 2011

Get Extra Device Power with the Tekkeon myPower MP3750 External Battery

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Hardware & Accessories" @ 07:30 AM

Please click on the video title above to watch it on YouTube in 1080p full screen video.

Who doesn't' want more battery life from their mobile device? I think we all do. I've been on a personal quest for years to find the best multipurpose external battery that I could find. I've looked at a few of them of the years (such as this one, and this one), but every one I've looked at has had limited functionality in some way. Usually it's that it's not compatible with whatever new laptop I'm using. The Tekkeon myPower MP3750, which sells for $119 in the Digital Home Thoughts Amazon.com store, is versatile battery in that it not only serves as a power source for a laptop, but with the USB port it can power a variety of devices. I was eager to take a look at it, and for the most part have been quite impressed with it. Read more...


Tuesday, January 18, 2011

FastMac U-Socket: Simple Yet Brilliant

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts Accessories" @ 02:00 AM

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/...king-it-a-bett/

The above picture pretty much says it all, doesn't it? It's so simple, so obvious, yet so brilliant. $19.95 per plate is a bit expensive if you deploy them all over your house, but I bet the average home could make make great use of a handful of these placed in smart areas for charging smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, etc. Each USB port kicks out a potent 2100 mAH, which should be plenty to charge any device that can accept USB power. I think I might order a couple - I'm not much of an electrician, but I suspect they'd be pretty easy to install. Just make sure you turn off the breaker for that zone of your house first!


Thursday, December 30, 2010

Laptop and Netbook Battery Usage: The Breakdown

Posted by Jason Dunn in "Laptop Thoughts Talk" @ 08:00 AM

For the life of me, I can't find the article that I pulled this graphic from! I seem to recall it was on a Microsoft blog, but every search I use fails to find it. Regardless, it's legitimate and quite enlightening I think. It demonstrates the reality of battery/power usage on current laptops/netbooks, and busts the myths that some people still cling to, such as:

  • "If I switch from a hard drive to an SSD, I'll get better battery life!". Nope, not really - modern hard drives are ultra-power efficient and assuming your system has sufficient RAM, switching to an SSD won't do much for your battery life.
  • "Turning off Wifi and Bluetooth will get me better battery life" Perhaps, but only slightly - at only 4% of power consumption, networking technologies being turned on or off won't make a big dent in power consumption.

The biggest thing that will allow you to eek out maximum battery life on your laptop? Turning down the screen brightness. Nothing else you can do will make as big of a difference as that one change. The good news is that as we see more integration of chipset functions and GPU functions into the CPU, the overall chipset and GPU chips will use less power, and ultimately give us better battery life. That's why the new AMD Fusion APUs (CPU + GPU) and Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU + GPU chips are so interesting...they will bring about a level of chip-level power savings that we haven't seen thus far.

I think 2011 is going to be a great year for laptops and netbook!


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