HP Gives a Lesson in Batteries, Explains the 32-hour Laptop
Ever wanted to know how batteries work? You should. They power your laptop and all your mobile devices.
A single Li-ion cellHP recently held a battery life event in Silicon Valley – or more specifically, the birthplace of Silicon Valley at the HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., where in 1939 Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard established the Hewlett-Packard partnership.
HP brought the media there to highlight one of its business laptops, the EliteBook 8460p, and its impressive claim of a 32.5-hour battery life (according to Mobile Mark). Such a battery life estimate is at the top of the industry, but also does carry an asterisk on HP's page about how it's achieved:
Up to 32 hours requires HP 9-cell (100 WHr) Li-Ion primary battery, separately purchased HP BB09 Ultra Extended Life Notebook Battery and customer download of the latest Intel graphics driver and HP BIOS. Notebook must be configured with Intel graphics, optional Intel 160GB SSD drive, HP LED HD Display and requires Windows 7 operating system. Battery life will vary depending on the product model, configuration, loaded applications, features, wireless functionality and power management settings. The maximum capacity of the battery will decrease with time and usage.
We went hands on with the fully-battery-loaded model and HP's battery life boasts, while still industry-leading, can drop for power users who are demanding constant effort from their machines. Light use will definitely allow the CPU to enter idle states, leading to more than a full day of run time. Those who foresee long lengths of time away from an outlet will see a great feature in the extended battery accessory. For those who actually have to carry their laptops around, however, the additional heft is considerable – such is the relationship between battery capacity and weight. The "Ultra Extended Life" battery is a bolt-on accessory, so the added weight can come on only at times only when needed.
The extra nine cells inside the extended battery pack
Dr. John Wozniak, an HP distinguished technologist in power technology, helps to engineer the battery technology that goes into the company's portable products. He gave a talk at the historic dining table in Palo Alto talking about what powers our mobile devices while we're away from an outlet.
We were able to capture the majority of his presentation at the HP Garage, which we're pleased to present to you below. It's nearly an hour in total length, but we assure you that you'll come out of it with a new understanding of the thought and engineering that go into your laptop and other mobile devices.







Even on the link in the article to the website, it says the 9 cell will last 13 hours 45 minutes, but that might not be with the specs they say is needed to make it last 32hrs
My Atom netbook with a ~55 watt hour battery only lasts about 5 hours, and from the wall with a kill-a-watt it takes about 13 watts all the time. This is an Atom netbook with an older less efficient chipset though. Power consumption doesn't go up noticeably if CPU is idle vs CPU @100% load. A watt or two at most.
EDIT: I think I read it wrong, a 100wh internal battery + a 100wh super duper ultra 100wh external battery yields up to 32.x hours of life.
OK, so 6 watts power draw from the batteries on average. Still, very hard to believe unless your doing absolutely nothing on the machine and screen brightness is way down.
Wouldn't the screen itself take about that much power if it's at full brightness? My CCFL 15.x" laptop screen takes about 10 watts from the wall (on vs full brightness). LED is supposed to be 40% more efficient or something like that.
I'm in the process of tearing it apart and upgrading it from a 6 cell to a 9 cell as well =D
It has two batteries. The primary being the 100 WHr, the extended is unspecified (though I haven't watched the video, but it may say in there).
"32 hours requires HP 9-cell (100 WHr) Li-Ion primary battery, separately purchased HP BB09 Ultra Extended Life Notebook Battery"
However, the extended battery appears to be a 9-cell configuration as well, so assuming it's 100 WHr, it would still require 6 watts per hour (100 + 100 = 200 WHr / 32.5 Hr = 6.15 W. But that's speculation on my part.
Those pictures make me want to cry! HP clearly doesn't understand battery life. I wouldn't mind more battery life, but not if it meant that bulky piece of expensive, inefficient, crap!
Correction: $150 for the pack, and probably about $50 in raw batteries.
2nd Comment: Then again, after listening to the guy in the video for a little while, he gets my respect, but I simply think the design is a poor company decision.
i'm going to treat this promised battery life with as many grains as salt as i do printer's ppm ratings.
1. That extended battery pack thing is that big because it has to fit a variety of different HP models, all with similarly-spaced apart mounting points. Could the design have been much smaller? Of course, but I have a feeling that a smaller, custom design lost to the compatibility argument.
2. U.S. regulation caps battery capacity by class, so anything beyond what HP (or other manufacturers) put in a single package (100 Whr) would have to be classified as something potentially more hazardous. HP simply couldn't fill all that empty space with more cells, even though that would be awesome.
I'd want to see 10+ hours of ACTUAL usage on a 14" notebook with an i5-class CPU... with a 3cell battery.
Ill be impressed when stays on for 100 or more hours.
i'm going to treat this promised battery life with as many grains as salt as i do printer's ppm ratings.
I think their numbers are correct. I have M11x R1 and I have it normally at 8.5W when browsing that is not light browsing. By playing with it, slightly reducing brightness and fancy diods, I managed to be at 7.5 W. My battery life was when totally new at 8.5 hours. Now this is first generation of this computer with hungry CPU, standard HDD and old chipset. With new CPU, SSD and chipset 6W is totally understandable, I believe they could do 5 W if they want. So their numbers match.
But the M11x uses low voltage CPUs, Sandy Bridge is 17w TDP, the HP laptop uses 35w TDP CPUs.
But I get what your saying.
and there at the bottom of the page .... "HP Recalls More Laptop Batteries"
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lithium-ion-li-ion-battery-recall-laptop,10470.html
Toshiba computers do not play nice with Wings3D, beacuse of the inability of updating the OpenGL drivers.
If you need updated graphics drivers for Toshiba computers with Intel HD graphics, you need to buy a new computer, If you need to update OpenGL!
That way we could simply carry a spare or two and definitely make it thru even a long day of work (or play).
Lithium polymer is special because it's a powder. In a regular battery it's filled with acid, so they have to be pre-manufactured in a metal casing. Lithium polymer has some interesting drawbacks though. If I remember correctly it was more sensitive to degradation than lithium ion batteries. If you want the differences wikipedia will give you a nice list.