launch safer laptop battery

Posted on October 6th, 2009 in Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Sonata battery–which the company is set to show off at the Demo ‘07 show taking place this week in Palm Desert, Calif.–is safer than conventional laptop batteries, but is electrically and mechanically compatible to current notebook designs, according to the company. Notebook makers can thus drop it into their existing models, said CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud, who added that Hewlett-Packard has been testing it for 18 months.

As a bonus, the Sonata battery can be charged to 80 percent capacity in about 30 minutes. Conventional notebook batteries take one to two hours to get to 90 percent capacity.

“We picked 30 minutes and drove development to that,” Lampe-Onnerud said.

The company is part of a wave of battery start-ups that have emerged in the past few years. Most got started initially to improve the runtime on notebooks or power tools. A raft of explosions and recalls, however, have also pushed safety to the forefront.

The popularity of hybrid and electric cars has also juiced the market. Last week, A123 Systems, which makes lithium ion batteries(gd761,kd476) for plug-in hybrid cars, announced it had raised $40 million more in venture capital funds.

Boston-Power has been one of the more noteworthy new entrants in part because the somewhat secretive company, which came out of semi-stealth mode late last year, employs many scientists and executives, like Lampe-Onnerud, who have worked in the battery industry for years. Along with showing off the battery publicly for the first time this week, Boston-Power also announced it closed a second round of funding for $15.6 million.

There is no magic silver bullet inside the Sonata, Lampe-Onnerud said. Instead, the battery differs from conventional notebook batteries through a large number of design tweaks.

“We understand the system. We don’t have a killer chemical,” she said.

The can, or outside casing around the battery cells,inspiron b120 battery,inspiron b130 battery, is made from a metal alloy that is stronger than the iron cans used with notebook batteries and thus will remain intact, in the case of a thermal reaction, or fire, according to the company.

Boston-Power also spent a lot of time on the interrupt system, which prompts the battery to shut down permanently if there is danger of a reaction. (Replacements are covered by a three-year warranty, which Lampe-Onnerud says is longer than the industry average.) The company can’t guarantee the batteries will never have problems, but it has added safety features not seen in ordinary batteries.

“If it is really damaged, I don’t want it to work again,” she said.

At the same time, the battery generally meets the performance characteristics of conventional batteries(latitude d600 battery) on the market today.

HP is likely the first customer, according to Lampe-Onnerud. A contract to put the battery inside a notebook has yet to be signed, but it’s possible a notebook with a Boston-Power battery could hit the market by summer, she said. John Wozniak, an HP distinguished technologist, will appear with Lampe-Onnerud during the Demo presentation.

An HP representative said the company has been testing the batteries and is pleased with the results, pavilion dv6000 battery is better ,but added that further testing will occur. A notebook containing the batteries potentially could come out this year, the representative added, but nothing has been signed and, again, further testing will occur.

Typically, large manufacturers move slowly and conservatively when adopting new components, and then introduce them on a limited basis.

The Sonata will sell for a premium, but Lampe-Onnerud would not disclose details on pricing.

The big challenge facing Boston-Power now is whether it can move into high-volume manufacturing. The company already has an alliance with a large Chinese contract manufacturer.

While Lampe-Onnerud was somewhat tight-lipped about how Boston-Power’s product differs from conventional batteries, a patent search indicates that one change will involve altering the chemistry of the cathode. Currently, cathodes are made from lithium cobalt compounds. The July 2005 patent, suggests swapping that out for lithium nickel materials.latitude d830 battery,latitude d500 battery.

More information can be found under a second patent from February 2005. Although a company’s patents can lead to future products, there is no guarantee that a correlation exists, and Boston-Power has several pending, unpublished patents.

HP Pavilion DV6000 Notebook Review

Posted on September 3rd, 2009 in Uncategorized | Comments Off

HP has some relatively new laptops on the market like the DV6000 series which can be customized or bought in made-for-retail editions. Two models are available for retail purchase, one of which is the subject of this review.

First, The Specs

In my eyes, the DV6000 is proof that PCs are affordable as hell today. These specs compare quite favorably to my desktop, all in a sub $800 notebook.

  • AMD Turion 64, dual core processor
  • 2 GB DDR2 memory
  • 15.4″ WXGA High-Definition HP BrightView Widescreen Display (1280 x 800)
  • 256MB NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) Go 7200
  • 160GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
  • LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support
  • 1.3 Megapixel Webcam with mic built into screen
  • Altec Lansing speakers built in
  • Lithium ion battery-pavilion dv6000 battery
  • 3 USB ports, ExpressCard/54 Slot, Video Out, Integrated Consumer IR, 1 RJ-11, 1 RJ-45
  • Windows Vista Home Premium
  • The DV6000 comes with a thin, little remote control for use in controlling HP’s multimedia player. HP is using a proprietary multimedia player for playing DVDs called QuickPlay. It ties in with the remote control as well as the QuickPlay buttons on top of the notebook.Powerful hp pavilion dv6000 battery, the player is decent, but many times I found myself simply wanting to use Windows Media Player rather than the QuickPlay popping up full screen. Also, the fact that it is tied into the QuickPlay buttons can be a little annoying at times. Several times I have rested my fingers on the top of the notebook and accidently pressed the DVD button and launched Quickplay. No matter what I’m doing, that interrupts the workflow badly.

    Differences between models

    Where the laptops differ is the case color and processor. The DV6770SE features a white case with silver keyboard and HPs “imprint design.” This laptop features an AMD Turion 64×2 TL-62 processor running at 2.1GHz. The DV6775US features a black lid with gray case and “imprint design” but has an Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 processor at 1.66GHz. Don’t be fooled by clock speed, the current crop of Intel processors clobbers all lines of AMD offerings. But, essentially, these laptops are on equal footing.

    The Intel processor will probably give you longer pavilion dv6000 battery life and run cooler, AMD processors are not forgiving when it comes to battery life or heat generation.

    So, that’s the back story and now its time to get to the point. I got the DV6770SE for review but what is said here will apply to the Intel version 99% of the time.

    Display quality

    The display is of what could now be called “average” resolution being only 1280 x 800 (1440 x 900 is becoming more standard) and I wish it was higher. It’s still nice bright and crisp, there were 10 steps between the lowest brightness setting and highest brightness setting. There are enough settings there to keep most people happy. If that’s not good enough for you then additional settings are available in the nvidia Control Panel.

    Activity lights

    Again, not many people think about this on a laptop. Most other laptops have a mix of orange, green, blue and red lights but HP did something different here. Every single activity light on the laptop is a nice “blue” color, even the “caps lock” button and charge indicator are blue. The only change I would make is on the power input, “red” for charging, “blue” for charged which would be similar to Apple’s approach but this is hardly worth crying over– powerbook G4 Battery

    Performance

    Vista has its say about what it thinks about your hardware so lets take a look. As you can see below, despite the “average” nature of its hardware, Vista thinks highly of it. What’s a shock is the rating assigned to the hard drive.

    The hard drive on this laptop is surprisingly fast. Surprising because it is “only” a 5400RPM (as opposed to a faster 7200RPM) drive with a capacity of 250GB. This usually translates to slow performance but I can say that is not the case with this drive. It’s fast, fast enough to receive a data transfer rating of 5.1. Similar 5400RPM drives in my other laptops only rate a 4.2 or so.

    While the 8400M GS graphics card is not a screamer or anything to write home about, it holds its own. You’ll be able to play modern games on this if you lower the graphics effects and resolution a bit. This particular card scored just under 1,700 in 3Dmark06. The same card in a Sony Vaio with 64MB of memory scored barely over 1,000 points.

    It would have been nice to see something closer or a score a little over 2,000 but for this card a score of 1,700 is still nice but not quite on the “excellent” side of things.

    Battery life

    If you don’t mind getting it down to the point where you’re running on “fumes” then its possible to get about 2 hours out of the battery,the same as pavilion dv2000 battery , maybe a few minutes more. Should that not be long enough, HP sells extended life batteries that last longer.

    Conclusions

    The HP Pavilion DV6000 is a really nice,perfect hp dv6000 battery , solid notebook computer and you really can’t go wrong with this unit. The price tag makes it very affordable. The unit sports a nice, sleek design and good all-around performance. It also offers a solid balance of features which really makes this entertainment notebook usable as a desktop replacement. In fact, I enjoy it so much I find myself spending more time working on the DV6000 now than I do my main desktop computer.

    So, despite a few annoyances, you really can’t go wrong with the DV6000 if you are looking for a solid, balanced work notebook without spending too much money.

    Laptop battery can’t charge-Must be the battery have died

    Posted on August 26th, 2009 in battery tips | Comments Off

    Yesterday, my friend miss Yang took her HP DV2000 battery to my home and told me that her battery has died. She said that the battery can’t charge and she has changed a new battery, but still doesn’t work. It seems like a big problem, if the battery have problem, so we go to the repair store together.

    We told all the information to the repairman Mr. Tan, he said that if you changed the hp laptop battery, then it proved the problem is not on the battery, and the laptop can work well, so the reason is only, that is the circuit on the laptop main board been damaged, so we have to unpack the laptop to check it.

    Few minutes later, the laptop main board has been removed, you can see the position in below photo, this is the battery charge port, and if there is no external power supply connected, this is the power supply port of the battery.

    To solve the problem should start at the charge port, check the battery pin has volt output or not, that is the right one highlighted in red circle in below photo, almost of the laptop supply 19V voltage to charge for the battery, then Mr. Tan test the charge pin with multimeter, the result showed the pin has no output voltage.

    Since the charge pin has no output, then we to test the charging circuit of the pavilion dv2000 battery. Mr. Tan turned over the main board, so the component in the yellow circle is the charging circuit. This is a diode and FET (field-effect-tube), Mr. Tan tested the diode first, found one side has no voltage, so that’s mean the current has been cut before the diode, so next, we have to test the FET, the FET is a small 8 pin chip, and the FET also has no voltage. So the result showed the problem is not on diode and FET.

    Mr. Tan tested the charging control chip finally, that is the component in the red circle on above photo. We tested that the current has not been enter into the FET, so there is big possibility of the charging chip has been damaged. After the test showed the problem is do like this, so the solving problem is quite simple, just change a same chip is okay.

    Mr. Tan told us that there is no secret in this, and it is not caused by the wrong operation of user, as everybody knows that the hp battery(pavilion dv6000 battery,pavilion zv5000 battery) will generate big voltage when during each process of charge and discharge, pull in and put out will produce spark at the port, so this is easy to damage the battery or laptop main board, sometimes, after the laptop use for a long time, pull in and pull out the battery regularly will cause the problem of battery can’t charge, meanwhile, the quality of main board component is also important, take this laptop as an example, under normal condition, the big current during charging will damage the diode which at the end of the main board power supply circuit, but this laptop fired the power supply chip, obviously, the malfunction phenomenon is same, but the repair cost has been upgraded.