Increase Your Battery Life - Reduce Your Productivity?

Who doesn't want to squeeze every last juice out of their notebook/netbook battery?

Problem is, there always seems to be a cost involved.

Reducing brightness - Trying to convince myself it's bright enough at the lower settings. Then getting headaches and eye strain afterwards and blaming it on fatigue.

Power Settings - Maximum battery setting means I have to adjust my power patience setting to maximum too.

Turn off unnecessary ports - What? The inbuilt camera uses power when I'm not using it? Is this some sick joke?

Turn off pretty features on the OS - But they make unimportant work just a tiny bit bearable.

Hate to admit it.

There's no two ways about it.

Just buy that clunky, oversize, protruding, 'I'm going to convince myself it doesn't look ugly' extra long life battery and be done with it.

Unless you have a macbook air.

Mac Dashboard - Snippets of information.

Mac Dashboard - Snippets of information.

I have always loved downloading utilities to make the daily tasks more bearable and to find ways to do those boring desk work.

For example, using a database program to construct a Fax template where I just select the clients and related responses without typing anything. That's just awesome.

Also, little things like downloading a program to check the weather, the world time, rss, delivery etc. The usual things.

Recently, having had to use a Mac for work, there is this clever feature on Safari where you can take snippets off your websites and place it on your desktop or dashboard. What a clever idea. So, rather than downloading the various programs, you can just go to your favorite website, snip the bits that are regularly updated and then put them on your desktop or dashboard. What a clever idea!

Of course there are similar alternatives on the PC, but they are certainly not as fast or as simple or as safe as the one built into the web browser of the Mac. Of course this alone, won't make me switch, well, not yet, but it's damn clever. The only thing is, my dashboard is now cluttered with these snippets and I don't have enough room.

Atari Portfolio - Terminator 2

This was a great machine. They even used it in the movie Terminator 2. Of course you can't do what that kid did in the movie but it had other great features. It was really hard not to love.

It had a great clear display that although wasn't backlit, it was incredibly readable. It was also very retro since it was a dot matrix screen with low 40x25 character resolution.

It had great apps from a simple word processor, database and spreadsheet. On today's high capacity AA batteries it could run for a good few hours. If you bought the media card you can put your mind to rest that your data won't be lost when you changed the batteries.

It was just so usable. The only thing is, it's not particiaurly practical today. It's too big to fit in a pocket and too small to type easily with the keyboard. But I would definitely keep one just to use it as an address book, perform small calcuations, all in a very sparse and clean user interface. It was refreshing that it had none of the obtrusive and colorful graphical user interface which get bogged down with menus or interfaces that look like windows 3.0. Yes, you can install a widget or a utilty on the desktop/notebook but I really don't like the whole mouse and keyboard interface.

To be honest, I still don't know why today's colorful interfaces triunmph over text interfaces. Do you really put pictures of people in your phone address book? I know accessing the internet on a pda is a great and cool idea, but then again, it's a terrible experience in my opinion.

Going Back to Paper.

The paperless experience has come to a disastrous end. It has made me realize that I am not technologically savvy. I ended up using 2 or 3 PDAs. One had better scheduling entry, the other had had a instant access to notes and the other one was just senselessly pretty. I ended up having so much different information on each one. The problem wasn't even that. The problem was charging, backing up and syncing.

I have now ended up using small sized, colored, pocketable paper notebooks. I just write, date and forget. No backing up. No syncing. No charging.

If only there was a PDA that had an instantaneous , functional interface, keyboard entry input, great syncing.... wait, I remember those old Casio Organizers. No! It can't be.

.TXT Files - Great! Oh, wait, no alarms.

Having recently been relying on technology for most things, I find myself not adjusting to it in a savvy way. I  use a desktop, pda  and now finally a netbook. There lies the problem. Syncing all the machines. They all use different operating systems. 

Since, I don't really have time or want to spend the time at the moment to search for the apps that can do it, although it can be fun, I have resorted to text files that contains todo lists, notes, and a planner with templates for quick entry. It was great until I started to rely on alarms. 

I realized I needed to sync all the alarms on all three platforms. You may wonder why I don't just choose the PDA as the main platform for alarms since it is the most convenient. Unfortunately, the only convenient thing about it is the size. Compared to the desktop, entry is slow and laborious. Adding notes on the small tiny keys are just tiresome. Viewing all the entries often involve a lot of scrolling, and the amount of information is limited on the small screen. 

Some days, my schedules have to overhauled and on a PDA this is painful. There are also other days when I have to change the schedule on the desktop, sync with the PDA, only to find out I have to overhaul the schedule when I'm out with my netbook. 

Then there is the interface. Don't you hate going from touch screen (pda) to mouse (desktop) to trackpad (netbook)?

What I really need is a really small clamshell PDA that runs the same operating system as the desktop, fits in the pocket and can instantly resume and have at least two working days of battery life, in case I forget to charge daily. Unfortunately, companies nowadays seems to purposely provide only four out of the five things I need.

Multitasking

I never really gave much thought about the specs on the computers. If they can load the office suite and access the internet, then it's sufficient. However, there are days when I want / need to do 10 things at the same time under a deadline and I wished I had a computer/os that worked.

Here are the things that I needed to do in 20 minutes.

1. Burn a catalogue on cd.
2. Confirmation emails.
3. Final checks on documents.
4. Print documents.
5. Internet for sending packages.
6. Back up information before powering down for the day.
7. Photo upload from camera
8. Touching up / processing photos / while being uploaded from camera.
9. Final adjustments on website using a lightweight application
10. Update information on a database.

I completed 9 of the above tasks.

It wasn't the CD burning that let me down, it was printing the documents which seemed to take forever, when under normal circumstances, there was no problem whatsoever.

I don't mind the disk activity, or the pauses between the application, or the crammed look on my desktop, I just want something that works.

Things I have pondered.

• Switch to a mac - Not possible. since some of the applications / net services require a pc / iexplorer.
  
• Bootcamp - Not possible, since I would be running into the same problems.
• Parallels - Cutting and pasting between the two os? Sharing data?
  
• RAM/CPU. Started with 512mb, then 1gb and now 2gb - dual core. I refuse to believe I need 4gb of ram for general office duties!
• Have a second PC / Laptop - Do I have to fire up 2 computers just to do my general office duties?
• Linux - See switch to a mac. Oh and which version or flavor! The manuals gave me a headache.