[080407]
460!
So I drew a comic (479) on the TC4200 last week. For the most part it sucked balls, but it looked like a comic and not a piece of crap. I’m at least becoming confident that while there’s a upper limit to art quality that needs to be pushed forward, there’s also a lower limit to art quality that’s slowly being pulled up as well. Like my worst art now is still better than my best art two years ago. Something like that; at least in the same vein.
On the whole, I’m very happy with this laptop. There are very few downright less-than-good things I can say about it, and while drawing seems to be one of them, part of the problem may just be my less-than compitent tablet-based drawing skills.
There are a lot of small touches that, while not very significant individually, I really liked on the whole. I might have mentioned that the keys seem to be textured to resist wear a bit better than standard Dell keys. The clickers on the trackpad and touchpad are also reubberized for the same effect, as is the palmrest, which seems to have a protective sheet over it. I like how they did away with the legacy ports and included three USB ports instead (and one on each side of the machine to boot, rather than three in back or something). I even comment on the power cord; it’s about twice as long as the ones I’ve had on Dells and I can use the machine on my bed in my dorm. That’s a really nice change. Then there’s the hidden latch and the little scrolling thing on the trouchpad and I could go on and on. Regardless, my 500m has worked five long years and deserves a rest.
I did a clean install over the weekend with the 80GB drive I raped from my 500m and lo and behold, HP’s software still kinda sucks. There were like three or four drivers for all the little custom buttons and inputs on the tablet and I wasn’t really sure which ones did exactly what and which ones I needed so I played around with them and stuff still doesn’t totally work. Some of the functions overlap with the functions provided by Windows Tablet and it’s all a very confusing mess. The tablet driver was also kinda flaky, so I stuck with the Wacom driver (though I had honestly hoped that HP’s driver would help the drawing). This is actually the first time I’ve done an installation from a non-proprietary external optical drive (my dad’s Latitude X300 has a proprietary one) and I’m surprised how smoothly it went, especially considering I used an old desktop IDE optical drive with an adapter instead of something more conventional (no other choice here: I sold my external Plextor drive a long time ago).
Tablet mode actually had some uses that I didn’t foresee. When you’re reading manga or a PDF file, you can use it like an ebook and have a portrait screen. When you’re watching anime in an inconvenient location, it can also be easier to switch to slate mode than to have the thing in laptop mode. So on and so forth.
Interestingly, it’s also hard to find wallpaper for the thing. You only need 1024 x 1024, but it needs to work centered in landscape or portrait mode, which can be challenging. At the moment, I’m using this rather simple Aria wallpaper which just happens to work without any modification (though the wallpaper I had on my 500m nearly worked well) [100614: dead link].
So I changed the hard drive here in part to squeeze the battery and in part to increase storage capacity. I bought the drive a while ago specifically for the low power consumption (and it was on sale at Fry’s; planned to make a non-external-powered external drive, but that never materialized). It’s a Fujitsu MHV2080AH (80GB, more than I thought I’d ever need at the time, and still more than enough considering how I impulsively delete/move stuff now and then. All of my machines now have 80GB drives; unless you count Colette’s pseudo-external 500GB) and it’s a little loud, but it as an idle power draw of 0.6 watts, which is still pretty damn good for a 5400rpm drive. The 40GB Hitachi 5k100 that came with the TC4200 drew 0.9 watts. The Hitachi 4k80 I had in my 500m drew the same. Active power consumption is about 2 watts for all three drives, but we aren’t doing any really heavy disk work going between class to class. Ideally what we’d want is a Hitachi 4k120 drive (0.3 watts idle, desite being a 4200rpm drive), but I’d have to buy it and I haven’t been able to find it cheap.
In my battery squeeze quest, I considered swapping the Pentium M 740 with a Pentium M 1.3/1.4 (11-27 watt TDP versus 6-22 watt TDP, respectively), but I was in Newark with my good friend generalachoo who suggested that I should undervolt the 740 instead. Since all laptop BIOSes are a piece of crap, this implies software undervolting, which is not a terribly elegant solution, but extra battery life is more important than elegance here. Using the free RMClock, I was able to stably shave abut 0.3 volts off every SpeedStep level on the 740, dropping the idle voltage from 0.9880 volts to the lowest allowed voltage (at least by RMClock) of 0.7000 volts. Full throttle voltage went from 1.3080 volts to 1.0040 volts. Not necessarily a good representation of temps, since I’ve been using it on my bed for a few hours now. I could have brought in the Pentium 1.3 or 1.4, but like I said, RMClock wouldn’t let me bring those below 0.7 volts, so it’d be a pointless loss in performance, considering the machine is idle 90 percent of the time.
All in all I estimate that I’ve gained about 30-40 minutes of battery from the drive and the undervolting. I haven’t actually done the whole battery drain test, but based on the relatively accurate (at least for this battery) windows battery monitor, I should be getting anywhere from 4.5 to maybe even FIVE hours under light loads (notetaking and browsing only with screen brightness at uber-low). The 740 also idles at least ten degrees lower than it used to, which is a pretty good drop as far as undervoltng goes. Got a similar result with Colette’s Athlon XP. Completely stable under Orthos/Prime95 for at least an hour on each Speedstep setting (and significantly more at lowest and highest) I might add.
Anyways, I’ve been playing with the undervolting settings on my D830 as well, but I ain’t done with that yet. I was hoping to draw another comic over the weekend, but it didn’t happen. Oh well. That’s all for now. Have a nice day.
