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Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Why the hell does my 1 year old work issued laptop (HP elitebook 840) have a battery life of 2 hours at normal usage, while my personal laptop (Dell Latitude 7490) which was launched in 2018 (!!) can do the same sort of work for 5-6 hours?

I’ve compared battery sizes and they are roughly the same (51 and 52 Wh).

My work laptop gets used for work which is moving some pictures around, browsing the web and some light excel/word/pp work, so what’s eating the battery?

Unless my IT overlords at work have installed some sort of bloatware/monitoring?
 
How do you use the laptop in terms of running on battery vs. hooked up to power supply?
I run mine (XPS 13) almost exclusively off the docking station, and the battery is pretty much shot to hell by now.
 
Both laptops are used when powered most of the time. My personal laptop got a brand new battery pack when I bought it since the old one was quite bulgy, so it only has a couple of months of usage, but the battery life difference is massive. Also speed/reactivity difference is huge despite having the same OS.

I just don’t get it? Every single part of the ‘new’ laptop is better (i7 vs i5, 32gb of ram vs 8 gb, etc) yet still the work laptop performance is vastly inferior
 
What i7 and i5 are they, specifically? Could well be that your private i5 is a low-power variant that extends battery life by design, while the work i7 is basically an electric heater with no regard for efficiency. Or there is some IT mandated anti-virus crapware constantly burning battery in the background.
 
NooDle said:
Unless my IT overlords at work have installed some sort of bloatware/monitoring?
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leviathan said:
Or there is some IT mandated anti-virus crapware constantly burning battery in the background.
Click to expand...
I vote it's one of these. Any laptop, even one with H-series high-power-low-efficiency CPU should get better than 2 hours battery life out of a 50 Wh battery unless you're constantly keeping the CPU busy (the above would be 25W average). That really should not be doable with some light office work...
 
i5 8350U vs i7 1270p

Work pc also runs MS Teams which eats up a LOT of memory, but even then it shouldn't be that bad?
Checked with colleagues and all of them report the same shitty performance.

Also at random times the fans spin up massively even when you're not doing anything particularly processor heavy, some people are calling it a fan rather than a laptop. It sounds like an airplane taking off

(Previous work PC was an iMac which had ridiculous battery life of 10+ hrs, even when doing lots of online meetings, so we only now realise how spoilt we were)
 
I'm thinking of getting the AirPods 4. My current AirPods 2 are dead for all intents and purposes, the left one doesn't last for more than 20-ish minutes. (At the beginning of this week, it wouldn't last more than 5 minutes. Talk about timing!)

However, I can only somehow afford the base model, the one without ANC. Tomorrow's the release and I'm seriously thinking of getting a pair. Should they be worth it? At €160 they're not horribly expensive, but I'm not exactly making a ton of money...
 
They’re probably fine. I have the AirPods Pro 2 which are great, apart from the fact that my iPhone randomly tends to hijack them from whatever I play content from, regardless of whether my iPhone plays any content.

Now, I had to have a backup pair in case the AirPods Pro crap out on me, so I got the CMF Buds by Nothing, their budget set. At the price, they are unbeatable with good sound quality and decent ANC. They only thing that sucks is the app, but they are fine on the standard settings so you don’t need to fiddle with that.
 
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marcos_eirik said:
They’re probably fine.
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that's what I'd say as well... they will sound perfectly fine, but you shouldn't exactly expect bang for the buck, here. AirPods are always gonna be fairly expensive for what they deliver.
then again, I also run a pair of 2s and 3s because I simply cannot stand the in-ear plug thingies. they never fit, and I actually like to be able to hear some of my surroundings well. the biggest drawback imo, apart from the price, is indeed the hijacking thing between multiple devices. sometimes, to get them to pair with my watch, I actually have to walk out of range of my phone (I only do this for runs, so only a slight inconvenience), otherwise for some reason my watch will decide it would rather play the content via airplay to my phone, then to the AirPods. weird.

my wife also has a fairly cheap pair of buds from one plus, and she seems perfectly happy with those. apart from regularly losing a foam ear insert thing for some reason.
 
eizbaer said:
[…]the biggest drawback imo, apart from the price, is indeed the hijacking thing between multiple devices. sometimes, to get them to pair with my watch, I actually have to walk out of range of my phone (I only do this for runs, so only a slight inconvenience), otherwise for some reason my watch will decide it would rather play the content via airplay to my phone, then to the AirPods. weird.

[…]
Click to expand...
The weird thing is that it’s also very inconsistent. They are rarely hijacked away from my iPad or iPhone by other devices, but they were hopeless to use with my iPod when I tried to listen to a podcast at the beach the other day. I had to disable Bluetooth on my iPhone to stop it doing that every two minutes. I’m currently on holiday in Turkey, and spent a whole day getting my iPhone updated to iOS 18 on the shit slow WiFi at the hotel’s beach.

That being said, multi device support is a real pain on most other wireless headphones I have come across, CMF Buds (Nothing) included. So the convenience factor of the AirPods seamlessly switching between devices is the main selling point to be honest.
 
I work for a small business and the "IT department" is me. Well, sort of. A coworker broke his laptop screen and I'm the one that needs to sort it out. It's a Dell with an active ProSupport plan.

I thought it was a case of opening a ticket which would make a Dell tech show up at our door with spare parts and tools. But no, Dell claims we don't have a credit account, and they can't open one for us either for reasons unknown. My employer has a good credit score, so that's not the issue. They want us to pre-pay the estimated repair cost. So what happens if the machine turns out to need something else while the tech is in there? Would we need to pre-pay again and wait for the payment to show up in their system before the repair can be finished?

It boggles the mind. Also, this is not how you get us to buy more Dells.
 
It’s almost if what I think deep down was true all along: people should commute to an office to do office work.
 
The problem here isn't people not being in an office building, but late-stage capitalism treating workers as disposables instead of humans. These excesses can be easily prevented if the company has even an inkling of interest in their workers as humans. Just have a connection with them.
 
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