Battery cheapness

I've expressed my frustrations before, particularly with respect to battery capacity. I now have a nice example of the battery problem.

I'm in the process of fixing my older sister's old Tecra 8100. It has a Pentium 3 of some sort, 256MB PC100 RAM (upgraded), 14" screen, etc. She uses it for internet browsing, email, and word processing, so no huge amount of power is needed.

Since the battery (10.8V/4500mAh) is completely dead and my sister is not in a position to buy a new one, I requested and received permission to re-cell the battery. Last night, I cracked it open, and found the expected nine lithium-ion cells, each with 1500mAh capacity. The Li-ion cells used in laptop batteries typically come in one of several sizes, each indicated by a five-digit number. The first two digits indicate the diameter of the cylindrical cells in millimeters, and the last three indicate the length in tenths of a millimeter. Thus, the 17670 cells in this laptop are seventeen millimeters in diameter and sixty-seven millimeters in length. Other common sizes are 18650, 18500, and 14500 (AA size).

Off I went to the intarweb to find some new, hopefully higher-capacity cells for this battery. I found that 17670 cells are far less common than 18650. Not only that, it turns out that the highest-capacity 17670 cell I could find for a reasonable price was 1800mAh, while 2200- or 2400-mAh is quite common for 18650 cells.

In the course of repairing this laptop, I nearly completely disassembled it. The only thing that I didn't touch was the system board, which I was (thankfully) able to leave in place. Having done a nearly complete tear-down and reassembly, a realization came to me as I looked at the battery: Toshiba could have made it bigger.

The nine cells contained in the battery completely fill the battery casing, making a block that is 17x51x205mm or so, once you include the contacts between each rank of cells. If Toshiba had opted for 18650 cells instead of 17670, the package would have been roughly 18x54x200mm. That's one millimeter thicker and three millimeters wider. Inside the laptop, cramped as it is, there is plenty of room in both of those dimensions for the battery to have grown.

Surprisingly, lithium-ion battery capacity hasn't increased much in the last several years. My old Thinkpad 600 contains cells which have a similar capacity to those in use today. If Toshiba had opted for the modest 2200mAh 18650 cells instead of the 1500mAh 17670 cells, they would have netted a nearly 50% improvement in battery life, pushing the laptop from its stock 3-hour life up to four and a half hours.

You may say that the engineers were attempting to reduce costs by using the slightly-less-expensive 17670 cells. Even if they were, however, I don't believe it gives them any excuse. With the amount of room available to them, they could have made the battery compartment large enough for 18650 cells, and inserted 17670 cells for the standard battery. This would allow them to also market an "extended" battery with the greater capacity. With the ridiculous premium they charge for extra or bigger batteries, they could have made a killing.

I'm still going to re-cell the battery, but I won't be doing it with 17670 cells. Instead, I ordered six 2200mAh 18650 cells. I would have liked to insert nine 18650 cells, but it's already a tight fit. If I need to, I can shave down the inside of the battery case to fit the 18650 cells, but the extra 3mm in the other dimension is too much to compensate for. I'll end up with a battery that is lighter than the original (although that makes little difference to me or my sister), but which has pretty much the same capacity.

Amateur Car Review: Subaru Outback

Background: I travel fairly often, and sometimes have to drive a lot. I've never driven the same model rental car more than once, so I'm getting a fairly broad exposure to different types of cars.

I am by no means a car expert. I drive a '95 Toyota Corolla to work, and my wife drives a '01 Honda Odyssey, so don't be surprised if I ooh and aah over any any new perks or bells or whistles that have become common in the last seven years or so. I won't make any presumption about being able to judge a car's performance, since I just don't drive that way. I also will make no extra effort to find out what different options come standard vs. with a premium package. Think of this as a "normal guy" review. If you rely solely on my opinion while buying a car, you're nuts.

First review: Subaru Outback ('07 or '08, don't know which)

This past weekend, I travelled to Utah to attend the wedding of my wife's older sister. The car I ended up renting was a Subaru Outback. I drove it about three hours to our destination, did a little running around town, and then drove back a few days later.

The good:

• The controls are easy to find and pretty intuitive. I didn't have any problems locating anything I needed, although the radio panel seemed a bit busy.
• In the center armrest, I found a compartment with an auxiliary audio jack in for plugging in an MP3 player, DVD player, laptop, or whatever, along with a standard power connection. So it's easy to hook up your music source and hide it away.
• The cargo area is big. Many full-sized cars, including the Dodge Charger, can't hold our double stroller in the back. It fit just fine in the Outback, and left plenty of room for our suitcases.
• It's quiet, at least to my ears. Lots less road noise than my Corolla, and even a little less than our Odyssey.
• I was impressed with the ease of ingress/egress.
• The clock/temperature/mileage display was useful, but it took me a long time to figure out how to reset the Average MPG display. None of the buttons on that display perform that function. Turns out it's linked to the trip odometer, which is displayed amidst the gauges on the dashboard. You select and/or reset using the button on the dash.
  

The bad:

• I have yet to drive a car that has a satisfactory cruise control. And this car was no different. Going up a slight incline at 60-70mph kicked it down into "this has to be bad for the car"-sounding 2nd gear. I can't really ding this car specifically on this point, since it seems to be a problem with just about every car out there.
  
• The coupe-style frameless windows seemed flimsy. Not having had much experience with this style, I must ask: is this typical for this type of door? I'm used to being able to close the car door by grabbing whatever part of it is closest to me, which is usually the window frame.
• Our kids' car seats fit just fine in the back, but after searching in vain for the top/center LATCH anchor, I gave up and resorted to using seat belts. Only later did I notice the center anchors--they were located in the ceiling. Why the Subaru engineers couldn't find a more appropriate, non-view-blocking location is beyond me. Also, the anchors have removable plastic covers, rather than being tucked inside the seat cushion. Removable means "easy to lose." In fact, a previous renter had managed to lose two of the covers.
• If you want to unlock the car with the key (they didn't give me the remote), you can only do so from the driver's side. And there does not appear to be a way to unlock all the doors at once using the key--you have to unlock the driver's door, open the door, and push the lever. Compare this to my Corolla, where unlocking once will open just the driver's door, and unlocking a second time will unlock all four doors.
• The seats are shaped oddly. During my three-hour drive, it felt like someone had moved the lumbar support from the bottom of the seatback up about six inches. It was mildly uncomfortable at first, but the discomfort did not increase with time, as I expected it would.
• My wife found it comparatively difficult to twist around in her seat to tend to the kids. I can't really explain that one, but it's true.
• The car comes with Daytime Running Lamps. I hate those. If I ever buy a car that comes with DRL, I'm cutting those wires.
• Along those same lines, the headlights are HID, and aimed (predictably, typically, and unfortunately) to the right angle for a motionless car. This means that if you a) go up a hill, b) accelerate, or c) go over a bump, the beams go too high, and you dazzle anyone unfortunate enough to be in front of you. It's annoying, even if you're the one in the HID-equipped car.
• Is 25MPG on the highway the best we can do? My Corolla consistently gets about 33mpg, and isn't much smaller. Without a great deal of perspective, I could be off-base on this one
• The cupholders for the front seats, though effective, are too far back, so you have to contort a bit to use them.
• Our minivan has a thermostat--set a temperature, and you can forget about needing to adjust the climate controls. It's a feature we now find indispensible, but it's one that's unfortunately lacking in most cars. Including this one.
  

Indifferent/didn't test/other miscellaneous stuff:

• It has a roof rack, if that matters to you
• It looks pretty decent, but I'm not an expert in that realm
• You can manually control the gear changes, if that's something you need
• The console buttons are backlit red
• My model had seat warmers. Neither my wife nor I care for them, so we never used them.
• The cargo area had included, removable/retractable covers. I'm not sure when you'd actually use them, unless you had something in the back to keep hidden from casual observers.
  

Overall, despite the overwhelming numbers in the "bad" category, I would have to say that the car was pleasant to drive. I didn't notice the same seat discomfort on our return trip, so perhaps the fact that I had been sitting in a plane for five hours before renting this car had an effect on my shape. Most of the negatives were little things which don't apply to every potential buyer out there.

Frustrations with laptops

It seems that the notebook industry hates me. From a few years of experience hauling around various sizes and type of laptops, it has become apparent that the companies who manufacture, distribute, and market laptops will do anything in their power to make it either impossible or ridiculously expensive for me to get a laptop that meets my needs. Here's a list of my requirements:

1) No Windows Vista. This immediately eliminates all notebooks marketed to the consumer crowd. Nothing in a retail store is going to come with XP. Linux would also be acceptable, provided the graphics hardware plays nice with Compiz Fusion.

2) A 13 or 14" screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Widescreen monitors are good for precisely two things: movies and games. They're not wide enough to comfortably fit two windows side-by-side, and you're forced to sacrifice vertical resolution in order to get the widescreen. For viewing documents or web pages, however, widescreen simply stinks. Most manufacturers seem have an aversion to selling anything not widescreen, or anything smaller than 15.4", in the US. Don't believe me? Take a look at the ads that appear in the Sunday paper for Best Buy, Circuit City, OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, Staples, Fry's, etc. They *might* list one or two laptops smaller than 15.4", but none have a "normal" aspect ratio, and none have a reasonable price.

(and things aren't getting better)

3) Long battery life. I want five hours from a standard battery. There are very few notebooks out there that do that.

4) Optional second battery in the optical drive slot. I have a Dell Inspiron 700m at home. Aside from the keyboard (see point # below), it's a pretty decent machine, until you get to its battery life. The standard battery, a 2200mAh unit, lasts less than 3 hours new. The extended, 8-cell battery lasts somewhere in the region of 5 hours (woohoo!). However, I hardly ever use the optical drive, and I would love to have a secondary battery there to extend the battery life by a few more hours. Dell's management decided, in all their wisdom, that since it was a consumer-line laptop, they would not include the hardware to allow me to swap in a battery instead of the optical drive. A little bit of research gives me the impression that such a feature is reserved exclusively for business-line notebooks.

5) Docking connector. Like the second battery, this one seems to be arbitrarily limited to business-line notebooks.

6) Headphone jack on the front. Happily, this one actually seems to be fairly common nowadays.

7) A good keyboard. The keyboard is my biggest complaint about the 700m. The keyboard is very cramped, and for no apparent reason. There's about 3/4" worth of bezel on each side, so there was certainly plenty of room available when they were designing this. Sure, the width of the keyboard happens to match with the width of the screen, but whoever decided that sacrificing a great deal of usability for a small iota of aesthetics should be taken out back and shot.

8) Good internal layout. My experience with laptops doesn't cover the entire industry, but it's apparent to me that they aren't doing comfort testing on these things. Here are a few suggestions:

• Put the battery and the optical drive closest to the user, under the palm rest. Every laptop I've used has the hard drive in front, right under one of my palms. And it gets hot. I'm not willing to spend $1000 to get a cooler SSD to compensate for a fault in the design. This, incidentally, would also help with the laptop's stability.
  
• Don't put ventilation intakes or exhausts on the bottom. This is one of my minor complaints about my 700m, as well as the D600 I use at work.
  
• Aimed at Dell: why does the power supply have to use such an enormously long plug where it attaches to the notebook? The standard Dell notebook power supply uses a plug that is a full two inches long, and protrudes at least an inch and a half out from the notebook when it's plugged in. This looks ridiculous when it's sticking out from the side of my otherwise petite 700m. There's no technical reason why the connector can't be shorter, or why it can't be a right-angle connector like we see on many other laptops.

9) CPU speed isn't a big issue for me. I like the ULV chips I've seen in some laptops. I don't crunch huge spreadsheets or run a highly-trafficked website or play demanding games with my notebooks, so getting the fastest possible CPU is not a priority.

10) Reasonably priced. I get bothered that smaller laptops have a huge price premium. Sure, the smaller size requires better/more engineering work, but why not do a single design for a small notebook and then reuse that design for the bigger ones? Nobody's forcing the OEMs to use a larger motherboard for a large laptop.

That about covers it. Oh, one more point:

Someone needs to convince the laptop manufacturers that it's time to find a new hinge mechanism. We've had the current design for over 15 years, and I think we've all become convinced that it's not good enough. I have only witnessed a very few cases where the screen hinge has neither lost its friction nor gained some amount of play. Yes, the current design takes very little space, but it wears out fairly quickly because it is exposed to high stresses. Of course, in our "throw away" culture, nobody expects you to keep a piece of electronics more than a few years, but some of us are perfectly happy using our hardware for many years.