Re: Crumulent battery life
"4-5hrs? really? WTF? In a land of tablets and other ~£1000 laptops with 8hr-12hr run times how the hell do they think this is good enough?"
Apples, oranges, and marketing guff. You can't compare with tablets, because they typcially run ARM CPUs, which are slower, and designed around low power. Try comparing a similar Intel and ARM, and you'll see the ARM isn't up to it when it comes to grunt. Don't get caught up with numbers, you're buying a laptop or a tablet, you're not buying numbers and marketing.
My brother in law has a term for this - Shit and Oragano. It loses a bit in translation, but basically it means, no matter how much herb you put on crap - it's still crap.
I've just replaced the battery on my Ultrathin Acer Asprie One 532h, and tested life by hammering the CPU at 100%, HDD on all the time, screen on all the time at full brightness, about 5 hours on an expanded battery. That equates to about 2.5 hours on a regular factory battery. Not typical use of course, but it's a very repeatable test.
The manufacturer's quote for the regular factory battery life is 9 hours. That's achievable, if you forgo some luxuries, like using the hard drive, and having a screen brightness bright enough to be usable, and you don't mind the screen going blank every two minutes, or actually running any processor intensive software.
Yep, totally achievable. You just need to add a bit of Oragano.