LOL Geekz

Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of Hp laptop battery   First post by: www.itsbattery.com

Just remember this, you young computer geeks: Content rules and always will.

Let's say you were writing that college essay, or that big proposal, and you had the fastest super-Pentium available out there, and a gazillion-meg memory on that laptop.

What would it matter that you had that super-duper computer if, as they say in the business, your ideas were ... let me use the Microsoft thesaurus feature here, so I don't use an offensive word ... your ideas were ... horse hockey?

Sure, with all that computer power, you could download a lot of videos and music.

So what.

That doesn't get you a job. That doesn't get you into that graduate school. That doesn't impress that corporate bigwig.

That bigwig wants content, and the ideas that'll make money for him. And even right now, in the fabulous year 2002, unless you're doing graphics, that content could be written on a computer with a memory that'd only hold 10 pages of text which is what, 8K or 16K of memory?

Last week, I wrote about the original classic laptop, which was around back in the mid-1980s, and really only had a 10-page text memory. It was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and it came with a little gray-on-gray screen, and it didn't even have a hard drive. Radio Shack didn't keep sales figures for the laptop, but Rick Hanson, of Pleasant Hill, Calif., who runs a Web site devoted to the TRS-80s (www.the-dock.com), estimates 6 million of the laptops were sold, and that around 1 million still are in use.

Why? Here are excerpts from an e-mail I got from Ross Anderson, a former Times reporter. He used one of these (now worth $200) Radio Shacks back in 1997, when he did a 17-part series retracing the Klondike Gold Rush.

Ross wrote me:

"For the record, the fact that the TRS-80 was expendable was only one of the reasons I chose to take it on the trip. The others:

"The Times was willing to buy a state-of-the-art satellite phone, but the things weighed 50 pounds. I had no interest in hauling that sucker over Chilkoot Pass, or down the Yukon River. Besides, when I investigated, I learned that by the time you get as far north as the Yukon, the operative satellite is so low on the horizon ... I would have had to climb a mountain, which did not interest me.

"Secondly, all the highfalutin laptops have very limited battery life, 95 percent of which is used to drive the color screen. With 2 or 3 hours of battery, and only encountering an electrical outlet every 4 or 5 days, it would have been useless. The 'Trash80,' on the other hand, doesn't have a fancy screen, so it goes forever on four AA batteries such as Compaq Presario NX9000 battery.

"In any event, I wrote each night, sitting in a tent or on a log beside the river. ... The machine worked perfectly. And nothing else would have."

I had e-mails from people such as Mike Oswald, a retired airline pilot. He had bought a TRS-80 in 1984. He loved the machine, but one day found out his son had given the laptop to a friend who came from a poor family and was then attending Bellevue Community College. That kid used the little laptop to take class notes, and eventually ended up getting a scholarship to a big-name California college.

Jim Byron of Bothell wrote me about how Boeing in 1987 sent him to a management-training class at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Since the school wouldn't let us tape lecture notes, we all had to take lecture notes. Each day, I would type them into my Model 100. Since it couldn't hold all my notes, I added a floppy drive. It worked for me! My little laptop was the only one in the class and I was often questioned about how I could remember this or that fact. I did it without a hard drive and 1G of RAM!"

So listen up, you young computer geeks.

I'm not telling you that you should be using one of these old, ancient laptops.

What I am saying is that last year's model, and the last-last-year's computer model, and last-last-last-year's computer model is plenty fine. It's the ideas, not the processor speed, that count.

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Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Apple Laptop Battery   First post by: www.itsbattery.com