Over the last couple weeks or so I've been driving out to some random coffee shop (usually but not always starbucks) and sitting to try and make progress in that book I was reading (PHP/MySQL Head first). Although I haven't really made a lot of progress.

Recently I did see an add for one of those "universal laptop battery" deals for like $30 or whatever. And since my laptop never did have terribly great battery life to begin with never mind two or so years later so I decided to buy said universal battery pack, in particular the iRecharge Universal Rechargeable Battery for Laptops.

Took me a while to figure out that there was no "input" adapter for my HP, just an adapter for the "output".

I put on charging as soon as I figured out how to hook it up. Took a surprisingly long time to finish charging. I mean the charge indicator (several green LEDs you get when you push a battery status button) has all four green LEDs but the LED that turns green when it's done still stays red for a while.

The instructions also suggest charging the laptop battery fully before using it so I did that as well. Then, finally, I tried it just now. Plugged in this new universal battery and powered up the laptop.

If the status bar in Windows XP is any indicator the laptop thought it was plugged in to AC. At least, there was no battery icon in the system tray to tell me. I was only on it about five minutes at the most, using the internet mostly. As soon as I was done I powered off the machine and plugged the battery back in. For some reason even 15 minutes later the LED indicator is still red. Seems a little odd frankly.

I have no idea how long this new battery is going to add to my total time but I'll be happy with 90 minutes. Apparently how it works is you plug the universal battery into the laptop with a fully charged internal battery and then when the universal one runs out the laptop runs on the interal one for the rest of the stretch. So maybe if I'm lucky 2 1/2 hours of battery life.

The whole point is maybe I'll be able to sit much more "where ever" like outside or at a table with no accessible power plug and still be able to study or whatever. Some-what fortunately I can still work without Internet access, though that is actually nice.

I feel like I should write this down as long as I'm thinking about it (it's almost on topic). At one point I was trying to think of all the ways I could automate installs of Windows including detecting if Windows was installing on a desktop or a laptop. Other than testing the detected processor type as reported by "systeminfo" and comparing that to a list I was at a dead end. Then two things occured to me: laptops have that extra set of settings for what to do with the lid is closed and also see the battery as an actual device in the device manager. So one or both of those two things must be stored in the registry some place. So wouldn't it be possible to simply test if either one (or both) of those two things even exist and take action based on the results?

The laptops ya see have wifi, whilst the desktops do not. So the desktops probably don't need the wifi auto configure stuff. And the laptops could have the preferred power scheme imported I suppose via reg import feature. Horray. There was another minor difference I wanted to vary depending on laptop/desktop but now I can't remember. I'll think of it again later probably.

I'm sure I have more to write but instead I'm going to bed.  ¶ 9:48 PM