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April 06, 2016

Asus A32-1015 Battery

It all boils down to hardware acceleration, ladies and gentlemen. Using the GPU to offload the majority of the work makes for smoother computer performance. The problem is; hardware acceleration is only supported by H.264 while VP9 relies a lot on the CPU to give it the boost it needs.Many companies such as AMD and NVidia have promised to support VP9 where this is concerned, but after 5-years, nothing has happened yet.

This leaves computer users to dabble through their options. They can simply switch to Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer because those browsers do not support VP9, and as such, video playback on YouTube and most other websites should be painless due to hardware acceleration. However, switching to those browsers might be a tough ask.

The next option is to download a plugin for both Chrome and Firefox that is called, h264ify. This plugin forces Firefox and Chrome to request H.264 from YouTube. Going this route should fix battery life issue among others, but we canâ€™t be sure for sure how long h264ify will be supported

The first corporate laptop we've seen with an AMD A12 processor inside, the HP EliteBook 745 promises an attractive design and solid performance for a reasonable price. Starting at $749 ($1,049 as tested), this laptop is certainly light enough to take anywhere and, though it falls short of most Intel-powered competitors, powerful enough to perform mainstream tasks. However, the EliteBook 745's sleek, silver-colored chassis can't make up for its poor battery life, weak typing experience and dull display.
HP's design language for most of its laptops is sleek and silver. You can see it in the consumer-focused HP Envy 13t, and it's on display in the EliteBook 745. The body is black on the underside and a beautiful shade of gunmetal gray everywhere else, and it has a reflective HP logo on the lid.

The computer is constructed from aluminum and magnesium and felt solid in my hands, but I noticed a little bit of give in the lid when I pressed on it while the system laid flat on a desk. HP claims that the keyboard is spill-resistant, so a couple of drops of coffee or water on your desk should pose no issue for the EliteBook.
When you open the lid, you see that same shade of gray for the palm rest, black island-style keys, pointing stick, trackpad and fingerprint reader. The 14-inch display is surrounded by a thick, ugly gray bezel similar to the one on the Envy 13t. It really takes away from how sleek the rest of the laptop is, especially when you see the almost bezelless Infinity Displays on Dell's XPS 13.

The 3.4-pound EliteBook 745 felt light as I carried it around the office and easily fit in a bag. At 13.3 x 9.3 x 0.74 inches, it doesn't take up too much room on a desk, but it's still a little bigger than the Lenovo ThinkPad T450s (13.03 x 8.90 x 0.83 inches).

I wouldn't want to use the keyboard on the EliteBook 745 for long periods of time -- the keys felt really shallow with 1.3 mm of travel (we prefer keys that have at least 1.55 mm of travel). Typing also felt stiff, as the keys bottomed out too quickly, and I noticed some flexing in the center of the keyboard.

ã€€I beat my average score on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, hitting 110 words per minute (my average is 100), though I had a 2 percent error rate, which is high for me (I'm usually around 1 percent). I did appreciate the backlight on the keyboard, which has two levels of brightness for when you're in dim office meetings or travelling for business.

The 3.9 x 2.1 touchpad is accurate, and I had no trouble with gestures, including scrolling, pinch-to-zoom and extending three fingers (to show all of my open windows). The pad uses buttons to click, but I wish I also had the option of clicking with the touchpad itself.Some business users prefer a pointing stick, and I found the one on the EliteBook to be comfortable and accurate. The one major problem is that there is no center scroll button for the pointing stick, which means that users will have to utilize the scroll bar to move down Web pages and documents. The pointing stick is more accurate, but two-finger scrolling sure makes the trackpad easier to use.

The 14-inch 1920 x 1080 display on the EliteBook 745 may be fine for spreadsheets, but its inaccurate colors make it less than ideal for media viewing. I watched the trailer for Captain America: Civil War, and the blue tint cast a purple hue over Iron Man's red suit and made Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson's skin tones look wrong. I was able to see details in bright light, like bruising on Tony Stark's face, but a chase between Black Panther and the Winter Soldier in a dark tunnel was hard to make out on the display. Viewing angles were fine up to 45 degrees, though the closer I turned to 90 degrees, the less detail I could make out.
In our testing, the screen registered 317 nits of brightness on our light meter. That's brighter than the ThinkPad T450s (236 nits) and the Toshiba Portege Z30t-B (264 nits), but the Dell Latitude E5250 shone brighter than the rest of the field at 347 nits.

The EliteBook covers 84.1 percent of the sRGB color gamut (100 percent is considered excellent). The Portege Z30t-B hit 100 percent and the ThinkPad 450s, 100.8 percent. Only the Latitude E5250 registered less, at 68.2 percent, and the category average is 85 percent.The screen could be more accurate, too; the EliteBook notched a Delta-E color accuracy score of 4.37 (the closer to zero, the better) and was beaten by the Latitude, ThinkPad and Portege (an astounding 0.2), as well as the category average.

Back on the main Battery Saver screen, you can toggle the mode on and off, using the slider if you want to enable it manually, but unless you know that youâ€™re going to spend a long time away from a power socket thereâ€™s little reason to do this. To make more advanced tweaks to the settings click the Battery saver settings link at the bottom of the page.

In this dialog box, you can choose to enable Battery saver automatically and choose the battery percentage when the feature is activated. The default setting of 20% should suit most laptops, but if your battery lasts a long time anyway, you may want to drop this to 15% or 10%; conversely, if your battery doesnâ€™t last very long, you may want to increase the setting to 25% or 30%.

The default setting blocks apps from pushing notifications (eating processor and battery time), but you can override this setting using the â€˜Allow push notificationsâ€™ tickbox, although I donâ€™t recommend doing so. Your laptopâ€™s screen is a massive drain on the power of your laptop, so lowering its brightness can help improve battery life. For that reason, it makes sense to tick the â€˜Lower screen brightnessâ€™ option, so that you laptop will automatically dim the display when Battery Saver turns on.

HP's partnership with Bang & Olufsen just keeps on giving. I put the EliteBook 745 on our test bench in the Laptop Mag lab and blasted Ellie Goulding's "On My Mind" and "Guns and Ships" from the Hamilton Broadway soundtrack. The speakers, located just above the keyboard, got loud enough to fill the room. Vocals and mids were clear, though the bass could have been deeper -- that is, until I found the Bang & Olufsen app.
Our test unit of the EliteBook 745 came with a 2.1-GHz AMD Pro A8-8600B APU with integrated Radeon R7 graphics, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This setup was fine for everyday use -- I streamed 1080p video from YouTube, wrote in Google Docs and had 10 tabs open in Edge before I saw any slowdown.
Still, this HP isn't as fast as competing Intel-powered business laptops. In Geekbench 3, a synthetic benchmark that measures overall speed, the EliteBook achieved a score of 5,494. The ThinkPad T450s' Intel Core i5-5300U CPU beat it at 5,993, while the Toshiba Portege Z30t-B and its 5th Generation Intel Core i7 pulled further ahead with a score of 6,401. The Dell Latitude E5250 and its Core i5-5200U fell behind the pack at 5,329.
This notebook was blown out of the water in our computation-heavy OpenOffice spreadsheet test -- it took 6 minutes and 36 seconds to match 20,000 names and addresses. The second-slowest of the group was the Latitude E5250 at 5:15 -- over a minute faster than the EliteBook. The T450s completed the task in 4:41, and the Portege banged it out in 4:15.

The real story, though, is how efficient Microsoftâ€™s video player is. If youâ€™ve been avoiding default players because of how bloated Windows Media Player was in older versions of Windows, it might be time for a re-think.

"Look up, waaaaaay up" is a phrase familiar to Canadians of a certain age, who watched "The Friendly Giant". The kids program aired from 1958 to 1985 on CBC, which our TV antenna grabbed from the local affiliate across the border in New Brunswick (I'm from Northern Maine). There's something about iPad Pro's enormity that makes it feel more like something the Giant would use.

My question this fine Friday: Is iPad Pro too big? For the majority of potential buyers, my answer is unequivocally yes. I don't see a product made for the majority. Whatever Apple's post-PC ambitions, iPad Pro is more a proof-of-concept for future laptop replacement. However, for the few -- creators looking for larger digital canvas -- iPad Pro offers much. For the many, the first version will work out the kinks, such as getting the app platform placed, for mass-market successors. Warning: Embracing the expansive tablet may make switching to something smaller nearly impossible. Size matters, and sometimes larger is better.

(This is second in a series sharing my experience, observations, and review of the tablet, which I hope to use as my primary PC throughout February.)During Steve Jobs' second coming as CEO, several design ethics consistently permeated Apple products: Humanization, touch as primary user interface, and miniaturization are among the primaries. There's a living, human-like quality to using Apple tech, and you see it too rarely from other inventors in the industry. iPad Air and mini, along with iPhone, are intimate devices because of how they respond to you and the ways you caress them with your fingertips.

Finger-first is one of Apple's oldest design ethics, going back to the original Macintosh launched 32 years ago. But touch's role started to expand with release of the click-wheel iPod in October 2001 before taking a huge leap with iPhone in June 2007. Apple is too obsessed with touch nearly nine years later, I contend. Touchless, voice-response interaction matters as much and in many ways more. iPad Pro is finger-friendly and human-like responsive but I wouldn't describe the user experience as intimate or immersive as the original 9.7-inch tab or its Air successes. Size is major reason.

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