technical upgrade

The Systems Administrator ordered and fitted a new battery for my laptop.  This is revelationary, or revolutionary, or both.  The old battery had got to the point where it would not really hold a charge at all, and even taking the laptop through to the study and trying to print a simple document was apt to end in failure because the computer shut down before it had finished downloading the instructions to print unless I took the power cable too and plugged the laptop in for the whole three minutes or so it took me to hook it up to the printer and fiddle around with print menus.  (Obviously this would not have been an issue if we had got wireless printing to work, but we didn't, and it would be easier to print if the printer did not live on a low Ikea coffee table while the laptop has to go on the floor, but we'll sort that out at some point when we tidy up the study.)

I am typing this with the laptop, which was 99 per cent fully charged when I started, unplugged so that the new battery can start deep cycling a few times to condition it.  It has made me realise how deeply ingrained had become the unconscious habit of reaching forward periodically to check that that the power cable was still securely plumbed in to the back left hand corner of the machine.  If it is not pushed absolutely all the way home, the laptop doesn't charge, and the first I know of it is when the screen goes blank, followed by the message in that alarming primitive white font on a black ground that the system had shut down because the battery had reached a critical level, saving my data to disc, and that I needed to attach to a power supply and the system would automatically reboot in 13...12...11...10 seconds.

Now that the laptop has got a working battery, it is trying to calibrate itself versus my power consumption.  My battery charge has already gone down from 99 to 85 per cent, on the other hand my estimated time remaining has gone up.  Typing (rather slowly) in Blogger can't use very much power.

I retract that last sentence.  My available time has dropped, in the space of two minutes, from two hours twenty-seven minutes to one hour forty-two minutes.  And now it is back up to two hours twenty-one.  The computer is clearly confused.

As long as it isn't one of those batteries which explodes while charging I'm sure we'll be fine.

Addendum  I am rather sorry to have discovered that Labour are not going to give everybody an owl if they win the election.  As I have already placed on record, I should like a pet owl.  Almost as much as I'd like to be a fly on the wall at any future negotiation between Labour and the Lib Dems in which the owl question was thrashed out as part of the coalition agreement.