Painting by Data

Very few people are seen with Windows laptops at open source conferences nowadays, unless, that is, they really want to be the center of attraction as stone age cave dwellers. For a while, I had been looking around to replace my old laptop when an offering by Dell caught my eye: a cute Mini 9 Ubuntu netbook at an unbeatable price of US$ 230 (Figure 1). So I finally made the move. Leif, a guy from work, even gave the cute gadget a funny nickname, "Mini-Me," after the tiny clone of Dr. Evil in the second Austin Powers movie.

My first impression was exhilarating; aside from some weird issues with ssh and the wireless driver, which I could resolve online, it actually worked! I then went on to replace the meager 512MB RAM with 2GB from a no-name supplier for just US$ 9.95. But soon after, I got suspicious: Would the netbook now consume more power in suspend mode and prematurely discharge the battery? Being an engineer by trade, I had to investigate.

From Notes to Diagrams

First, I refitted the old memory module, suspended the computer, and read the battery status of the reanimated machine at irregular intervals in the course of the next 36 hours. Figure 2 shows my hand-written notes: a list of discharge percentages and times.

[...]