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That's actually really bad for the battery because the cells don't complete the charge/recharge cycles. Then when you do suddenly need to start carrying the laptop around, the cells won't "dig deep" and keep going. The circuitry does the wrong thing.

I think this is a side effect of Microsoft's longstanding push for each OEM to write their own "drivers" for simple stupid things. There are motherboards out there that actually report different hardware settings to Windows than "generic Bios" and this is just another one. We've seen hard drive controller have "hidden codes", "soft" sound cards, "soft" modems, and the list goes on. Microsoft finally felt the need to "fix" the bad hardware their older OSes allowed OEMS to hide for years, just like when they finally added a good wireless manager to Vista after the one in XP was a dog and OEMs pre-SP had to roll their own.

My point is that these things SHOULD be open hardware APIs, but their "just a little broken" so you need the "Windows X-version" drivers... that way each OEM can feel special, Microsoft can poke vendors like AMD-Intel and Nvidia-ATI against each other over petty details, instead of how good a computer allows the user to do tasks.

edit: You have to get the joke. Microsoft keeps it's monopoly by being the only player that can sort out all of these little pieces. They pit chip manufacturers, computer makers, software writers, and users against each other so they're so busy "stomping bugs" they can't go anywhere else.

Edited 2010-02-12 05:34 UTC