GRT-815M - battery maintenance

There are many guides on the net how to maintain the battery of your laptop. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to give real data as a reference for the GRT815M model.

I use my desktop replacement always running on "AC_Power". From time to time I perform some "exercises" of the battery (twice a month) by fully discharging the battery. So this is the situation after 3 years and 4 months:

The "Charge Cycles" counts are not accurate. They are at least double since I have used the computer several times on battery, anyway. The first sign of degradation appeared on the third year. On another laptop (HP) and the same scheme for the battery exercises the battery is already showing degradation after 6 months...
I have to admit that the GRT815M seems to take special care in this particular situation. The HP computer charges automatically the battery every now and then when it is below some threshold, while I have never seen the GRT to charge the battery during the 2 weeks period between the exercises - this is almost equal to keep the battery outside the computer.

As concerns the usage of the computer:

It is always plugged in the power outlet. I turn it on only when I use it - usually every evening for about 6 hours. If I check the time counter of the HDD it says 7986 hours which is close to 333 days constantly working but this doesn't reflect significantly the battery maintenance since the battery is charged even if your laptop is off but still plugged.

GRT-815M - Norton AntiVirus slow-down

If you still keep your preinstalled Norton AntiVirus and you have upgraded to Windows XP SP2 you may experience serious performance decrease of your old computer. Possible solution for you might be to install/replace your memory to 1GB. Anyway, the reason for the slow-down comes especially from the AntiVirus program. PROPER REMOVAL (uninstallation) of the program gives you back all the glory of your otherwise powerful computer. Uninstalling the NAV might be tricky so, take some time to read some posts on the net about the problem.

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=61013
http://basconotw.mvps.org/SymRem.htm

These posts are a little bit outdated but they will give you a clear idea about the situation. Last year (2006), I used the latest NAV uninstall tool and that one did well. There was still some traces after that but some manual intervention helped as well. I have to say also that this did not help the same way on another computer, when replacing NAV2007 with SAV2006 did not work for the firewall. So, proceed with caution. To summarize: if it works for you and you don't experience performance problems - keep it. Otherwise you may consider replacing it with AVG free (that was my choice). AVG also slow down a little bit the computer but it is way better than NAV. So, that is all from me.