A word of warning :

If I haven't been hallucinating again at 01:00am last night, there is a serious pitfall when using the 770 the way I described above (ie keeping the WLAN interface up at all times, with a cyclic ping or otherwise, while you work in the ssh session). It seems this eats the battery faster than the AC adapter is able to charge it !

I say this because when I started my test yesterday the battery was full or nearly so (3 or 4 bars). I then plugged it in (battery icon changing to animated charge) and left it so the entire evening with the ping and ssh session active. When I unplugged it again after this (admittedly very lengthy but mostly inactive) session, there was only one (red) bar left ! Instead of recharging the battery had actually emptyied...

Either that or my 770 has a hardware problem :-)