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Laptops with Decent Battery Life?
Dave Robillard asks: "I've been looking at new laptops recently (hooray for disposable income) and I can't find a single one that has what I want: relatively 'slow' processor (I do not need a Ghz PIII in a laptop), networking, and most importantly, loong battery life. The real reason I want a laptop is for coding on the run. I don't need to play Quake @ 100fps. Are there any laptop manufacturers out there that machines like this?" Any laptops out there that have a battery lifetime that exceeds 2 or 3 hours of usable lifetime?
You may want to consider a refurbished laptop, like some of the ones here. And if you're really serious about long battery life, these claim to give you up to 12-16 hours of usable battery life, with the downside being that they are external, and a bit pricey:
Electrofuel PowerPad 120-A Notebook Battery (up to 12 hour)
Electrofuel PowerPad 120-B Notebook Battery (up to 12 hour)
Electrofuel PowerPad 160-A Notebook Battery (up to 16 hour)
Electrofuel PowerPad 160-B Notebook Battery (up to 16 hour)
PS:Sorry all the links go to TigerDirect, I'm sure you can find the products on Pricewatch also. Just remembered seeing the external batteries in one of thier catalogs, is all.
Have you considered getting a mac? The iBook is an amazingly decent little beastie for the price, and the Ti is simply astounding. Good (and I mean good) battery life, you can underclock the iBook easily for more battery life if you like that tradeoff, OSX, OS9, or Linux, built in networking... seems to satisfy your every desire.
I've had this sig for three days.
I've been running a new model iBook under OSX 10.1 and think it's terrific. The workstation version of the OS has apache and perl and you can get postgres etc. S'pose it depends on what type of coding you want to do, but I've been very happy with it - zero complaints.
Apple claims up to 5 hours for the iBook, and the same for the PowerBook G4.
--
Adam Sherman
Freelance Geek
After using Vaios for a long time and hating the battery life I just upgraded to a Fujitsu S Series and got the 2nd battery. You can get embedded ethernet (although I went with the firewire instead), and with the primary battery I get over 2 hours doing perl development at the airport/on the airplane. I also got the optional battery that takes the place of the dvd/cdrw and get about 5+ hours. This of course depends on what you are doing. For example converting a video project (raw) to mpeg will kill my battery in not time.
I'm doing all of this on w2k, your linux mileage will be different.
I'm currently planning on replacing my six pound Gateway Solo 9300 laptop (P3/800, 160mb, 20gb, 15.1") with one of these two Transmeta Crusoe-based laptops. Mostly because they're uber-light, and with all-day staying power. I'll take offers on the laptop, btw. :)
.83~1.16" (?), and weighs 3.27lbs. Battery life is reportedly around half that if the backlight is turned on the whole time.
The first is the Casio MPC-206E Cassiopeia FIVA. It runs the Crusoe TM5600 at 600MHz, which means it's probably comparable to a 400MHz P2/P3. 8.4" TFT LCD, 800x600. Max 192mb RAM, comes with a 20gb HD. Cool toys include onboard 56k softmodem, 10/100 ethernet, 1 Type II PCMCIA slot, sound, VGA out, video out, FireWire, CompactFlash, USB, and an included dual-boot Linux partition. However it's also A5 sized (8.7" x 7.7" x 0.83"), and some people have found it too small to type well on. Nine hours of battery life with the extended life (heavier) battery, and it only weighs 2.18 pounds without.
The other option is the NEC LaVie MX or MX2. Another Crusoe laptop, this one boasts a larger 10.4" 1024x768 reflective LCD (so it's daylight readable) with a backlight you can turn on indoors, and is larger overall. 10/100 is with a dongle, two USB, no FireWire, VGA out is with a dongle, and no video out. Battery life is 8-11 hours standard (no additional batteries to switch in), it's 10.4" x 8.3" x
Dynamism has a neat comparison engine, linked to there showing the LaVie MX2 and the Fiva.
Also, NEC has the Versa DayLite, which is the US model of the LaVie MX, so you don't necessarily have to find an importer like Dynamism for it.
I have a Lombard series Powerbook that I can get about 5 hours of on a single battery charge. From what I have read and heard about (look on forums.macnn.com for more info) the Wallstreet, Lombard, Pismo, and Titanium series Powerbooks have excellent battery life as well as performance under the battery. A good deal of the time I'm running my Powerbook at home or hotel room (like right now) on line power but lots of times have to go to the battery. You can easily set up a low power profile in the location manager in MacOS (8.5-10.1) so you can switch pretty quickly and easily to low battery mode to get every last bit of power out of your battery. With the screen brightness down as low as it can get and the hard drive set up to sleep after five minutes of inactivity I have gotten five hours usage (running Office2001). With the screen set low I can get nearly 3 hours of playing games like Star Wars racer and Diablo2. Unfortunately I don't have and iBook but they apparently have the same battery performance. One cool aspect of the Wallstreet, Lombard, and Pismo series Powerbooks is you can use a second battery which literally doubles your power lifetime. With plenty of RAM Mac laptops will go for a very long time. You can pick up 400 and 500 MHz Pismo Powerbooks on MacResQ and Powermac for a little over a thousand dollars. IIRC Yellow Dog runs just fine on the G3 based Powerbooks if you're interested in running it. OSX can run X apps through XDarwin and about half of the FreeBSD Ports collection pretty well if you want to go that route too. Besides the battery life of the Mac laptops you get the low weight only rivaled by the smallest PC laptops (Sony and Fujitsus as well as a couple others), though with the caveat that the Mac laptops have an internal drive bay where some smaller PC laptops have external ones which means they have one more thing to lug in your bag. Hopefully that helps. Luckily the hype is to be believed when it comes to Apple's power claims on their portables.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I have a Dell Inspiron 4000. With the second battery I get about 8 to 9 hours in Linux. The one disadvantage is the 2nd battery shares a slot with the cdrom and the floppy, so you can have only one of the three at a time.
My A21p, admittedly a high-end machine when new, has about a 5.5 hour battery life with both batteries installed. This machine is an 850 P3 with 512 MB RAM, 32 GB HD and (best of all) 15" 1600 X 1200 X 32 display. It is heavy, about 7.5 pounds, and large. The battery life noted above is achieved with Red Hat 7.1 and performing a series of compiles and frequent saves (old habit). If you are willing to pay the freight, it's a fine machine. The display just has to be seen to be appreciated. FWIW.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Look at the Compaq Armada series. I have heard many good things about the Armada E500 series. One of the neat things is that you can pop out the bays for floppy and CDROM, and stick batteries in there, giving a total of 3 batteries, and apparently pretty good battery life. I haven't used one myself, though.
I use a Dell Inspiron 5000e (CuMine PIII-750/650 w/SpeedStep, 128MB RAM, 10GB HD, DVD, 15" LCD) that gets a full 3 hours per battery under light (e.g. coding, as opposed to encoding MP3s) use, without even enabling any powersaving features. With a second battery in the DVD bay (floppy is non-removeable), it gets a total of 6 hours.
A lot of these long-life laptops are ultralight, ultra-tiny as well (especially the Crusoe ones), and they drive me nuts with their tiny keys. So why don't any mini-laptop keyboards follow the "happy hacking keyboard" model? They manage to be small, while still having big keys, by omitting crap like caps lock, function keys (use fn+1 for f1), windows keys, home, pause, etc. I really don't need any of that crap, just 26 letters, 10 numbers, and half a dozen special (modifier, enter) keys. Maybe some arrows would be nice too, but that definitely does NOT add up to a 101-key board! Don't even get me started on the space wasted by touchpads (as opposed to trackballs)....
Sorry for the rant!
--JRZ
I can get 2-3 hours of reasonable battery life on my Sony Viao F-series laptop, per battery.
Look for the laptops with multiple battery slots. My F-series has a second battery slot if you take out the floppy drive. If you feel like buying extra batteries, you can generally have a virtually infinate battery life.
Note that most of the laptops with excessively long battery lives tend to be micro-small, which doesn't seem nice for coding on the run. So you may have to make comprimizes.
Gentoo Sucks
simple get a psion 7 it runs on a strongARM two AA batterys are all thats required to run a strongARM lets see ANY x86 CPU do that !
(yes I know psion recently gave up selling to the public but still sell bundles for corp's and will do so for a long time)
MOT CPU's dont do bad(witness the raves about ibook) but really ARM and MIPS are the way to go
(oh and get a small LCD as these tend to eat POWER for breakfast, lunch and tea)
so have a look at CE powered devices that can be turned into linux/BSD machines or just stick to what it came with
regards
john jones
You will not find a fully functional laptop with better battery life. It is a bit on the small side, though.
It was priced around US$2000. [Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with NEC, transmeta, Fry's, or Linus Torvalds]
Getting it running Linux is easy, even the winmodem is supported (see the Linux laptops list for more info). Spec-wise it's fine (800x600 screen, the whole machine is about the size of an A4 sheet; P3-500, 128Mb ram, 12Gb hard disk). They're getting kinda scarce now, but I have seen them going in some discount stores for fire-sale prices, and there's always Ebay.
You win again, gravity!
I get a whopping 40 minutes on a full battery :)
I have a IBM A20p with 700mhz CPU, 18gb drive, 192mb ram, 15" display and I get usable 4 hours out of it - without playing mp3s ofcource.
Yeah, I get right around that too. Using the bundled software to slow the processor doesn't seem to help. I think I'll have to buy a 2nd battery and swap it with the CD-ROM. Thankfully I don't need battery power all that often.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
I have got an IBM Thinkpad 760el p133, it was dirt cheap, obviously. But it is ok for coding, and with 2 batteries, it lasts about 6~7 hours in FreeBSD. BTW: the 2nd battery replaces the CD/Floppy. I got mine off of Ebay. I know you probably would want one of these, but w/ BSD it works great.
One thing you can do to make sure your batteries stay good is to drain them at least once a month. That keeps them going well.
Another thing to keep in mind is keeping the power consuption to a minimum. Lower the brightness of the LCD screen. Adjust the other power settings to minimize the power used. Turn off any other things that don't need to run like virus protection or the like. Try not to do anything that beats on the hard drive.
And of course the other thing to remember is get a couple of spare batteries. That way you can run as long as you like, with a few quick interruptions.
In most(all) current thionkpads, you can remove the CD-rom drive, and replace it with a battery. In my thinkpad, with the second battery, i get 6 hours of battery life. The laptop has a 650mhz pentium 3, but i have it set to clock down to 134 mhz on battery, and the screen set the lowest brightness.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
I have a Dell Inspiron 3700, that is relatively untuned, running Redhat 7.1, and on one battery, I've had it go through a 3.5 hour meeting where I was taking notes and regularly goes through a 3 hour class.
So chalk me up as another one recommending Dell.
I hate to mention it because it runs WinCE but what about a Hewlett-Packard Jornada sub notebook. You don't need speed, so you're in... and you want battery life uber alles, and that's what this wee puppy does... days of battery life, not hours. Smaller than average so if you get carpal you could be in trouble but otherwise I found I could just (JUST) touchtype on the damned thing...
but if power's your issue, check it out.
I am a leaf on the wind
Using a Dell Inspiron 3800 with 2 of their high capacity main batteries (53wh) at the same time, I can get 8 reliable hours, and usually stretch it to 9. I have a 12.1 inch screen which helps the battery life, keeping in mind that for a laptop, the screen is the largest source of power drain, so if battery life is important, keep the screen as small as you feel is necessary for your work (smaller screens also mean significantly cheaper cost for the computer). I'm running a 600Mhz Celeron II w/256 RAM and a 5 gig hdd.
I was looking for pretty much the exact same thing as you, about two months ago. I settled on a refurb IBM Thinkpad 770x I got off ebay for $700, but I've seen them as low as $500 depending on the video features. It can hold two LiOn batteries at once, and you can hot-swap batteries (ie if you had ten batteries, you could keep swapping between them, yanking one out while the other powers the machine - with the money you save on the thing, you could buy a bag full of batteries).
It's a PII-300, which is plenty for everything I do (human rights reporting in a developing country with unpredictable power, half 110v, half 220v, half the time not working) and should be fine for coding. Big 14" TFT screen, nice IBM keyboard, built in 56k modem (altho I put in a 3com 10/100 / worldport cellular card). It's also got a digital LCD that indicates % battery remaining, and the standby function with win2k works very quickly (ie you can punch it inand out of standby mode in 3-5 seconds, standby being virtually zero power). I put 320mb of ram in mine.
Also has hardware DVD decoding (dvd drive goes where the 2nd battery does, and you can hot-swap), AC3 audio out, SVideo capture and TV out, NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Infrared on the front and the back if you're palmy. Stereo speakers.
Here's one on EBay (no affil, this is an auction that's already ended)
Considering how quickly laptops depeciate (the 770X was $3499USD MSRP two years ago), it seems silly to buy a 1ghz machine if you don't need it. These machines have 3 yr wty on them, which means you can buy one that still has a year left on it - word on the street (well usenet street) is that IBM careth not whether or not you're the original owner. A pal in IBM service confirmed this, but ymmv.
Hope this helps, email me if you want more info.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
is what I have, the specs are here.
For having a 1Ghz (700Mhz with SpeedStep), 30Gb HDD. 15" SXGA screen running at 1400 x 1050 I still manage to get almost 4 hours out of 1 battery. Add the other in and I can get over 7 hours. Mine may be a tad pricey, as I got every single feature out there, but it starts at around 1100$. Check it out
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
My Dell Latitude C600 is both very light and contains a relatively long-lasting battery. I've gotten 4 hours or more out of it at times, doing pretty normal stuff the whole time - wireless Internet, MP3 listening, DivX viewing, etc. etc.
Cheers,
levine
The manual says '3.8 hours on low power, 2.6 hours on full power'.
I normally get about ~70 minutes if I'm luckey. Once I got 2hr 50min with the LCD off. It is really annoying because it goes from about 60% to 2%.
the original mac portable can get about 9 hrs. off it's lead-acid if you run it off a ramdisk..i guess it could be a bit heavy, though.
My TRS80 portable lets me hax0r BASIC code for almost a whole day straight! I don't need no stinking 14.1 TFT's, only wimps use the command prompt! Honestly, you can serial-port into your linux machine, but you're still on a cord.....