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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.
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.
DON'T go out an buy a second battery. Sony has a mail in rebate for one. If you call them and complain about the battery life enough, they will give you a second decent battery as well. Although the decent battery is only worth about 1 15 minutes, it is still better than 37.
Check out the fx210/215 users group on yahoo:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FX210