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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?
On my iBook, I've gotten about four hours runtime under Linux without having set up any power conservation, but the battery didn't last the next hour in suspend mode. (There is no suspend-to-disk mode.) IMNSHO power consumption in suspend mode is too high. I expect I could squeeze out an extra hour or so if I adjusted my system configuration - currently the disk never spins down because of the various daemons I run. The main problems I've encountered are:
If you're used to having a control key to the left of A, you'll have to rewire the keyboard. Apple laptops use ADB keyboards, which were designed for use with mechanical latching capslock keys. Modern ADB keyboards still behave as if their capslock keys latched; therefore, it's not generally possible to remap the key in software.
As it is on many laptops, the power connector is fragile.
The touchpad is positioned such that my right hand tends to brush in to it, moving the pointer or resulting in a click. If it were positioned slightly further to the left, this wouldn't be a problem. You should probably try one out to see if your hands fit it better.
There is only one battery slot. Supposedly the laptop will last about 25 seconds in suspend mode without the battery, giving you time to swap, but I haven't tested it.
If you're developing for a Unix platform and you aren't writing in assembler, an Apple laptop might be worth looking in to. If you're developing for Windows, look elsewhere.