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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.
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.
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.
That won't be an issue if you're programming for a higher-level target (Linux, POSIX, KDE, etc) - develop the code on the iBook, then just re-compile it on an x86 box when you need to create a production release. I did this with my last project, and it worked quite well.
There's another advantage - when you build your code on multiple platforms, you are more likely to find some types of bug (e.g. those that make assumptions about byte ordering or structure padding).
I think the iBook is a great little platform. The Apple claims of "up to 5 hours" seem a bit optimistic, but it does have very good battery life.
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.
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$2000. [Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with NEC, transmeta, Fry's, or Linus Torvalds]
I think that to some degree, SpeedStep works independently frrom the OS. You can't change operating speeds while running Linux, but if you power the machine on without AC power, the BIOS (or whatever handles that) automatically puts the processor into low-speed mode.
I've got the same laptop (less memory though) and I get 3.5-4 hours plus per battery if I am just writing email or a docuemnt in Word. Light stuff like that. Maybe a little bit of programming. But I've been very impressed with it.
One thing you can do to make sure your batteries stay good is to drain them at least once a month. That keeps them going well.
Another thing to keep in mind is keeping the power consuption to a minimum. Lower the brightness of the LCD screen. Adjust the other power settings to minimize the power used. Turn off any other things that don't need to run like virus protection or the like. Try not to do anything that beats on the hard drive.
And of course the other thing to remember is get a couple of spare batteries. That way you can run as long as you like, with a few quick interruptions.
is what I have, the specs are here.
For having a 1Ghz (700Mhz with SpeedStep), 30Gb HDD. 15" SXGA screen running at 1400 x 1050 I still manage to get almost 4 hours out of 1 battery. Add the other in and I can get over 7 hours. Mine may be a tad pricey, as I got every single feature out there, but it starts at around 1100$. 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