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?

Comments

Apples and...well Apples

[Graymalkin]

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.