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Laptops with the Longest Battery Life?
Yi Ding asks: "Recently, I have been investigating laptops for clients, and the majority of the complaints about current laptops is battery life. Most laptops just don't have enough juice to even finish a single DVD or write an article for 4-5 hours in an internet cafe. Of course, one can lug around extra battery packs, but it's a pain and often defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place, portability. What have your experiences with battery life been and where can I find the longest lasting, reasonably robust, laptop?"
Are the ones that stay plugged into the wall.
I haven't managed to find a single one that I don't have to get more juice to quickly.
My Toshiba Satellite A45-S121 gets 4-5 hours of battery life on dim backlight.
Beautiful OS, beautiful construction, loooooong battery life, light-weight... what else can one ask for?
That if you leave it in suspend the whole time, or bettery yet HIBERNATE...you can get it to last for days.
Cheers!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
dell laptops have a battery life of about 2 hours new. They of course always last a little bit less time than they say they do, and as the batteries get old they run for shorter and shorter durations. If you want to play a DVD on a Dell, cross your fingers because it will be a close one.
iBook G4's have a very long battery life. I have one, and it lasts a lot longer than any PC laptop I've encountered.
My G4-800 iBook has lasted at least six hours, perhaps longer.
I'm a Linux user but Mac laptops are lovely, with excellent battery life. Too bad Airport Express (and power management?) isn't supported on Linux PPC.
that sleeping is a great way to stay active during the day.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
My Vaio seems to have lost its length of charge over the past two years...
I think it went from around 6-8 hr to about 4 hrs or so.
Ive never been able to have any luck with power management through linux on my dell so I guess im stuck with xp
You could ...gasp... leave it plugged in if you're just sitting at a table.
I've got to say, my new 12" 1.33Ghz G4 PowerBook really has some great battery life. Well over 3.5 hours with "normal" usage, even with the screen brightness cranked up. I haven't done any DVD playback testing though. You can probably get improved battery life for DVD playback by ripping the DVD to your hard drive, so you're not spinning the optical drive that whole time...
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Werent they the ones that touted the longest battery life? Of course, they specialize in Tablet PC's (which are pimp - get a motion m1400VA... so nice) Back to topic... yeah I think electrovaya had the longest claims (9 hours), and the longest life (7-8 hours that people have been getting) - Awperator
to this article it looks like the latest model has gotten up to a six hour plus lifespan. Of course, it still costs a bundle.
I live on my laptop and it's an older IBM model, so the battery life is pretty rotten. My solution has just been to find a plug. If I'm on the road, I keep a power converter in the car and plug the laptop in so I can run at a full charge. It's also good for keeping the three-year-old entertained on a long car trip.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
I have an IBM X31 and the standard battery. With the low power settings on (you're just writing an article, right?), wifi on, and the dock at home, it lasts just under 5 hours.
If you want to burn cd's, bring the base and put a batter in it and it'll last another 3 or so hours.
If you want ultra long battery life, get the super extended batter that clips onto the bottom, just like a base. It'll give you almost 9 hours!
This laptop is incredible. I highly suggest it for anyone who doesn't want to lug around a 6lb laptop.
One man's long life is goign to be another man's power hog. It all depends on how you use the machine and how you set up the power saving features.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I have a two year old battery in my Powerbook and it still lasts about 4.5 hours. The damn thing goes forever. Just keep the screen brightness down. Besides, they look pretty and all the girls in the coffee shops come up to you!
I forget which site did the review, but I think it was Anandtech. Anyways, Electrovaya notebooks would seem to get almost unbelievable battery life. They're not THAT much more expensive, either, IIRC.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I know that there are a couple models out there that actually use 2 batteries. It was either Fijitsu or Toshiba.
I can get nearly 8 hours out of my IBM T41 with the larger battery when I'm just using a word processor or something similarly non-CPU intensive. Easily watch at least one full DVD.
I've been very happy with my Thinkpad R40. It has a 1.4 GHz Pentium M. As long as I use low power settings I usually get about 6 hours of life. I've heard of better, but they're usually ultraportables with tiny screens.
One problem, you won't be gaming or doing anything really CPU intensive if you want to save power. On power conserving settings, the processor runs much slower than the normal speed and the screen is not as bright, but that's going to be the case for any laptop to get the battery life it claims.
I have a Dell Latitude D800 (Pentium M 1.4 GHz). I can get a solid five hours out of it if the screen brightness is down and the processor isn't too heavily loaded.
It's a welcome jump from many other notebooks where the battery could be more accurately labeled "UPS"...
Ever since that upgrade a couple of weeks ago, Slashdot has been reallllly flaky. Of course, there's the dreaded 503 error we've all (?) been seeing several times a day. Then there's this article, the one this comment is attached to: appeared on the home page, but for the first couple of minutes afterward, I got nothing but "Nothing to see here. Move along". What's the secret forum ID to see the discussion of what the @#$! is going on at Slashdot? Anybody got a clue?
I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron which gives me nearly six hours use between charges. This does weigh-in at about 3.7kg, though.
:)
If you want long battery life then you're going to have to accept something a little heavier. There's a limiting factor called power density, which is a measure of Ah/g (or Wh/g) you can extract from a power cell. This is improving with newer cell technologies like Li-Poly (Lithium Polymer), but Li-Po's have some interesting charging requirements which make me *not* want to have one charging in my laptop while it's sitting on my lap.
Not to sound like an Intel commercial, but that's largely what Intel's Centrino platform is all about. It's designed as a mix of processor and chipset that allows the system to maximize battery life.
I have a Fujitsu Lifebook 5010 that reliably gets me just under 5 hours battery life, maybe more like 4 hours if I have wireless enabled (and there's a hardware switch on the case). Something like playing a DVD is going to suck even more battery, because of the need to spin the drive motor, but I'd wager I have enough juice for that most times.
Centrino isn't a blindingly huge advantage, though. Fujitsu makes a non-Centrino version of the same laptop that comes with 802.11g, and I understand it only gets marginally shorter battery life, and that's all from anecdotal accounts. Centrino does a good job, but a big reason this model's battery lasts so long is because it's 900MHz (so doesn't run as hot, so doesn't need as much energy to run the fan) and it only has a 10 inch screen.
Breakfast served all day!
Centrino-based ThinkPads have great battery lives... six hours and upwards, depending on usage patterns. The Centrino chipset makes a big difference in power consumption!
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
My 15" iBook G4 regularly gets 7 hours+ worth of battery life if I'm not playing any DVDs (backlight dim, and in auto-power conservation mode). If I'm playing a DVDs or doing heavy disk I/O then I usualy get 5 hours. Maybe 6.
I have a Fujitso Laptop (with an "upgraded" battery) that can handle 8-10 hours on (wifi off most of the time) pretty well. Fujitso makes extremly small laptops, and most of them have low power chips (Centrino or Transmeta Crusoe).
For me, the battery should last long enogh so I can unplug my laptop and carry it to a different location (as in kitchen to living room). My laptop is 12 pounds though (Inspiron 9100) and portability was limited to "get it from home to work and back" . Of course, YMMV depending on what you do.
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
I get anywhere from 2-4 hrs on my powerbook. Working with heavy programs sucks juice quicklly, but if I'm just surfing or typing, I can get quite a lot. Working with the back light dimmed helps a lot. Computer technology is just too far ahead of battery technology...one of these days they'll even out, or at least we'll get more sufficient battery life.
My hands are clean of your space juice.
Look for a laptop with Centrino processor/mobo/wifi. The processor is either an older Banias (still good) or a great Dothan core. These are Intel processors designed for laptops, so they put power consumption at a minimum. You can also choose a slower spinning hard drive for longer battery life, and the cost of some performance.
I used to own a PowerBook G3 Pismo, and it had the best battery life I've ever seen - and it was a used one about two years old too! Of course, you can't buy them new any more, but current Apple laptops have pretty good battery life. It helps if you dim the screen a bit, use CPU power conservation methods, and if you copy the DVD to the hard drive (sounds complicated, but isnt) you'll get a lot more life. It's the constant spinning of the drives combined with lots of video and cpu power usage that will kill your laptop easily. Apple laptops, for what they are (smaller and more compact than bulky and pointy PC laptops), have really good battery life. On a flight from Toronto to Vancouver, I had my powerbook running the whole time - and this is a 5-6 hour flight, and it was also only at 80% life when I started the flight. With the screen off and only playing MP3s, it said "0%" for about 3 hours!
I got about 6 hours out of my iBook G3 500MHz once with an average of about 5 hours. My Toshiba P15-S479 (a ginormous 15" Media Center Edition laptop with a full blown Pentium 4 and all the extras) can get around 2-2.5 hours when I'm watching tv shows or dvds off the hard drive. If you want the ultimate in portability, durability, and battery life I would definitely not hesitate to recommend an iBook.
The Apple G4 800mhz 12" iBook can run a DVD for 3 hours, and 4-6 hours doing mixed work that's not very disk/CD intensive. The batteries are so small and light, that carrying around an extra isn't too bad either:
Other than that things like forcing the laptop to stay in ultra-conservative power miser mode, or getting a laptop based on a low power processor (Pentium M, Transmeta Crusoe, etc) can help. Also, if you are willing to pay for it, see if there is an extra battery for the laptop you are buying that has a higher capacity than the one that ships standard. Replace the stock with the high capacity, and you've got more battery life.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to go to the 'net cafe owner behind the counter and ask politely if you can plug into that wall socket there...
Honestly it works. I work regularly in cafes for entire days. It just takes looking like a fool for a minute, asking permission, then pluging my stuff and setting up my "office" in front of everybody, I can stay there for the whole day. And also, if you go through enough cups of coffee, I guarantee you the owner won't ever ask you to get lost, because what he earns on you certainly outweighs what he loses in electricity.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
My Dell can get about 8 hours of battery life under minimal load. Of course it does have a spare battery in the media bay.
This is probably the thing that bothers me the most about laptops. I long for a "Moore's law" for batteries so your laptop would last 4 hours this year, 8 the next, 64 in two years and so on.
I know there must be some technological barrier or limit just as there is with semiconductors. If anyone has comments on that area it would be nice to hear them.
It gives me 6 hours of real work, with the "large battery" attached. And it weighs all of 1.6 kilos / 3.5 lbs with that large battery.... I even wrote a page about installing Debian on it - it runs Linux well.
IBM's T series has been great. 4 hours has not been a problem for me. Not every laptop has to have a "spare" battery to get additional life. The IBM T series, and others can add a second battery in place of the DVD drive which adds some additional life. I don't have one because I haven't needed it. The best timesaver is to really have the system shut down everything that is not being used, and shut down quickly when you are not using the system as a whole.
The new ThinkPads with Pentium Ms last around 4-4.5 hours, or so I've heard.
With my IBM thinkpad t40p I get around 6 and a half hours with a 9 cell battery in windows on the highest power saving setting. In linux I get a lil over 4 if I recall correctly using acpi.
I have one of these for work.
I can watch TWO DVD movies on a plane with it on a single charge.
When I bring it home and work on it in the evening, it can sit on until I go to bed with its WiFi card on full power and not run out.
I typically get 5h+
Who actually uses a laptop without plugging it in anymore? Batteries are pretty much mini-UPS systems that allow a few minutes of work here and there. I get nervous if I'm unplugged for more than a few minutes.
I think I would like a laptop with a small super-light battery since I'm not going to rely on it for long anyway.
i have a compaq presario laptop and it is one of the worst computers i have ever owned. i dont know if other people have had the same problem but after about the first 6 months of use the battery life has decreased significantly, is it just a part of having a lithium ion battery or did i get ripped off?
This summer I've been spending time on various islands in Alaska. I find that although I get 4-5 hours on my laptop with dual batteries (Which is a very good way to get much more time if you have a slot for it), I end up using 12V car batteries, an invertor (Depending on whether I have the correct adapter or not), and solar panels to suit my needs.
If 4-5 hours isn't good enough then you should probably carry around a 12v battery or fuel cell in a back pack.
For DVD playback, that's a problem, but working on an article for several hours shouldn't be a problem for most laptops. I found my two-year-old Dell Latitude C840 still running with the fans full-bore three and a half hours after I accidentally put it in the case without completing a poweroff (I was leaving in a hurry). The thing was almost too hot to touch, and I only knew because I heard the low battery warning, but it still had 7% battery left on the original 66WHr/4480mAh battery.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
but my laptop seriously rocks.
I work as a developer and requested an IBM R50p with 1Gb RAM, which is plenty to handle Tomcat + IntelliJ + Firefox + Outlook + other crud.
On the occasions where I have to go to meetings all day, I've got 8+ hours out of the battery (taking notes, wireless network etc). Admittedly, this is the extended battery (hangs a little out of the back), but with a DVD writer, 60Gb and IBM sturdiness, its definitely the best laptop I've used.
While it's normal battery life is only about 2 hours, with the extended you've got roughly 7 hours (give or take). Now you did complain about extra battery packs, but since this puts the mm20 up to a total of 4 pounds, it's not that big of a deal. Also, the mm20 works well in linux. Of course if you want a CD/DVD drive you'll have to find an outlet anyways...
Fujitsu P2120
With extended main battery and the bay battery installed it'll get over 10 hours off the battery (12 hours as quoted by Fujitsu).
My IBM R40 has 2-3 hours untweaked.
When downclocked to 100 Mhz, minimum illumination, 4X cd speed, highest hdd spindown time and that linux ioctl that caches hdd writes i can get 5-6 hours.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I used to use an old Dell Latitude. With it in console mode, running Kismet, in a rucksack, I could get 4 hours from it easily. :)
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The Sharp Actius MM20 gets some pretty amazing battery life. With the extended battery they really do get 8 or 9 hours running most anything.
Mine regularly lasts close to 6 hours on the battery, at least while doing non-intensive tasks and keeping the brightness at a reasonable level. Not to mention it never heats up to an unbearable level, even on a summer day; I've heard its fan come on maybe 5 or 6 times since I've owned it, and its usually been when I had it on a heat conductive surface (like a blanket or thick carpet).
Nothing beats Apple laptops in my opinion, especially in the low-end. Something comparable to a 12" iBook in size, weight, and battery life, ends up costing $1500 in the PC world (at least when I checked out the Thinkpads).
Okay, so everyone's got great battery life with their laptop has posted in. What I'd like to know is: which laptop's have the shortest battery life? Was battery life a major factor in your laptop purchase? How many people here use their laptop as their desktop (i.e. plugged into the wall socket regularly)?
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
The original PowerBook G3 line (still very capable and even upgradeable) had two battery bays - the expansion bays could fit batteries or media devices. You can get high capacity batteries for these units and actually the g3 and G4 upgrades for these PB's increase battery life.
Dimming your screen always helps - you can dim it and get some privacy by buying A HOODMAN
And I relize you said you didn't want extra bulk, but adding a solar battery extender and sitting near the window is a definite possibility - I could eaily get 7 hours from one battery with an iBook or G3 laptop.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Oh, come off it. The handful of ounces a battery weighs pales in comparison to most of the other accouterments a mobile fellow or gals carries around.
Besides, for most laptops, two batteries worth will far outlast any "long-life" laptop's single charge life. I'm not saying it's the ultimate in convenience, but if long life is really, really important to you, get the machine you really want and will be productive on, and then cough up for another battery.
You know what?
Sony Vaios
I managed to score a pgc-z600ne vaio laptop about 6 months from a client. its small. its not the greatest laptop power wise, but it runs debian nicley, I can watch movies on it, etc etc, and it lasts between 4 to five hours. I did beef it up a bit though. Upped the ram to 256 and the HDD 40Gig.
Dispite having a non 3d vid card and only a 650 P3 processor, I still wouldnt trade it with my friends P4 2.6GHz with double the ram and the same size hard. Its so darn cute and much more portable.
Its made me think why there is a good reason why its hard to get these sorts of laptops secondhard: Hell no-one wants to part company with them.
my perspective of what makes a good laptop has changed as a result of having this laptop.
is not a typical movie. Most movies are 90-120 mins, which is well within the capabilities of the PowerBook. Heat, on the other hand, is a whopping 3 hours long!
"Life in every breath... that is bushido"
This is just my experience, but my IBM Thinkpad T42 2378FVU (1.7Ghz Pentium-M Dothan, Radeon 9600) gives me plenty of juice to finish a DVD movie, and lasts a shave over 4 hours. It doesn't do half bad on benchmarks either. I got 19522 on Aquamark3, 9728 on 3DMark2001SE, and 2515 on 3DMark2003. That's on AC power, but if you set your battery on max drain (a bit over 2 hours or so of battery life) it can maintain that performance. By putting it in suspend when I don't need it, my Thinkpad lasts all day at work.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
7.5hrs on a single battery, the standard one that it comes packaged with.
It edges out slightly the T41p due to difference in graphics chip apparently.
I have one and I can attest that it is no lie. I ran it at full-speed (OS/2, not Windows, Windows chews more) and battery was about half empty at over 3 hours of usage.
With battery mode turned on (Intel Speedstep), I did get well over 7 hours from this baby. Screen was not even at dimmest setting.
I get 5-6 hours out of my ibook if I turn the screen brightness down. If it's doing nothing but playing mp3's with the screen blanked, it lasts for about 10.
Apple laptops aren't much, if any, more expensive than a PC laptop, and the battery life issue alone makes it worth the investment. Toss Virtual PC on it if you need windows stuff, but I've found that it does everything that my PC did, only better. Except for one thing, Visio VSD files. Hassle the Omni group to add VSD functionality. They already support VSX, but Visio saves in VSD by default, so you won't be able to read/edit pre-existing visio docs.
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I have minimal experience with laptops outside my own 14" iBook G4, but I can say that it lasts a remarkably long time for any laptop. In fact, the only time I ever run the batteries completely down is when I fall asleep to iTunes in my bed. (yes, I sleep with my iBook. If you had one, you'd understand)
Yes, Intel Centrino is more then just marketing hype, all Centrino laptops have longer battery life then typical laptops.
linkage
The catch however, is Centrino laptops are also underperformers compared to regular laptops.
My Fujitsu Lifebook P-5020 claims to have 11 hours of battery life, but I've never gotten more than 8. Of course, this is with the built in wireless on, so I'm sure if I turned off the wireless and dimmed the screen I'd get more.
It's a small laptop with a slower chip (~1Ghz), which is exactly what I was looking for. The laptop almost fits in a 1-gallon freezer bag, but remains fully useful. I carry it around in the front pocket of my backpack or a thin leather valise. It plays DVDs just fine, burns CDs just quickly enough, has excellent wireless antennae, and the long battery life and portable size make it fit my needs for a non-desktop-replacement portable computing machine. Apparently you can get it to dual boot your favorite distro, but I haven't had the motivation to tackle that yet.
Incidentally, I bought the machine from Portable One in San Jose, and I recommend them- good customer service and good selection, with reasonable prices.
(Celui que tient la peur de devinir nuage)
My old Titanium powerbook stood up to the DVD test. Right before the second Matrix movie came out I sat down and tested the length of the battery. I put the powerbook in "DVD Playback" mode in the Energy Saving system panel - which means "NO ENERGY SAVING" (brightness all the way up, no spinning down of hard drives). Anyways, the Titanium 15" powerbook was able to display the whole movie beginning to end. Which was great for waiting in line.
;)
My newer Aluminum 15" (firewire 800) Powerbook can NOT do this. I can NOT play an entire DVD from start to finish with sound and everything running at full tilt. It's possible with some fudging of settings I could get a whole movie to work -but I haven't tried.
I imagine the two biggest consumers of power during DVD playback are
1) DVD drive spinning
- this could probably be mitigated by ripping the movie into quicktime and playing off your hard drive (which I believe consumes less power than the DVD drive)
2)Powering the speakers.
- Someone clue me in here, but I imagine you'd save power if you plugged your headphones in rather than powering the onboard speaker. And you'd get a better experience plugging the sound output into an entertainment center too.
Joseph Elwell.
I find my powerbook (Al 15) generally makes it for about 2.5 - 3 hours on a single charge, and that's with fairly heavy disk use and the occasional CD/DVD burn. I tend to carry a second battery because the batteries for these powerbooks are pretty light so it doesn't really add to the weight much...
I've heard that the iBooks do better on battery than than the Al Books do, but I prefer having the extra screen space and the shininess...
I'm also looking for a good flexible solar panel to go with my powerbook as I spend a fair amount of time in places with no regular electricity and rechanging off an inverter is a hassle, especially if someone wants to take the vehicle off with them (a separate battery sort of defeats the point of portability for most uses).
As an aside, I had an 8 year old Toshiba Satellite that (up until I gave it away to the charity I was working for) got over 2 hours on a charge, and I found it in a skip...
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
an apple laptop is going to last a lot longer on battery, with its tendency to run fanless (as long as you're not doing an 'emerge -uD world'). ppc cpus in general have a lot less transistors than x86 cpus and consume less power. my 14" ibook can go 4.5 hours, during 'normal' use (text editing, web surfing, some compiling). and I have watched a full dvd and had battery left over many times.
That's with the main battery and the bay battery with a reasonable screen brightness and average use.
I can actually get through 2 DVD's stored on the harddrive before the battery dies.
It's not the speediest laptop (900mhz transmeta crueso) but it's nice and small and portable.
I've used my laptop under linux for about 6 hours on more than one occasion. I currently own Xnote Friday from PC Club, It's a nice laptop (I do work at PC Club btw). Everything works great under linux and I can throttle it down to 600 Mhz and the damn thing just runs all day. 600 Mhz is fine for everything I do, dvd's, programming, web surfing and bzFlag.
I was trying to keep my zealotry a secret, but powerbooks have always worked the longest for me. I have two Dells, the older one gets around three and a half hours, the newer one only gets around two and a half.
On the other hand, sometimes I forget to plug in my powerbook and somewhere in the last third of an eight-hour day, I'll realize it and plug it in. I use to run it on batteries to use iTunes during parties. Its never fully died on me.
If it was a (anatomically correct) woman, I'd marry it.
My dell m60 with the primary batter and secondary battery in the modular bay will get me about 6.5 hours of battery life with both blutooth and 802.11b active.
My jvc 7310 with the 12 hour battery lasts me 13.5 hours (since it has a 1.5 hour built in battery). This laptop is an ultra light and weighs 1.99 pounds without the 12 hour batter and 4 pounds with it.
Any laptop with a Centrino sticker on will get 4-5 hrs battery life. All centrino laptops regardless of manuacturer are all the same, with the exception maybe of the video processor. Everything else is controlled by Intel (IE Chip set, CPU, WLAN).
The only exception would be if some Manufacturer decideds to cheap out on a battery pack. A 11.1V 6000mAh pack should get aprox 4-5 hrs depending on usage.
(with bay battery, and not much load, as usual ;)
d se riesbean.do?series=P7D
I D= 23
Manufacturor page:
http://webshop.fujitsupc.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buil
Forum:
http://www.leog.net/fujp_forum/forum.asp?FORUM_
Source:
http://www.laptopsinc.com/
My Grey Toilet Seat iBookSE G3-466 is always good for atleast 2 viewings of DVDs off battery on road trips.
I watched an entire 3 hour Stargate:SG-1 series DVD on my HP zv5000z Athlon 64 notebook with 12 cell battery (just barely, the notebook automatically went into suspend mode afterwards with 3% battery capacity remaining). I achieved this in part by using ClockGen for nVidia nForce3 to undervolt the CPU to 1GHz at 0.85V. (I haven't figured out how to do this under 64-bit Linux yet, anyone know?) The current CG-stepping Athlon 64's use 1GHz @ 0.95V as their slowest PowerNOW! setting, which ought to give you close to the same battery life (I have the older C0 stepping). Mind you, I'm using the least-efficient Athlon 64 notebook chip. (DTR series, Mobile and Low-Voltage are the other two). 1.4GHz @ 1V and 2GHz @ 1.3V (full speed, 3200+ rating) also work.
Too bad HP put a Linux-hostile Broadcom WiFi card in this thing and rigged the BIOS to reject non-HP wireless miniPCI cards (see page 8-1 of the relevant HP Hardware Guide). And they used the 3-year-old GeForce 440 Go video chip (like putting bicycle wheels on a Ferarri). The slow 4200RPM HD and optical drive were easily replaced with proper components. The 1680x1050 widescreen is REALLY nice. Great notebook for getting work done, but the 440 Go can barely handle Doom 3 at 640x480 res. I swear, did Intel pay HP to cripple their AMD notebooks?
My work thinkpad T40 last well over 4 hours with it's tumor style extra large battery
I can get about 5+ hours of battery with my Acer, good enough for 2 dvds
-Mike
If you really want battery life at the expense of everything else an aging HP200lx plamtop will run for a week or two on two double AAs.
A little better is the hiptop phone which has a querty keyboard and lets you web browse and type email on. In practice mine lasts about a day with ocassional usage , twice that if on standby and a lot less if you use it to make a lot of phone calls.
I'm sort of toying with selling my Dell "desktop replacement" laptop, as that didn't work out (I wound up getting a desktop anyway) and instead going for a lightweight. The Sony Picturebooks with 600-800 MHz transmeta processors are commonly available on eBay for $1000. you only need 700 MHz to play DVDs smoothly, and a friend has one of these with a little add-on battery pack that snaps onto the bottom and gives him 6+ hours. It raises the keyboard into a nice typing angle and the whole thing is still well under 2 KG.
A 700 MHz or so machine with a nice screen, that was very small, would be nice. I've got a Dell monster now and I never take it anywhere because it's too damn heavy.
Hello All
:)
My 0.02, try and find a laptop that can take dual battery packs. That should allow plenty of time to do just about anything
You could go with an external battery pack but all of the ones I've seen are pretty pricey and add to the overall bulk of a laptop.
Good Luck
The biggest consumer of power is most laptops is memory. Display, disk, and cpu can sometimes be contenders, but all of those can have their use moderated in such a way as to preserve battery life. Whereas I'm not aware of any system with a facility for dynamically turning on and off parts of the ram.
So, as contrary as this is to general geek wisdom, get systems with as little ram as will allow you to do the necessary work without swapping.
is my Etch A Sketch. I mean, I never have to plug that damned thing in.
I think it runs Linux (rock solid, but the UI is pretty sketchy, pardon the pun). Not sure if it's Gnome or KDE, tho.
Tadpole's wireless thin client laptop currently boasts 6-8 hours (uses SunRay thin client protocol!) The powerbook G3 "pismo" had dual battery bays with a potential life of 10 hours.
Years ago, there was a 486DX100 laptop manufactured by CLEVO. Ideal for working on the move and I distinctly remember testing the battery life by plaing a CD, doing a disk check on infinite loop and playing a video clip all simultainously with the backlight full on... and it lasted about 7 hours. It had a nice trackball integrated in its case which IMO is better than these touchpads we have today - ok, it would be lousy for anyone left-handed but it was good because it was above the keyboard, not below, so there was no accidential touching of it and with the buttons on the side of the case, it was quite comfortable to use.
Nearly a third of the base size was occupied by the huge NiCad battery pack.
I wouldn't mind having that machine again - you can get serious amounts of work done on a trans-Atlantic 11-hour crossing.
*sighs*
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
I have a Thinkpad T40 with the lower resolution (1024x768) display. With the extended-life battery, I easily get 4 hours of DVD playing time when I'm on the airplane. With the standard battery as a backup, I can watch nearly 6 hours of DVD's without recharging.
[ home ]
Like it says in the subject, my Omnibook 6100 is pretty nice. The standard battery has a capacity of some 4400mAh, and tends to last me a little less than 4 hours when laptop_mode in the Linux kernel is switched on with the support scripts. That's enough for a good medium-length hacking run in, say, a spot in the shade under a tree in the Helsinki central park, what with the beautiful weather we've been having and all. Gives me a reason to spend time outside.
Still, I can't help but think about what kind of battery life I could get out of that laptop with an extra battery in the slim-bay...
I use a 12-inch, G3-500 iBook for travel. It typically gets 5+ hours on a charge.
:-)
There will always be a processor/battery life tradeoff. This laptop is plenty fast enough for me when I travel.
If you think you need the ability to render footage for "Shrek 3" on your laptop, perhaps you need to think again.
3.4 ghz processor, ati 9700 vid card, 7200 rpm drive, bluetooth, wifi, 15.4 in screen, subwoofer.
About 1 hour of battery life.
A lot of sub notebooks, which are designed for travel (i.e. Sony VAIOs, ASUS M5000 and S5000, some Fujitsus) have reasonable battery life, but also have the option of using higher capacity batteries without increasing the overall weight or size beyond an ordinary (usually they remain much less). These larger batteries boost the life of the laptop into the 8-12 hour range (or even more if you look at those powered by Crusoe or other exotic power savers).
lifebooks especially the P-Series have great battery life. I was able to watch a DVD and a half on a single charge, and with the Bay battery and the extended battery you've got at least 12 hours.
I write code.
My 12" iBook averages 4.5/5 hours (with airport extreme enabled and in use) doing things like playing music, surfing the web, writing docs.
If i push it or it's hot then sometimes only 4 hours, but this is rare.
Watching a DVD will drop it to about 2.5-3 hours, which is still reasonable. Of course, this is a brand new one, and after a year I won't be getting this kind of battery time. But none the less, what kind of PC can deliver that? Not to mention this upgraded iBook after tax and shipping was under $1900 CDN.
Both PCs and Macs these days can get the battery life you want. PCs you want something with a Centrino (unless you can live with a Transmeta, then you get really good life), and read some reviews to find out which ones get the best life. You'll have to do some research because there are so damn many brands and models.
On the Apple side, the iBooks get awesome battery life. No more than a good Centrino laptop, but at least you don't have to go looking hard for it. Powerbooks aren't bad (you won't have a problem watching a 2 hour dvd) but their battery goes faster than the iBook.
I've got a dell latitude CPi with a Pentium II 366 and a 13.3" screen that I bought for about $300 a year ago. Replacing the old original battery (2400mAh) with a battery from a NEW P4 based latitude (something like 4400mAh) yields battery life well into the 5 hour range. The machine is (just) fast enough to play DVDs, surf the web, write a paper, and run PowerPoint. What more do you need?
Here's to dell for keeping the same battery form factor for several years.
Read the original post. The guy is complaing because 4-5 hours is not enough.
Hopefully I dont get sued for this.
DOOM3 IS OUT! PLAY IT! GET IT!
Get it here
This one has a very long battery life and it reboots FAST.
Got a Thinkpad R40 for about a year now, Pentium-M 1.3Ghz, 512MB RAM. Battery life is about 5-6 hours with battery saving options (screen blanker, turning off hard drive etc). ;)
If I let it go into standby mode when not in use I never need the AC adapter the whole day. Just wonderful to go into a meeting and watch everyone else with their P4-2.6Ghz laptops (more like "portables") scramble for the one power socket in the room while I just sit back and smile
I sometimes watch DVDs on battery power while relaxing on my bed, doesn't really drain the battery as well. Imho there is no way around a Pentium-M if you want serious processing power combined with extended battery life.
My Toshiba 450CDT, a 1997 model Pentium-I 75mhz, running linux in console mode, has a 10 hour battery life.
The only thing I've ever seen do any better, except maybe a PDA, was a Tandy Model 100.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I get about five hours on a Thinkpad t41p w/extended battery, mostly coding with eclipse/app server/db/ldap running so the CPU is not idle. It is not uncommon to see six hours when the CPU throttles back... tragically making documentation portion of the project really seem like it last forever. More than enough battery to watch a dvd and do a bit more gaming on a trans atlantic flight.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
It should be pretty easy to devise a hand crank generator and just give it a few cranks when you need more juice. I remember reading that Freeplay was going to sell such a device -- they talked about it in this Wired article, but the closest they've got on their web site is a hand-cranked mobile phone charger. Kind of a disappointment.
There are several things you can do to get more out of your battery.
If you have a variable speed CPU like the AMD Ahtlon XP-M then you can use SpeedSwitchXP (or similar) to force it to run at the slowest speed. For the tasks you mention 500 MHz is plenty of power.
Rip your DVD to the HDD and play it from there.
Disable WiFi and Bluetooth even if they aren't actually connected. They will continously ping looking for other devices, which does hurt battery life. Most notebooks have a keyboard shortcut to disable it.
One of the most useful utils is MobileMeter. This app will show the amount of current your notebook is currently consuming, so you can play with various settings (like backlight intensity) and see the exact affect it has on power consumption.
Finally, what's wrong with using a spare battery? Modern notebooks can hibernate and resume in less than a minute, which is trivial downtime to swap batteries.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The complaints you cite are slightly behind the curve. Brand new Pentium-M based laptops claim to, and really do, have amazing battery life times. My friend has a Compaq based P-M laptop with a 15" widescreen and his battery lasts 6 hours. One with a smaller screen should run even longer. Beware Pentium-4 mobiles which do suck down battery power; get the 'M' series.
We have a bunch of Pansonic Toughbook W2 laptops.
They get around 6 hours of battery life with normal usage. Playing DVDs get around 5 hours or so.
They're Pentium-M 900's.
It also has an integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, wireless, and weighs right around 3 pounds.
I haven't personally seen a Y2, but I hear the battery life is comparable, and has a larger screen and option for a DVD-RW drive.
The only drawbacks I've found are the smaller-than-usual keyboard (which you can get used to pretty easily) and no ability to dock (other than the USB docks of course). That and the ($2200?) price.
Ignoring for the moment that this question can best be answered by just going to CNET (or some such) and looking at the reviews, I will put in a good word about my HP compaq nc6000.
I still can't quite believe that I actually bought an HP laptop (I mean... its HP!) but after reading some very positive reviews I gave it a shot. Not only did I get a decent sized 14" LCD, 512MB, Pentium M, DVD CR/RW, 60GB HD (enough to bring entire MP3 collection to work), bluetooth, wifi a+b+g.... but it also has excellent battery life.
Battery life was my first criteria as I started looking for a laptop computer, and this HP made it through the first cut. Several times I have accidentally forgotten to plug in the laptop at work in the morning, and only realized that I was running off of battery power well after lunch.
Beyond the excellent battery life, I've been absolutely thrilled with this laptops layout and features. I can use wifi when its available, and I can use my phone's GPRS via bluetooth as my last resort for internet connectivity.
And I was very much relieved that HP did not preload all the JUNK onto this laptop that they load onto their consumer PCs (which has to then be manually uninstalled and deleted!!). I guess they don't want to piss off their business customers. It came with a nice clean fresh install of Windows that I was able to customize to my taste.
So, for a great mix of power *AND* great battery life, I recommend the HP compaq nc6000.
IF you pull out the floppy and drag in a second battery any of the dell inspiron line can go 6-8 hours.
Does start to get heavy though.
The iBook's various power-saving features were helpful, I'm sure, but the fact that it's running a leisurely 500MHz CPU must have helped. If you're concerned about battery life, look at the slowest models available. An older, slower machine with a fresh battery is probably going to keep you going the longest.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I can get about 7-8 hours on an x40 with 8-cell extended life batt (still weighs only 3.2 pounds)... can supposedly get 10+ hours with the larger battery "slice"
- Avoid frequent full discharges (puts strain on battery)
- Turn off wireless networking
- Remove unnecessary PC cards
- Avoid using floppy drive or CD drive if possible
- Dim down your brightness
- Use electrical outlets (where possible)
- Avoid use of media players
- Keep the battery at a moderately cool temperature
While this greatly depends on your needs, and how much you are willing to spend, you could consider the idea of a solar charger for your laptop. here is one, and there are others are available as well. These results come from a quick google, and probably aren't the best options available, but I do recall seeing a small fold out one which would extend the battery life by about 30%.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
Well, perhaps it's not generally applicable enough to be considered a "solution" so let's call it a "solar consideration" instead.
Anyway, although I was disappointed when Real Goods became part of Gaiam, they at least still have a decent selection of solar power devices, some of which (as I understand it) can power your laptop directly. Under the right conditions, this would easily allow you to keep the system powered for many more hours than the typical laptop battery would provide (although, for DVD watching, the darker environment that may be desired for viewing would be counterproductive for watching on solar power).
Anyway, just something to think about, and certainly Real Goods is not the only source of such items. I recently bought a small solar battery recharger from Silicon Solar, for example, and some of the products in their catalog would probably be workable for this too.
(Many caveats apply, of course, including the size/portability/convenience of the solar power device.)
No Laughing Allowed!
Its called an iPaq. I can do everything that I need to do, yes even watch a DVD. It takes a little program to rip the DVD but it can be done. Its real portability.
www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/05/toshiba_boffins_p rep_laptop_fuel/
www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,49717,00.html
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-960823.html
Here is hoping we all have one of these ASAP before the world bursts in to flames!
I saw an ad for this in an airline magazine, and have entertained the thought of getting one. I have no idea how well it works.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
The iBooks have the good battery lives, not the Powerbooks.
Most "features" of a laptop don't really consume extra power if not utilized. For instance the DVD drive only consumes power if it's actually spinning (and mencoder can can take care of that).
To reduce the power consumption of the cpu simply put it to the lowest frequency (speedstep). 600MHz is generally enough to play a movie (DVD or .avi). As far as the LCD screen is concerned - simply reduce its brightness.
I'd personally recommend the Centrino processor line - good perfomance at reasonable power levels (as opposed to Pentium 4 Mobile).
The Raven
The above gives the impression that a serious number of people is very happy with their battery life, a fact almost at odds with the original posting. I (a computing vagrant, living on bad coffee in Europes various airports for most of the time) have the experience that while my ancient thinkpad runs outa juice really quickly, nobody has ever refused me electricity. just ask (preferably in peoples own language) and in practice, theres a good chance youll get a free (bad) drink on the side. Tried it in the US as well, and it worked there too (no drinks though).
Is the same problems as inkjet refills. Who do you buy refills from?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
When new, easily 8+ hours at work (networking, email, docs and code) with a battery in both bays. Until one battery recently failed (6+ years old!) it still regularly gave 6 - 7 hours of effort. This is by far the best I've ever seen from a laptop.
What I really want to know is how to convince Steve Jobs that both battery life and battery configuration are really, really important.
My Powerbook G3 Pismo is great, I usually run it with two batteries, one in each bay, and another two batteries in my external charger. With that setup, I can work all day and all night completely wirelessly. I start in the morning with everything charged. At lunchtime I swap the empty battery in the Pismo for one in the charger; no need to even shut down or sleep; they're hot-swappable. At dinnertime I do a second swap. At bedtime I plug the Pismo back into the wall. Works great... or it did. The machine's old, the batteries are old and degraded... sometimes I have to swap three or four times in a day now. So, I upgraded.
My new G4 iBook has good battery life. I start in the morning with the battery charged... and at lunchtime, when it's dead, I switch back to the Pismo. If I had a spare iBook battery and a charger, I could simply shut the machine down (or put it to sleep, maybe), flip it over, and swap the batteries, but this is way less convenient!
Now, how do I convince Steve Jobs to make me a laptop with two battery bays in it?
Steve, if you're reading this from your hospital bed, get well soon, and pleeeease make a machine with two hot-swappable battery bays again! And don't make me stand on my head to swap them, either; put the battery on the side where I can get to it! (And you can leave out the optical drive; I never use it!)
if i put a metric shitload of ram into a laptop (like 4 gigs) then copied / into a tmpfs on boot, then chroot everything to /tmpfs/, then unmount / and only keep /home mounted (as it wouldn't be reading/writing there much), would i greatly improve battery life, as the hd wont be spinning hardly. or i could put /home on a usb mass storage device, like one of those keyrings.
anyway, if there was no hard drive or cd drive involved once the laptop is booted, would this give a huge gain in battery life, or would i be wasting hundreds of pounds (£) on ram for no purpose?
One nice thing is that nowadays this approach is quite interoperable with PCs and Macs. Tools to convert to the 3M format have been available for decades and now tools to convert from 3M to a digital format are almost as ubiquitous. On the down side there are some claims that the 3M approach can harm the environment, after all, it does grow on trees. On the other hand a high proportion of discarded equipment can be recovered and processed for reuse.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I got to pick out a computer for work and i chose a Dell Inspiron 9100. This thing's battery life is a joke. At most, i will get about 1.5hrs. Also, the cable and ac-dc converter is the size of a brick. We have a Dell with intel's low voltage processer (the name escapes me) and those get like 3 hours max. We have 2 Apple notebooks, and those get like 2 hours, but.. they have MUCH sexier ac-dc adapters.
i use the laptop more like a desktop anyway, i mean, im not going to sit somplace and use crappy internet and overpay for coffee when i have great internet and free coffee at my house
Plus my laptop's battery has a built in subwoofer!
That's useful, right?? right??
The Dell 8200 with the 2nd battery pack (fits neatly inside 2nd device bay) will often last me ~6h. This is usually at full processor but I'd bet that if I used speedstep I could get it to an hour more.
Partnership for an idiot free America!
For the x86 side, use laptops with Pentium M cpus for the battery/perf. The whole Centrino marketing thing is based on using this cpu with other intel hardware to maximize battery life. I have a x1000 compaq with 15.4" screen and it has lasted a little over 4 hours. I think it could have gone a bit more if I employed more power saving features. I even watched FOTR on battery. I had the dvd ripped to the HD so the dvd drive was not it use. I am not sure if it would have lasted with constantly spinning the disc. But basically if you really wants lots of battery life, use laptops with smaller screens (10" or 12") and keep 'em dimmed. Also minimize the use of the HD.
I also have iBook 12" and I have used it for over 5 hours on battery. I stopped using it after 5 hours so I am not sure how much more it would have gone for.
Yeah, mine can run for about 3.5 hours at most on lowest backlight without PCMCIA card, reading from optical disc or doing processor-heavy activity (Playing long DivX movies, playing fullscreen games, etc.)
I can get through a 2-hour DivX movie on battery.
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
I have one for work and I get about 4.5 hours on Battery. The thing is there seems to be something in common with most of these types of laptops.
1. You can't have a cdrom and floppy in at the same time.
2. the resolution maxes out at 1024x768 without using an external monitor.
I've got a used Omnibook XE3 from a fuckedcompany when they were getting rid of extra stuff (and employees). It's a PIII 900Mhz, 256 MB RAM, 40 Gig hard drive and a DVD+CDRW. Cost me something under $200 with a bag and additional NIC/modem.
Now the battery that came with it almost dead and won't last more than 30 minutes. The problem is that a new one costs half of the laptop itself, and I don't even know what to expect from it. Any ideas on how long a new one would last?
My IBM X40 (it's a Pentium M, 1GHz) runs 7 hours on a charge of the 8-cell battery.
:)
Total weight is only 1.6kg with the battery, and the laptop is great for everything except graphics-intensive games. The downside is that there is no DVD drive except with a docking station, and it has only a 10.4" screen running 1024x768.
It suits me perfectly for a transatlantic flight though and plays DivX very well for several hours
-- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
If you are looking for long battery life, look into Pentium-M / Centrino laptops. Banias was an excellent chipset in that it brought both performance and power efficiancy to laptops at the same time. Now, the Dothan chipset seems to be doing it again. As far as brands/models... Intel Thinkpads are nice... some of the gateway models get excellent battery life as well. Personally, I use an ABS ZForce F2; which uses an aopen 1557g "barebook". I get an average of about 4 hours out of the battery... not shabby at all.
Email/browsing/etc on my T40 with the extended battery (9 cell) lasts 5 to 6 hours, with no special settings for the screen brightness. The screen is set to sleep after 2 min or so, and I've disabled the pagefile in Windows XP, so the hard drive gets a rest.
While I think overall IBM makes some great laptops, they seriously blew it on the batteries in the 600 series. (pentium2/pentium3)
I have two, a 600E and a 600X. With 5 batteries between them, not a single one works. All died within months after getting them, no matter which unit they were used in. While I'm sure they fixed this, I'm still wary of IBM and probably wont buy them again until the unlikely day they ship me two new, working laptops.
My iBook 700 still lasts for 5 hours after ~2 years of heavy use and my WinBook XLi POS still gets around 2.5, and that one was severly mistreated.
My next notebook will also be a Mac.
I bought my G4 400 PowerBook from a whore for $100 two years ago. Not even lying.
Ever since I got it, I consistently get about 2 hours out of the battery in high power use mode. I've never really played with the energy saving settings, so this semi-short life is understandable.
The real interesting thing here is that my battery has remained fully functional since I got the Powerbook. It's not lost any of it's stability or duration in the entire life of the thing. When I got it, it was already a year old, so after three years, it's still going strong and consistently putting in 2 hours.
The odd thing is that I have a friend who has a G3 iBook (white plastic case, 600 Mhz) and his battery went from 2 hours to 1 hour, and now he can't use it at all. There's a real difference between the two machines. I think you really get what you pay for with the G4.
I know I sure did.
Incidentally, the whore worked at my company.... I was not procuring her services.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
I got almost 8 hours on my battery one night typing up documents. My Spartan rocks :) Centrino is your friend. I've gotten 4 hours watching DVDs which is enough time for 2 flicks. More than enough time for my usual flight from Oakland CA to Dallas Tx. 2 hour layover is enough to watch another flick and charge the battery enough for the 2 hour flight to Lousiville KY and I'm back in my home territory with 3-4 movies under my belt. And for those of you that are highline travellers, there are auto adapters that can plug into the cig lighters in the seats (if they have them and aren't disabled) so you don't even need batteries.
You can play DVDs on paper? I ph33r your writing skillz!
ResidntGeek
Probably one among many, but at work, we get these IBM notebooks with the Centrino (Banias) processors, and they get 7 to 8 hours, and they're nice and fast too.
no text : )
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Look to the past. We were getting 20 hours battery life with regular non-proprietary AA batteries back in the 80's.
:-)
TRS-80 Model 100, 102
Cambridge Z88
Amstrad NC100
Amstrad NC200
Serious keyboards, (except the Z88... but then its membrane keyboard is actually near silent so it has advantages).
Instant-on, no boot time, no harddrive to wear down, the Model 100s pass the drop test.
Universal interface called "RS232" you can connect it to practically anything
LCD screen is actually visible outdoors.
32K RAM of course in the model 100 but we're going to fix that
Modern laptops are barely more portable than the old luggables. I don't even carry one anymore. I have a little foldable cart with a Shuttle Xpc in it for serious work.
With the extra battery in the media bay, it lasts 7 hours of coding in Visual Studio with medium screen brightness, auto power management, ethernet on, and wireless ethernet off. Should be a reliable battery life quote since it's my coding machine while I unit test on my workstation at work.
... and then there's those WarCraft 3 breaks, hahaha.
It definitely lasts 2 DVDs on the hard drive.
I have a Panasonic Let's Note CF-W2 (bought here in Japan). The STANDARD battery gets about 6 hrs on AVERAGE! Just sitting around doing nothing it'll get about 7. Watching a DVD I'll get about 5 hours. It's a super workhorse.
I couldn't ask for a better laptop. It's also fanless, so unless you have a CD in the drive, it's dead quiet...
Jds
http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/4520-3121_16-51270
And if you go on a diet and lose a couple of pounds, consider using the saved weight for a battery
I don't have your problems.
Wake up to 2004, W I N T E L I D I O T.
I recently had to purchase a lightweight laptop for my boss. His requirements? That it be lightweight, long battery life, and have a few bells and whistles (DVD playback, wireless, etc.)
d se riesbean.do?series=P7
Well, we ended up getting this one:
http://webshop.fujitsupc.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buil
The Fujitsu 7000 series has a hell of a lot of bang for the buck and if you are interested in long battery life - it's hard to beat this. Fujitsu claims that the 7000 series can run for up to 11 HOURS on battery power. This is, of course, using the modular bay for a battery.
Nonetheless, it seems he's able to get over 5 hours on just the single stock battery for non-DVD use. Centrino-based laptops are very well designed and when used with the ultra-low voltage processors are unbeatable, IMHO.
Finding a dealer though... That's the REAL challenge...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
with the double-battery option - around 8 hours continuous use, and that isn't using suspend/standby. Sony says that it could last up to 11 hours but I haven't been able to get that. All this with a gorgeous 14" screen and about 4lbs w/o the battery. If you got a few bucks I recommend getting this bad boy.
The very best solution I've ever had for writing up all kinds of documents, taking meeting notes, and doing other basic things such as PIM, yet maintaining long battery life and low weight, is an HP Jornada 820 (WinCE). A real 8-10 hours on a full charge, a real, touch-typable keyboard (the only bug was a misplaced caps-lock key thanks to MS's strong-arming the initial H/PC keyboard layout), and a screen more than sufficient for writing draft and some final documents (640x480). Also meeting-friendly (no fan, true instant on, one click to turn off all sound, no scrounging for an outlet, no panic when the meeting takes longer than my battery). Anything smaller is not touch-typable and anything bigger might as well be a laptop. It can sync with a fully loaded laptop that stays at my office or hotel room, where I'd be more likely to watch a DVD anyway. Unfortunately, this form factor has not succeeded for a variety of reasons, an important one being that one must give up something significant to get really good battery life. Today, I'd probably pick a very small form factor notebook to retain a touch-type capability, and cut its other features to the bone (slow processor, minimal disk, RAM; no integral CD/DVD). Leave all the power in the desktop-replacement laptop that lives a less mobile life.
I am currently using an unplugged T-40 with the larger of the two batteries. I unplugged at lunch around 1:30 and have 5 % battery at 7:10pm. I dont watch DVDs or burn CDs so I dont know how that affects battery life. @5 punds even w/the heavy of the two batteries I have yet to see any laptop last longer. The battery and laptop are also about a year old.
But if what you're trying to do is write text, get a PDA and a keyboard and a good sync program, and you'll get days of life out of it. My old Psion 3A was unbeatable - adequate built-in keyboard (great for 2-finger typing or two-thumb standup typing), gorgeous 480x160 monochrome screen, and 2-4 week battery life. Psion had a hybrid mini-notebook at Linuxworld today - 800x600 screen (looked like 9-10inch, reasonably full-sized keyboard, ~1-week battery.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
iBook running Gentoo with 2.6.7 kernel with CPUfreq governed for long battery life. Never timed it, but it lasts all day at work.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I'm in austin, possibly the US's most wireless city, and virtually every cafe and hotspot here with free internet has also done power outlet drops.
Most cafe's dont mind you plugging in. After all, if your visit isnt limited by how long your battery lasts, you're much more likely to buy more of their products.
-
Hope this is helpful. -D
My T41p (T42 is out already) lasts 4-4.5 hours going full speed with the larger (9 cell) battery. With power management on (lower backlight, CPU throttling etc), it last cca 6 hours without problem. Should be more than enough for your needs. Another plus - the HW is completely Linux friendly, everything is supported and works.
This is an area where you might find Apple excelling. As laptops have always been a strong point of theirs, it's no surprise that they pay good attention to battery life.
/too/ heavy. My Dell 600m gets about 2.5-3 hours of mixed use with wireless but no DVD. If I force it to use the lowest speed all the time (600mhz) then I get acceptable performance with about 3.5 hours life. Dell also lets you buy a modular battery to stick in the CD drive bay for about 7 hours of life if you don't plan on using the cd drive.
Both iBooks and pbooks are designed to get quite a bit of battery life (I'm sure you can find the marketing numbers on the website). Let me just say that in my usage of 12" iBooks with G3s of varying speed, I was able to get 3 hours easy. Of course, this was with doing nothing terribly intensive. I imagine that with DVD watching and a low backlight you'd get just as good results.
Recent pentium Ms have done quite well as well. IBMs are a leader here, as I believe the T40 series have quite a decent battery life without being
My dell inspiron 8600 gets about 8 hours with a second battery pack installed, with MSVC++ compiling a few times an hour and using a bluetooth mouse.
It's interesting no one even mentions Transmeta anymore. It's unfortunate too - last I checked, they still had the best battery life relative to Pentium M based machines, albeit at the expense of performance.
The lack of public mindshare is quite telling of the company's impending demise if it doesn't get its act together soon.
If you want to write articles in internet cafes, check out my setup:
Alphasmart (Palm with wide screen and built in keyboard)
Die Hard 12v Deep Cycle boat battery
DC to DC inverter
I get about 4 months of constant use out of this setup. At some points, the spontanious recombination of lead ions in the battery exceeds the actual power use of the alphasmart, so using it actally charges the battery.
You can get ultra low battery laptops but many of them have very small size keyboards, very small resolution display screens etc. Not really what I would want for serious work.
The best bet for something that has good battery life and has enough performance that you can do most work (including developing code, writing articles, browsing etc.) is IBM T Series laptops with an extended capacity battery in place of the regular battery and an additional battery in place of the CD/DVD Drive bay. You will get a battery life around 7-8 hours with this combination if you run on the battery optimized performance setting (which is adequate for most needs).
Of course, it isn't cheap - but it is a real pleasure to get some real work done on
Osho
Most laptops fall in the 2-3 hours or less range, or the 4-5 or more range. The primary difference between the two is the processor. Processors designed for laptops (Pentium M, or Centrino) will give you the longer battery life, and the laptop will generally be lighter. The processors designed for desktops (Pentium 4) will give you a shorter battery life, and will weigh more, but will be cheaper.
I own a Dell Inspiron 8600 powered by a Pentium M processor. I have watched full movies and only used about half of my battery life.
It's small, lightweight, and gets 5-6 hours of battery life.
Apple claims 6 hours for the 12" iBook. Though I can't verify it first-hand, I can say that the 4 hours they claimed for my old 16-VRAM iBook is just about right.
[url=http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/PCG-U3/]S ony U3[/url] owner with [url=http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/Products/PCG-U3/fe at1.html#f1]big battery[/url] reporting in.
I have no business with power technology. But maybe for more knowledgeable folks could find out if there is any thing exciting coming from the portable power conference.
... you find yourself plucking out your eyeballs long before the battery goes flat anyway.
I just bought an ibook G4, and with very light loads (i.e. word processing) it gets a full SIX hours of battery life.
Watching a DVD I can get about 3.5 hours (enough for ROTK)
Running a LARGE multi-threaded software compile using fink (i.e. CPU is pegged continuously at 100%), I get about 2.5 hours.
Sure beats the crap laptop I have for work - a Compaq N1020v which gets 60 minutes on a GOOD day doing nothing but word processing...
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
That's what I get from my toughbook W2 - less if i watch a dvd but still way more than enough to finish the average flick.
What I did when buying a laptop, rather than try to get an all-in-one solution - which is very hard to find without compromising on something - was to partition my problem space into 2... and then get 2 laptops, one solution for each problem
problem 1: need an ultralight laptop with long battery life and built in cdrw/dvd, built in wireless
answer 1: Panasonic toughbook w2 - has been the perfect solution for this - *very* light, *very* long battery life - this is the one i take with me everywhere
problem 2: need an ultra killer gaming laptop, regardless of weight, battery life, etc (essentially a desktop that is easier to lug around than a normal desktop)
answer 2: Alienware Area51m - a monster - but worth it for the games - this is my primary gaming machine in fact
Anything Apple works for me. replace battery every 2 years or so.
-1 ubiquitous
-1 troll
Lycestra
I'm pondering getting one of the new eMachines 6800 series... sweet machines for the price (Mobile Athlon 64, Radeon 9600, 512 MB, etc)
However, I've got no clue how long the battery will last... does anyone have any experience with these machines?
I have a new Dell Latitude. I get about 2 1/2 hours if I'm not using the CD drive. A couple things that help. Don't use the Luna themes with XP, they shorten life about 20%, turn off indexing, about another 10%. If you have 1/2 gb of ram go with no swap file, you get about another 10% out of that. The themes really kill the tink though, loss them and you will be fine.
MOD PARENT UP
Electrovaya has concentrated on battery life as one of their core strengths since the beginning. Their latest model sports a whopping 75WH battery with a claimed run time of 9 hours. Even with a DVD player sucking away the juice, you should be able to get 4-5 hours out of it.
I haven't owned one of these beasties yet, but I've played with a friends and they're pretty nice. A bit on the expensive side, but that's what you have to expect from Tablet PCs. For some reason, manufacturers don't seem to realize that a Tablet PC is just like a normal laptop, only LESS CAPABLE. They prefer to treat tablets as some exotic new technology that people will pay a huge premium for. *Sigh*
http://www.electrovaya.com/product/sc2100.html
yo, anyone know of a foot pump to turn mechanical energy into something that can power your laptop?
I doubt you could sustain the power needed forever, but if it could be used in remote locations in a crunch, or to extend life by, say 25%, I'd buy it. It would probably come in handy more often than a power cord if it could make you last 8 hours, cuz the cord could just be left at home.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
I'm a Mac guy, but I switch to the PC laptop for email and browsing on the road because of the batter life issue, and the fact that for laptop processors, Intel is WAY ahead of the G4.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I bought a 17" Powerbook G4 (1GHz) with 1GB of RAM, replaced the Apple-supplied 4200RPM HDD with a 7200RPM drive for a performance boost, and regularly see 3 hrs of battery life on "regular" usage (iTunes streaming to an Airport Express, wireless networking, Safari, Eclipse, Mail, etc.). It isn't great but it isn't bad either. I saw about 4 hrs of life on my iBook G3/600 under the same conditions, also installed a 7200RPM drive in that machine...
I use a Powerbook G3 "Pismo" running Debian as my main computer these days, and I couldn't be happier with it. Not only is everything supported, including sleep mode and wireless networking, but it has two battery bays for a total of eight or nine hours of life under normal usage.
Earlier this year, when I flew to San Fran for WWDC, I was able to use the laptop all the way from Buffalo to Cincinnati to San Francisco for writing code, reading docs, and listening to mp3s, and still landed with 50% left on one of the batteries.
The downside, of course, is that an older laptop doesn't have nearly as much processing power as a new one; but for me, it's worth the sacrifice.
Another model I saw that looked interesting was a VIA Nehemiah based model with JDS that was being demoed at JavaOne -- I don't remember who made it, it might have actually been Tadpole, but I would imagine that the battery life on those would be pretty good. The keyboard was too small for my Ogrish Hands (tm), but it seemed like it would be okay for someone more human-sized.
--saint
I own the Fujitsu P2110 - 866mhz Transmeta Crusoe + 512Mb ram, and 60Gb drive (updated).
I have the extended + modular batteries, each give over 7 battery life, and I managed to squeeze over 18 hours from light to average usage (with pcmcia powered down, battery management set to performance and screen brightness on just under medium).
The laptop itself is a little slow, but seems to be perfect for reading books, watching movies/dvds and programming (with distcc). High bitrate divx play perfect, and even certain games like warcraft3 can be made playable under wine. (ATI Rage Mobility 8mb, with accelerated gatos drivers).
Also great linux support, and works pretty much out of box with everything. Sound card has hardware mixing (amazing that nforce2 and many via chips dont). There is also an optical out to plug to your hifi at no loss of quality!
Overall, highly recommended laptop that I had for around 2 years now that can be gotten dirt cheap. Slight show of tear like headphone jack has bad contact now (only if you touch the plug though, so not dramatic). Cant see me replacing it anytime soon though.
There are newer transmeta based laptops as well, and if battery and portability is your goal, they beat centrinos in every possible way (centrino requiring 2-3 times more power, bigger heavier batteries to provide similar battery life at the gain of performance).
Anyway, just my opinion, yours might differ, but over 15 hour battery life impressive by any standard.
If all you want to do is write, a laptop is an overkill power-wise. The MobilePro 900 has a 90% size keyboard and a half-VGA screen and runs a long time on a charge; the Journada 72X is similar but smaller. You can even use the stalwart Radio Shack 100 (www.club100.com) and its descendents, which use AA batteries.
Doug Jensen
With the transmeta long-run utility set to max savings, low display brightnes and no wireless I was reading an e-book during a transatlantic flight and it still had a significant amount of spare juice in the battery at the end of the flight (well, it wasn't exactly the entire flight, I did power it down during takeoff and landing ':)
This machine doesn't have a dvd-drive so I can't comment on that (I guess I could get a decrypter and copy a movie to the hard disk but I haven't tried that)
They're very lightweight and you can find them on ebay at reasonable prices
Application startup performance is quite bad though :(
If you're going to go with 2 batteries, it's best to have them both in at the same time, so you don't have to swap them around. You can get clip-in 2ndary batteries with Dell Inspiron 8600s. Mine gives me about 5-6 hours of battery life total (~2 hours on the 2ndary and 3-4 on the primary). The Pentium M chip also helps.
The only disadvantage of Dell's setup is the 2nd battery uses the drive bay, so you can't use it while using the CD drive. This is less of a problem than you might think, since it drains the secondary battery completely before switching to the primary one, so you can always swap it out and still have power.
Hi,
I have an IBM T23 I've been nearly around the world with. I'm impressed with the battery life - I can get about 4 hours on a plane with it (low LCD brightness, no CD-ROM playing, MP3's on a separate device...)
But what matters almost more to me is how fast the batteries recharge. I haven't actually timed it, but I bet that one of the normal life T23 batteries would charge from 10% to 100% in little over an hour. Great for short layovers on x-country flights.
This is in stark contrast to the battery in a Toshiba laptop I had three years ago, which took at least twice as long to charge as it did to run down. Insane!
you have to realize that no matter what battery you get it seems that as they age the time they give you goes down, so at the end you always end up with solid 1-2 hours of usage. I'm not sure what the deal is with the Centrino based ones, but I think they'd do the same after few months of continuous usage.
If you want to watch a whole dvd, has anyone tried programs like dvd idle? It claims to optimize caching to minimize the many spin up/shut down cycles. It won't help with burning but for watching a movie, it looks like a no-brainer.
Just an opinion.
The MAIN reason most ppl's computers have crappy battery life is because they leave the computer plugged in after the battery is already charged, I have no idea why it kills the battery but even my parents' brand new 17" powerbook still has that problem. So, if you want long battery life, just friggin' unplug the computer when it's done charging.
What about the P-P-P-Powerbook?
I get 4h 7m out of my dell inspiron 1150. Its a celeron 2.4 14.1, i paid an extra $50 to get the 12 cell battery rather than the 8, well worth it. I think the main problem is with people buying these "desktop replacements" and thinking its a normal laptop, just more powerful. Where do people think this power is coming from?
I've had my HP Pavilion Ze4400 (customized) for about a whole year now, and I've been going from LA to Boston regularly, which is a 6 hour flight. I have never felt the need for a bigger battery than what I have, as my laptop lasts (if only editing text in openoffice) about 4 hours. When watching a DVD, well, don't expect to watch the whole Titanic movie, but you can watch a regular movie of 2 hours easily, and even the bonus features too, with the brightness at full. My father has a Compaq laptop for his job, and he gets about the same battery life. So, here's personal experience: HP/Compaq Li-ion batteries last long enough for people to be happy.
I heard that iBooks have up to 6 hours battery life, but I'm no apple fan myself. Look into that too.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Well, my trs-80 Model 100 gets about 25 hours to a set of batteries, and if you run out, you can just buy a 4 new AAs.
And for durable, it doesn't have any running parts, and is still running strong 20 years later.
Oh, you wanted a laptop released in this millenium?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Sun Catcher Solar Modules
Sun Catcher modules feature quality Kyocera crystalline cells to deliver the most energy from the smallest surface area. They are encapsulated in a durable resin for light weight and long life. The robust zippered, folding, cordura-covered modules deliver 14.5 or 25 watts depending on model. A 3-meter power cord lets you sit in the shade, while your Sun Catcher works in the sun. Power cord connector is a female lighter plug with nominal 12-volt output. Use a 12-volt power adapter appropriate for your laptop, or charge a 12-volt battery like the Power Plant Notebook Battery.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Fine, for all you noobs who don't believe me.
http://homepage.mac.com/gellenburg/8hoursbaby.png
HP Compaq Business Notebook nx5000 (review): 6 hours, 4 minutes (15" 1024x768, 6.2lbs)
Panasonic ToughBook CF-W2 (review): 5 hours, 47 minutes (12.1" 1024x768, 2.9lbs)
HP Compaq Business Notebook nc6000 (review): 5 hours, 32 minutes (14.1" 1024x768, 5.9lbs)
Acer TravelMate 8000 (review): 5 hours, 25 minutes (15" 1400x1050, 6.8lbs)
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Why not just use a power cord? Most coffee shops have power plugs which can be used without any problems with the manager's permission. I did this for almost a year while writing a book in a Second Cup (I even get wireless from my home appartment!).
My iBook can play a long DVD and have power to spare. 3 hrs is typical minumum with heavy use like gaming. Of course like all batteries, they hold less of a charge with age.
That CANNOT be true. On a brand new battery, a TiBook G4 gets 5 hours on dim backlight. An iBook *G3* gets about 6-7 hours on dim backlight. An iBook G4 would be expected to get 5 hours on dim backlight at most.
http://www.google.com/search?q=asus+m3n
I get about 5-6 hours with the base battery and another 2-3 out of a second battery that replaces the optical drive (wtf do i need that for?).
More (or equally) importantly, you can buy it barebones and avoid the $50 M$ tax.
The only reasons not to get it are if you require wireless a/g (Centrino only supports B) or if you require 1600x1200 res (I got the 1024x768 native one, there is one that comes in 1280x1024 as well).
The design is near flawless and the touchpad has a really good groove to it plus a scrolly-thing that is infinitely useful.
My Treo 600 gets 4-6 hours active use (talking, MP3 playing), 4-6 days intermittent use (up to 10 days with powersaving scheduled shutdowns). I haven't tested video playback, but it's probably comparable to MP3 playing, maybe 3-5 hours.
--
make install -not war
Anybody remember the Micron GoBooks from ~6 years ago? At the time, they were reasonable machines--233 or 266MHz Pentium MMX, 96MB RAM, USB, two PCMCIA slots, 12" 800x600@16bpp TFT.
The great thing about these machines was the base battery, a flat and relatively thin battery that fit over the entire base of the computer. With that thing plus a battery in the drive bay, the machines could get *eleven hours* of battery life.
And they weren't very heavy. Less than 6 pounds with the base battery, iirc.
Of course, they're not exactly powerful by today's standards, but they still run Linux very well, and they're solidly built. Still a good buy if you can get one cheap and do very basic things on the road.
I have my old inspiron that I use at home and in cafes. Dell had a whole series of laptops that all used the same accessories. 3800,3900,4000,4150 8000 and some of the matching Latitudes. What is cool is that the battery tech just got better. My first battery was 14.8V w/ 3000mAh and the new dell batteries I got off ebay this winter are 4460mAh a approx 50% increase. What is even better is that laptop takes two identical batteries at once if you remove the accessory drive. Of course it ways a ton 8-10 pounds but I do not have to carry arround a power supply.
Oh really?
You want battery life in a laptop? A Newton eMate 300 got 28 hours of regular use on four AA's. Beat that!
There are a number of IBM models that will operate for long periods on battery power, while providing excellent performance and large displays. My personal experience is with an R50p, with which I get 4-1/2 hours on the standard extended battery. If an additional light-weight Li-ion battery is substituted for the DVD burner, the total run time becomes 6+ hours. This system has a 1600x1200 display (48% more screen real estate than a 17" PowerBook) and 1.7 GHz Pentium M with a 1 MB full-speed L2 cache that provides much better performance than any production G4 processor. The latest ThinkPad T42p models offer the 90 nm Intel "Dothan" Pentium M processor with speeds as high as 2.0 GHz and 2 MB L2 cache, without sacrificing battery life.
I wish I had your luck. I have a 1.8 ghz pentium 4 mobile and I can get maybe 2-2.5 hours. It's an inspiron 8200 with a beautiful "ultra-sharp" display. However, it's marketed as and I use it as a desktop replacement. It's too heavy to move around much. I purchased it because I'm a college student and it's great for moving back and forth from school and home. I can manually slow it down to 1.2 ghz using cpuspeedy (linux application) and I'm sure I could get better battery times. I purchased a second battery when I ordered it so I can take it on longer hauls.
I don't care much though. If I wanted a laptop with a better battery life, I would have chosen one designed for such purposes. I purchased it in 2002 and for my needs, it was a good tradeoff to get a fast computer.
I'm sure this will never be read or moderated, but here goes.
There are some better battery technologies in the pipeline. For instance Zinc Matrix Power, Inc is working on a rechargeable alkaline-zinc battery that has about twice the energy density of lithium ion battery--600 watt hours/liter versus 385 watt hours/liter. They have already done field testing and Intel corporations is showing interest in them.
Also lithium polymer batteries promise to have higher energy densities and be available by 2005.
I'm now on my 3rd PB 15" (still have 2nd) and I've always been amazed at the batteries. I even was able to get a higher capacity battery from Apple since they jacked up their battery to support a CPU speed bump. I've routinely been able to watch full length movies on DVD when flying cross country and squeeze in a bunch of work with maximum power saving practices (dim screen, etc). Another nice touch is the ability to check the battery strength while the computer is hibernating or off (button and LEDs on battery).
Recently I've also become a big fan of the Kensignton Universal Car/Air Adapter. You can also get a version that works for AC wall power too so you can leave the stock brick at home. The Car/Air one is super light and works with both Empower and cigarette lighter style jacks. I cannot tell you how valuable unlimited DVDs and games are when you need to pacify a kid who can no longer be amused by more preferable diversions. And of course it's always fun when 4 hours into your flight all the other laptop users are looking longingly at your super bright screen while theirs are pitch black.
My Asus S5N will last about 8 hours or so of regular use with the expanded battery pack. It sticks out of the back a few centimeters, but the notebook is already so small that it doesn't really make a difference.
here is the link to an HP .pdf on how to maintain battery performance as long as possible.
t /D ocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale= en_US&docIndexId=179111&taskId=101&prodTypeId=3219 57&prodSeriesId=364182
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSuppor
click on the link that says "Lithium Ion Battery Technology: Getting the most from smart batteries."
I found it very helpful
Not only is this laptop so damn beautiful, but on the regular batteries, I can get over 5 hours. I bought it specifically for things like long plane flights so I can play nethack and kill time.
It has a killer sharp widescreen, and comes with basically everything you need.
With the larger battery, you can get 7-10 hours.
I was going to get the Dell 300m, until I found out that it doesn't come with a DVD player built-in. Who the hell wants to deal with a modular DVD player on a plane? Hell no!
I love the Sony TR3.
I can't recommend the IBM Thinkpads too highly. They're not the cheapest laptops around, but they're really well-made. I have a T40 with an extended-life battery, and I can get nearly eight hours out of it if I'm careful (dim the screen, turn down the CPU clock, use Linux 2.6 laptop mode to keep the disk spun down as much as possible) and around six if I'm not (watching movies on DVD).
Beyond battery life, my T40 is built like a rock, a fact my head can attest to. I was in the passenger seat of my car a couple of months ago, with my T40 on my lap, when my wife fell asleep and went off the road, rolling the car four times starting at about 70 mph. The laptop bounced off my face, beating the hell out of it (my face, not the laptop) and was then ejected through the window. I'm not sure if the laptop broke the window or if it was already broken. The T40 was picked up from where it landed in the dirt about 100 feet from where the car stopped. Damage? Well, one of the USB ports was damaged (the one that had my mouse plugged into it -- we never found the mouse), the lid latch kind of sticks when you try to close the top, and the case has a couple of minor scratches.
I've had three previous Thinkpads, too, and they've all been excellent, well-built and well-designed machines. Some of the others didn't have great battery life, though.
IMO, if you want a really good x86-based laptop, buy a Thinkpad. If you want the best possible laptop, and don't need to run Windows, buy a Powerbook.
Disclosure: I work for IBM, and own IBM stock (and Apple stock, and Dell stock) but I don't think those facts affect my opinion. If you don't believe me, ask me about some other IBM products, like, say, Lotus Notes.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
My Fujitsu B3000 series with touch screen gets like 8 hours minimum with both batteries and weighs like 3 pounds! Everything is external in order to keep the weight down and the thing compact. http://www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/www/productbri dge_bseries.shtml
My primary concern when buying laptop was getting long batterylife and low weight. And after a long search i finally found what i consider the best in those two areas the panasonic toughbooks: I personally bought the W2http://www.panasonic.com/computer/toughbook/lear n_more_tbw2.asp/ which weighs only 1,3 kg and with full brightness and WiFi on gives me around 4-5 hours battery when surfing the web and doing similar stuff, and it even has a build-in cd rw drive.
MikMik Baby Organics Mikkaworks
I, too, must agree! I went with the other end of the spectrum - buying a 17" Powerbook. But in its class, it's completely unique too. I've had several buddies criticize my decision, saying "You're paying too much for too little CPU power!" and so forth, but where else can I go to get a 17" LCD panel in a laptop this thin and lightweight? Furthermore, who else offers the backlit keyboard feature, or the slot-loading DVD burner (no flimsy tray to break off)?
One of my good friends bought a high-end Sager "gaming laptop", arguing it was a much better value for his $ than my Powerbook 17" was for mine. Only 2 or 3 months later, he's already talking about getting rid of the Sager. Why? He says "The fans are too loud!" (Not only that, but its battery life is abysmal, it's "thick as a brick", and as he also complained about, the speakers are terrible in it too.)
On the plus side, the Sager uses a higher-end LCD 17" panel than my Powerbook does. (The rumors have it, Sager originally spec'd their laptops with the exact same panel Apple uses, but Apple outbid them and bought up all the supply for their Powerbooks. At that point, Sager just ordered the next model up from what Apple used.) It really does look beautiful - but a display alone doesn't make the laptop.
There is a switch just above the keyboard that allows me to put the laptop in low power mode and in that mode it runs a good 7 hours on the extended life battery. It is very useful for my long commutes on the train from Long Island to NYC.
Those who trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither" -- Ben Franklin
I have a Sharp PC-MM10 laptop with the extended battery. Even with the extended battery, the thing is very light (maybe 3 lbs). I get 8-9 hours of battery life in Windows, if I turn the display brightness down slightly. I haven't gotten the longrun stuff working under Linux yet.
One caveat: the hard disk may be questionable. A friend of mine had his PC-MM10 hard disk fail after just over a year. There is a story at epinions.com about someone who had several successive hard disk failures.
The PC-MM10 runs on 1 GHz Transmeta processor, which could be why it conserves battery power so well. I don't know about the newer PC-MM20.
The 12 inch White iBook lasts about 4 hours and 30 minutes, with heavy action going on. (iChat, dvd, mail, Safari, netstumbler)
You have been sig'd
Last week I saw the new Sony A170 in the store, and the display is indeed as amazing as they say. Time for Apple to upgrade their displays I'd say.
Great except for that keen OSX bug a couple of battery updates back. It showed me a battery life of 10 hours for my iBook G4 one day. No, it wasn't true. Screenshot would have been funny though.
-- INTX Grouch. http://www.midnightblue.net
mmmmm tasty tasty
They come with a standard battery that isn't all that great, the extended battery is what you should buy, no real extra weight, a neat extra handle. Makes the laptop slightly longer but not much.
With the extended battery I get about 6 hours.
In addition you can buy a special battery that goes where the CD/DVD drive goes. This gives you an additional few hours, making a full working day on batteries possible. Have tried it, and it works for me. Can't be used in conjunction with the CD/DVD drive though...
My thinkpad is a T40.
I have a Dell Latitude which lasts roughly 3-4 hours with a new battery. But when I have 2 batteries (remove the cd-rom/floppy drive), I seem to get 7-9 hours. I also do things like dim the screen all the way and lower the processor speed. It runs at 750 mhz on battery vs 851 mhz on AC (PIII). Of course, the amount of time I get off of it depends on what I'm doing with it. When I am using my cell phone as a USB modem, I get roughly 1/2 the battery time. I'm sure the major factor in getting maximum battery life is diabling/disconnecting all of the peripherals that you do not need.
I have a G3 ibook with a G4 ibook battery...I get around 7 hours witht he screen dim and wifi off...5 hrs with wifi on!
Panasonic makes the best laptops for the road warrior in my opinion. They have a line of laptops here in Japan called "Lets Note" and Toughbook in the US. They are up to 4 designs now that designed to fit various demands.
None are super powerful, but they are designed for the best battery life. There is no other laptops in the market that comes close. Trust me I've searched. They are all designed around the Centrino chipset which also means they are all wireless capable.
The one with the longest battery life is the new R3. It's designed for people that are continually on the road and needs a PC everywhere. The ad says 9 hour battery life. With regular use I'm sure it's closer to 7 hours. it's a bit on the small size, 10.4" display. And it has no optical drive, so you can't use it for watching dvd on the road.
I personally own the new W2 model. 12.1" display, 802.11g, 7 hour battery life, and an internal dvd-rw. I love it. The best laptop I have ever owned. I get 5~6 hours on battery easy.
They also have a 14.1" model, the Y2. similar to the w2. 7.5 hours. but only a dvd-rom/cd-rw combo drive.
They are a bit pricey, but in my opinion, if you travel alot and use laptops everywhere, then they are well worth the money!
My sony c1 picturebook gets 11 hours on an extended battery with the backlight turned down.
Well - I guess the problem is that this changes from model to model even from the same vendor. Personally I have owned IBM Thinkpads, Fujitsu, Sony Vaio, Twinhead, and a bunch of Dell Latitude and Inspiron laptops. Of these in general the Dell Latitude performed best when it came to battery life. A Latitude with one spare battery running Linux with carefully configured APM features could run me through most of a long haul flights without problems - in other words I usually squeezed something like 4-5 hours out of each battery. Oh - and the opposite was the Fujitsu - nice looking, nice performance but impossible to get it to run more than 1 1/2 hour.
But again - I doubt these views are very valuable since I am sure the latest models from all vendors are completely different.
The Sony TR series is a beast and a half. I have the extended capacity battery and I get 8 hours easily.
I have a Fujitsu P5000 subnotebook. 1GHZ P3 (centrino marketing tagged). Average about 5.5 (enough for a cross country flight) hours with the brightness about 1/3rd up. If I pop out the DVD drive and slap in the second battery I get at least 9 hours.
You cant say something as general as that. For example, my Dell with a desktop 2.66GHz P4 will give 3 hours of battery life. And i can watch a full DVD on a single charge. I'm sure the newer centrino equipped ones will run much longer than that.
I've found that getting a fresh battery makes a huge difference. I've had a Compaq Evo Centrino notebook for about a year. When the notebook was new, the battery was good for about 5 hours. After a few months it was down to 3.5. After 6 monthes, 2 hours. Finally when I couldn't squeeze even an hour out of it, I replaced the battery. This leads me to believe that I would need to purchase 3 or 4 batteries a year to maintain maximum battery life.
Also, I see people saying "a Dell gets 2 hours" or an "IBM gets X hours". This is silly, each notebook brand has many different models. I would bet a cross section of similar Centrino notebooks from different manufacturers would have very similar battery performance.
I did some research a while back on building a machine that could last more than a day on a portable battery. Clearly, this technology does not exist off the shelf today, but what could you get if you were willing to get your hands dirty?
The best technologies I found were ones being researched by the military that used a combination lithium and fuel cell battery. Another interesting one was a mini gasoline generator! These experimental technologies could get maybe 24 hours of full power computing, but this still entails carrying around like a liter of fuel.
So realistically, the near future of laptop computer battery does not really look very bright. Literally. Reducing power consumption is going to be the only way to reach decent times, and that means no backlight, small screens, and very low power solid state components.
The best case imagined chemical scenario is a solid-fuel fuel cell, but even with these, the hours of power are going not going to get to even cell-phone-like batterly life.
So, I looked into nuclear, and there might be a way to invent a safe halfnium battery that will solve the problem for good....but getting nuclear tech to the mainstream safely doesn't seem within our reach for many decades.
I you're just word processing and browsing the Internet Wirelessly, get one of these. They get 24-36 hours of battery life (they do have a black and white LCD, though).
If you're just word processing and browsing the Internet wirelessly, get one of these. They get 24-36 hours of battery life (they do have a black and white LCD, though)
I get 7+ hours with my ThinkPad T40p - With the 9 cell battery. Yeah, it is a bit bigger and heavier, but it is not entirely ugly to look at and is not a big stretch. I recomend the ThinkPad T4X to anyone who asks about a good, reliable laptop - Overpriced? Well, it depends how you value the thing - I paid extra, however, I'm very satisfied.
Esta es una firma en Espanol.
My new IBM ThinkPad T42p lasts 4-5 hours/battery, and I haven't tweaked the power management yet.
I have ripped several movies to Divx4 AVIs @ 1920kbps + 128k mp3 audio. Using an HP (Compaq) TC1100 Tablet PC (10.4" screen, brightness all the way up, sound about halfway up through headphones) I can play a movie for 2hrs30min--just enough to watch Pirates of the Caribbean and then play a few hands of FreeCell. The unit is small physically so the battery is kind of small, and decoding ripped DVDs requires more CPU power than playing an original DVD (AFAIK) due to the fact that it's compressed even more.
:-)
My 12" G3/800 iBook can play back a whole DVD easily, maybe two if they're short (Toy Story 1 & 2 and Chicken Run are always fun.) Since I'm cheap an never get direct flights (FL to CA) that's enough for me.
It's a year and a half old and still gives a solid 2.5-3 hrs of use--wireless web surfing with the performance turned all the way up to keep Safari from lagging too bad.
I doubt this is useful to the poster but I've read lots of interesting stuff in this thread and thought I'd share my experiences.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I have a new 1.5 GHz 15" PowerBook. It gets a consistent 4+ hours of life in "regular" use - that doesn't mean watching a DVD, but it does mean writing documents, surfing the net, checking my e-mail, and so on. It also gets that kind of life with both Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme live and kicking.
For power conservation, I let the processor cycle down as needed, and I spin down the HD after 5 minutes. I also have the brightness dialed back to about 70% when on battery - that's usually good enough for me. But that's all the steps i need to get over 4 hours. If I were a little more aggressive, I might be able to break 5.
Part of the difference I think is the newer PPC 7457 processors - I believe they're pretty light on the power consumption (I don't have the actual specs handy).
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
the fujitsu p series is amazing. there is a forum for them here.
most have 10 - 11 hours with extended battery and modular battery. they're "ultra-portables": 10.6 inch screens with 1280x768 resolution. they're available in oldschool crusoe models for "cheap" or centrino platforms.
i have a p1120, which is only 5 hours with an extended battery, but no modular bay. its got a 8.9 inch 1024x600 screen which is touchscreen - the reason i bought it. it is my baby.
My gateway 450 ROG, 1.4 GHz Centrino, hi cap internal battery + slimline bay (~90 Watt-hours in total), dim backlight, playing MP3 in the background through winamp, 9-10 hours with sporadic use of word or excel. If the backlight is set to turn off after 1 minute of idle, the MP3s will play for 13-14 hours. Granted, this is with the power management set to throttle the proc down to ~260(?) MHz during normal (light) use, and a number of services and devices (i.e. internal WiFi) disabled... After ~8 months of daily use, battery life had dropped by ~15%. If I'm using the system as a development station on high brightness, the increased backlight and disk activity reduces battery life to 5-6 hours.
A prophet is never regarded in his home town, I guess.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
4-5 DAYS on a set of 4 AA batteries.
My Dell is a Latitude CPxJ -- P3-650 with 256M of Ram. It's old, but I found out quite by accident that it works with the newer Inspiron batteries (75Uf IIRC)
I bought a lot of 6 "bad" ones on eBay, planning to take 'em apart and assemble one or two good ones from the individual cells. Turns out I had two perfectly good ones, and now my old Dell runs for 8-9 hours, with the WiFi card and moderatly heavy disk use. If I'm doing local compiles (I'm a Java developer) then I can shorten it to 6 hours, but I've got to use the disk a LOT to get it down to 6.
The longer your battery life is, the bigger your pennis is.
The latest IBM Thinkpad X Series with an extended battery will get at least 10 hours of regular use (web browsing, word processing, playing dvd's)--no questions asked.
If all they need is simple stuff, it's hard to beat a good PDA with a keyboard attached. If they need basic stuff and DVDs, maybe it's best to get them one of those portable DVD player gizmos and a PDA with a keyboard...
Granted, most people just want a PC, never mind the details, but there might be another solution.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
Is the 2nd battery in the modular bay, i've taken this thing to lan parties and stretched around 5+ hours of use out of it. It is really nice that even in its max battery mode it still has enough power to play UT2004 in a high res with the effects turned up. Say what you want about Dell but battery life was my main reason for choosing them and I couldn't be happier with it.
I have an IBM Thinkpad X40 and it's great. I've got the extended life battery though, but I think it's well worth it. I haven't tried squeezing all the juice out of it, but without thinking about it at all, using it with full brightness, compiling some apps, doing some websurfing, I got four hours easily. It weighs about 1.4kg with the extended battery connected, so it's still very very portable. You don't get an optical drive with it though, but if you can either stand using an external one (I know it's no problem to me) or don't even need one, you'll be just fine.
-- Everybody has a sig but me...
Full fledged desktop P-4, Radeon 9600 Mobile, and a huge hi-res widescreen = 2 hours at best with 802.11g and Bluetooth on, less if I burn a CD or two, and maybe 40 minutes if I'm lucky when playing games.
.iso files on the HD if possible. Optical drives take more power than HDs.
For a PC, go for a Pentium M, preferably the Ultra Low Voltage model if you can put up with "only" 1.1GHz. Smaller screens help, and a 4200RPM HD.
You might be able to get away with decent plugged-in gaming with certain mobile graphics chips.
Tablet PCs, while expensive, are usually some of the smallest portable PCs you can find, and thus use the least power.
For a Mac, it's simple. iBook G4 12"
One nice thing about Macs is that you can put them to sleep and swap the battery while turned on. A PC will usually need you to hibernate or shut down first.
Get as much RAM as you can afford. Swapping causes heavy hard drive access, and moving parts eat battery life.
Set the HD sleep time to as low as possible, without causing it to rapidly cycle between sleep and running, as spinning up the drive takes far more juice than just keeping it spinning.
If you need a CD for certain software, use virtual CD drivers and
If the machine has expansion bays, fill all that you can with batteries.
Minimize wireless usage, and keep the screen as dim as you can comfortably use it.
Half of the battery life equation is on the user's end. My old Tablet PC ranged between 2 and 6 hours, and my new desknote ranges between 1/2 hour and 2.5 if I'm lucky. It all depends on how you use it.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
T40's about about 4-5 hours of battery life while doing processor intensive stuff (think a DVD or VS.Net compiling). Not sure what brightness the screen was on, didn't really care.
They are pricey, but they rock.
Use handhelds with keyboard extension.
I use Clie TH55 with keyboard extension, and I can easily write reports for hours without worrying about battery life.
I have one of Apple's PowerBook G3 (Firewire a.k.a. Pismo a.k.a 2000) models. It's been upgraded from 400 MHz to 900 MHz and from 64MB RAM to 512. It runs Panther pretty well...I wouldn't open my 1400-picture iPhoto library on it (that's what the G5 is for :) but it does great for random web browsing, word processing, etc. You're still mostly up to date technology-wise since this machine includes an internal Airport 802.11b slot, USB, FireWire, and 10/100 Ethernet.
The key to the Pismo is that it is the last PowerBook to include an additional bay which can hold the stock DVD-ROM drive or another battery (or various third-party fixed and removable drives). If you buy one of these machines used of course you shouldn't expect too much out of the battery included but you can always add one or two high capacity batteries. I have one that gives me 4-5 hours of careful use (no DVD watching) plus one original Apple battery that just gives me an hour. The only problem is weight - with two batteries installed the machine gets up to 8 or 9 pounds. But, working at a university with total WiFi coverage I find it quite worthwhile to bring everywhere I go on campus without having to pack the power adapter.
I bring my laptop to coffee shops for 5-6 hour sessions of writing. I like to write fiction in my free time. I found that using only one app (I use OpenOffice, even though my laptop is well equipped to handle MS Office (1.8ghz). and reducing the power settings on my laptop I can get 4-5 hours out of it. I use a toshiba laptop, by the way.
It might seem a bit odd, but I somtimes embody the "Monitors are for hackers with a bad memory" saying. I'll turn my monitor off (switch to VGA-out only). I can write that way for up to 6 hours. Of course it doesn't work so easily for other applications, but for simple writing, I tend to do fine. Only problem is a little 20 minutes of editing and formatting afterward (editing and formatting that tend to take up more time if they're done on-the-fly anyway).
With the Ultrabase dock attached it is still smaller than most regular notebooks. With a slim battery in the base, it gets 11-13 hours. Undocked it's still superior at 6-8 hours (8 only if wifi is never used). Caveat emptor, though, buy it in a store; Thinkpads are notorious for dead pixels. Mine has an annoying one almost in the center.
Another awesome writing machine (not for DVDs, though) is the Psion Netbook. 1.1 kg, no moving parts (durable as heck), PCMCIA slot, wireless capable, good keyboard, touch-screen. Linux is also available though still a work in progress. And, back to the topic, last but not least, it gets a solid 12-14 hours between charges.
Clearly, the laptop with the longest battery life is this 800 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 I'm using. The battery has run down so far that there's a single blinking LED when I press the button on the battery, which is supposed to mean "empty", and the battery status item in the menu bar has an X in it, signifying that the PowerBook doesn't even think there's a battery there at all. It's been running like this for at least 40 minutes and shows no sign of giving up. This after several hours running with Airport enabled, the screen turned up, and a USB-powered scanner attached and running.
Three cheers for Li+ batteries!
I've been using an Inspiron 300m for about 3 months now. I've got the extended battery, which ups the weight to about 3.2 lbs) and I can get ~8 hours using it for surfing and typing... ~6 hours playing DIVX movies at full brightness. If I want to play DVD movies, I pop it into the base which has an extra battery (this ups the weight to about 4 lbs) and I can get ~9 hours watching movies.
Blackrobe "The Original TechnoWeenie!"
I have an ASUS M2N (centrino and wirelss) and have got 5 hours of surfing and game play out of it before I realised I hadn't pushed the power cord far enough into the socket. It has 4 cpu speeds, so dims and dumbs itself down when running off batteries. I wasn't even on the slowest speed. .
Very impressed.
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." - Zapp Brannigan
Oops. I remember reading about that before, but had forgotten. I was thinking of the problems with storing H2 in a safe manner in cars and such, and extrapolated that those powering laptops would work the same.
If your client just wants to write an article, then he may want to consdier a laptop alternative such as those made by alphasmart; they can get 700 hours from 3 AA batteries, it's palmOS-powered, and it has full-sized querty keybaord. Or maybe they can use a PDA with an AA battery extender and an optional keyboard.
Well, there was also the matter of the Powerbooks catching on fire, which scared me off of them!
Best Buy can have you arrested
My answer (really): I don't know to be honest, but as a general rule, laptop batteries last for about 30% to 40% of the time that the sales brochure claims they will.
Always gets a laugh, but I'm *serious*!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I routinely get TWO full length DVDs (just watched LotR:RotK and Lion King two days ago) out of my T40 with extended-life battery. When brand-spanking new, I clocked it at about 8 hours, though it is down to about 6 nowadays. Good thing I have a spare extended-life battery!
i own one, would never buy one again, yes they have a p4mobile processor in them, and a 16.1" screen and alot of other shit. but it gets to hot and the battery only lasts for 55minutes after owning it for 4 months, and even less when you turn up the brightness of the screen. i don't have the extra battery as the laptop is already heavy enough. these bulky machines preform well under pressure and when only plugged in, but walk away from your wall socket and your meetings had better not be longer than 30minutes!
yes its
I purchased a P-2110 (precessor to the P-2120) because I had heard it handled Linux so well (at least the previous season's did).
.... when I got it back this time I figured I'd try an experiement and I gave it to my dad [replacing his old clunky Inspiron 7000 series] to try with WinXP to see if the same problem manifested itself. Oddly enough, what is now over a year later, it hasn't. I was almost hoping it would so that the Fujitsu techs might know better what to do ... or clearly see it was a hardware problem or something ... instead of polietly saying they couldn't support other systems...
...
And it was fine, for about six months. Then it suddenly died in February (day after valentine's actually). RMAed it (Fujitsu probably has the nicest/best customer service of any company I've dealt with over the phone recently). When I got it back I put FreeBSD on it which lasted only a few days before the same problem happened
As it stands, that's the only MicroSoft Windows machine in my family. It'd be nice to get it converted, but I'm just afraid history would repeat itself
I love my x40 (running debian testing.)
If only I had done a little more research and realized that the "ibm 802.11b/g" is really an intel 2200bg and that it is only in the VERY most basic level of "working" (linux can now recognize it...)
but the battery life is great. a solid 7 hours with low LCD. of course getting suspend and cpudyn working properly was a bit of a pain.
anyone who has a x40 have any tips?
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
The only Tablet PC on the market that can provide 12-16 hours of run-time providing an entire day's worth of mobility
My cell phone is quite the computer. It has games, and a calculator. If it allows instructions to read/write the memory, I could simulate a Turing machine.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I make it through 6 hour flights while watching movies constantly and still have enough left over to check my email when I get off the plane.
I use a Dell C600 (PIII-1000-Speedstep)
First I pack the ROM drive away and replace it with the second battery. I also carry a 3rd batt just in case. Second I also RIP my DVD's (DVDDecrypter) to the hard drive - spinning the harddrive takes far less juice than spinning a DVD. Lastly I use a hardware & user profile that has any extraneous devices, apps, utilities disabled.
Amongst all the hype amongst talk about PB the mail about Electrovaya SC500 Tablet PC got squashed. Take a look ati =180 4
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?
The review is a little dated (Mar 2003) but a battery life of 8hrs and 17mins is still impressive!
Also to quote the site
" And that is only the performance of the 96Wh battery standard in the SC500. Imagine what the 120Wh SC800 is able to do.".
Definitely worth checking out if most of your work can be done on a (slow) tablet PC. (mail/wp).
And the reason for that is what you're doing at the time. I usually use the percentage instead of the time, because if I'm using five applications at once, I still have 63% capacity, not the 01:03 that it says.
My PowerBook gets a pretty good battery life -- I'm guessing over four hours the first time I used it on battery power. But damn is it hot.
Man, I'm late with this one. By now since there's 568 responses, I hope it gets noticed. I'll be a weenie and post it to a top response.
.txt they should get a Psion 5mx. I've done plenty of research on this because that's what I need for my trip round the world. They run off AA batteries which last 20-30 hours.
If your clients are just looking for something to check email, web access and are willing to save in
But of course, it's not the newest and latest, and the screen is black and white. But if your clients are geeks, there is a linux version of it.
Good retailer of refurbished ones. Linux version.
If anyone buys one, please mention my name: Dave Smith. I'm riding a small motorcycle round the world and Paul at Psionflexi has been really helpful.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
And yes, I've reconditioned my battery, as per instructed.
A friend who bought exactly the same model has 2-3 hours of life on his battery, and his wife (who has a new version) gets all of 5 hours. An acquaintance has a battery life of 10 minutes, but he didn't get an applecare warranty and never uses his machine without plugging it in anyway.
While I like the laptop, and think the OS is with the home "consumer" needs, I'm not sure I'd buy another laptop, as the battery-life issue seems such a crapshoot, and I don't see any laptops out there with what I would consider a reasonable keyboard layout. I might as well just lug around a happy hacking keyboard and use whatever hardware is available.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
Dell CPx, PIII, 500Mhz, 1024x768.
Two brand new 4460 mAh batteries, which are ~20 bigger than what the laptop shipped with years ago, yields over 11 hours of phun.
And for that, I can live with the low rez.
Toss in Gentoo, gcc 3.4.1, and compile everything with -O3, and you've got a snappy little machine, mang!
...ever seen that run on an X40? No, didn't think so. And for the record, on a new battery, my Tosh M1 centrino/pentium M will do 7 hours on office-type work, with not too much optical drive activity.
A keyboard, LCD screen, standard electronics and no hard drive. . ?
It shouldn't cost more than $100. --And that's pushing it. And you can't comfortably read on the thing. (By comfortably, I mean, read while lying in bed.)
Other than the price, it's not a bad little design though. Still, I ended up getting a Psion 5 off Ebay for $75. Not the best design either, but good enough. And you can read it while lying down.
-FL
Oh, my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 goes for about 4 weeks on a pair of AA batteries...
If you had to have a laptop for a CEO that could support 2 batteries and you could recharge the batteries on a charger (external to the laptop) is there such a thing? I support a CEO who travels between offices, airplanes, hallways, hotel rooms 24x7 and I'm looking for a solution that will allow him to never have to power down (even to change batteries). Is this possible? As I say, he's often in hallways and stuff so the more cordless hours a day the better.
I have a good Compaq LTE 5250. The battery is the biggest problem. Mostly I run Linux in my laptop, however, outdoors laptop shuts down during rc-script. So I should have a win95 startup disk with Norton Commander. Booting from floppy allows to work approx. 15 minutes.
I have a picturebook with transmeta cpu.
The only thing that really uses power is the
display. Replace that with oled, and your laptop
will keep running all day.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
I solidly believe that there is a deliberate gap in the computer market. There are simply no decent devices being currently made which allow one to easily and effortlessly write on the go. The technology is there, and it is entirely possible to build a good word-processor with a good screen and a good keyboard which can last forever on AA's. They used to make them. (The TRS-80 Model 100)
They still sort of do. Alphasmart's Dana is workable tool. But at $700 Canadian for the bottom end model, Alphasmart can go right to hell. Basic LCD with a keyboard and rudimentary electronics? The thing should sell for no more than $100 tops.
I ended up getting myself a Psion 5 from Ebay for $75 bucks.
Nice big sreen, lasts about 25 hours on a pair of AA's and it's got the best key-board I've seen for a palm. It's tight, but with small hands you can touch-type, and with bigger hands, you can do a six-finger version of the same at a fair clip. But it's still not the best solution.
The keyboard, while quite amazing as compared to similar devices, could be better. (If you press the edge of a key rather than the middle of the key, you don't always get a contact. This is needlessly annoying.) Plus the LCD screen is far too reflective for my tastes. If the wall behind you is painted white, chances are you're going to be irritated.
There's a good back-light system on the Psion 5 which fixes this, but it reduced the effective battery life down to, (drum roll please), about 6 hours, which is no better than the average laptop. Thanks guys.
Interestingly, I still find myself using the Psion 5 all the damned time. It does have a couple of features which I have found in no other device. --The primary one being the big screen which allows you to read the thing comfortably while lying in bed. --I don't care who you are, if you're a geek, then you've probably pissed yourself off trying to read in bed with a laptop. The Psion 5 is the first time I've ever comfortably been able to do this. With a fully programmable key-board, (using freeware off the web), you can configure the buttons to match exactly where your fingers fall. Not bad!
I've also done a lot of writing work on the thing since I got mine. It's nowhere nearly as comfortable as a full desktop PC, but it does the job in a pinch. I just don't like to be pinched. Still, if you want to write a term paper in a coffee shop, then you can certainly do so. The batteries will last longer than you. It's just that the device could be better. The sad part is that, as far as I know, it's the best solution currently available in a conusmer product available on the surface of the Earth. And that's pretty lame, because it could be better and it could be better with the technology currently available.
If the keyboard was maybe an inch wider and worked a little better, and if the LCD was just slightly less reflective; why, then the Psion 5 would be a dream come true!
As it is, though, for an average $75 bucks on Ebay, I can't complain too much. You can read the thing while lying in bed, and you can type a paper while sitting at any convenient table top where your PC isn't. Then you can put it in your backpack and move on. If you run out of batteries, you can buy a new set at any convenience store and you're good for another twenty-odd hours. Takes Compact Flash cards, too. That's not bad.
It could just be better. And a part of me thinks that this is entirely by design. Why is it so important that people not be allowed to easily, comfortably and reliably record their thoughts during the day while away from their ugly work stations? --Is there some reason people are required to always be subtly stressing over battery life? How does this affect the over-all tempurature of culture?)
What end does this serve?
And what th
Anybody have any idea how incredibly hard it is to find a good outside location in the shade with both a Personal Telco node and a working electrical outlet? I have no idea how Pioneer Square hosts so many events when out of two dozen outlets I found, only one works, and it's located on the roof of the TriMet bunker on the side of the podium that overlooks the square, which also happens to double as a public restroom for the Californian rejects who end up homeless here.
Help us build a better map!
My Sony vaio r505gc with extended battery does 6-7 hours under Linux without much trouble. But that's under GNU/Linux ;) If I really squeeze: dimmed backlight, just text processing etc. I get 7-8 hours. Naturally compiling sources will bite into the battery quite seriously.
Under Win2k it's a bit less impressive I never get more than 4-5 hours. You see the bitches at Sony don;t care about their customers so the powermanagement apps don;t really work too well under Win2k, only under XP. And as we know stock MS powermanagement is pretty poor.
So, off to ebay you lot for a sony R505 and an extended battery. Caveat: getting its wireless to work under GNU/Linux is a pain.
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
I second this.
I god a Psion 5 MX and it's the best "laptop" I ever had to write text.
The keyboard is excellent.
And if you need internet access, Opera runs rather well on it. Oh and to test scripts, Perl and Java are also running well on it.
I've published a book about Linux. Almost everything has actually been written on a Psion 5 MX and almost all scripts have also been written and tested on it.
{{.sig}}
Fujitsu Lifebook P 2000. 800 mhz transmeta Crusoe. You can replace the CD-rom with a battery that takes you from 7 to 14 hours of runtime. Turn down your screen and you can stretch it to 16
Uhm!
http://www.dynamism.com/libretto/specs.shtml
NiCad batteries are the worst (I know!), newer technologies claim they don't suffer.
Two books on for the x-wing and one for the tie. You would choose a speed and heading and turn to the apporiate page, then your opponent would and so you would twist and turn trying to get a lock. NO BATTERIES and a lot of fun. Sadly I lost it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I hate to break it to you, but Dells, HPaqs, catch fire too.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Simply pull a Doc Brown: steal plutonium from libyans and make it into a battery. Just remember to read any letters from the future before shredding.
And remember, bulletproof vests and armored laptops are always high fashion ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I've had my Powerbook show 19 hours - didn't make it last more than 4 though.
Im using an iBook G4 12". It's not a centrino Toshiba I used before, but the battery life ist pretty good. It's enough for an DVD and if you wirte a letter, it lasts for 4 hours. I'm satisfied.
Same here for my HP Pavilion zt3000. On the 'Max Battery' profile I can get 5+ hours with wireless enabled. My brother watched a dvd on the plane here and told me it lasted for 4 1/2 hours.
:-)
I just pulled the plug to see the estimated time remaining. It says 6:12 hours
From my experience with HP laptops though, It's possible that you won't get the same battery model. My previous laptop, an Athlon XP Pavilion ze4430 could barely reach 2 1/2 hours. It's the processor, of course, but a friend of mine had the same model and easily got 3 1/2 hours. Using an HP battery tool I found out that the maximum capacity of my battery was significantly lower than his.
Panasonic has a 10.5 inch laptop that they claim has 8.5 hours of battery life. Saw it at the panasonic museum in osaka, japan. It's a pretty sexy machine
My Dell Inspiron 8600 (with the centrino 1.7, 1920x1200 wuxga display, 80gb hdd) gets a good 7 hours of usage for things like surfing the internet/typing with the second battery installed in the modular bay and the display contrast all the way down.. not bad for such a monster of a laptop, considering its faster than most desktops.. with the dvd drive installed in place of the secondary battery, it'll play through a full movie and still have about an hour left..
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
I live in Japan now, and the laptops here are light years ahead of the pack that are for sale in the US. I just ordered a Fujitsu that lasts 6-7 hours on the standard battery. I know there are some companies like dynamism.com that sell imports from Japan.
Check out http://www.alphasmart.com - you can buy a dana, a palm-powered "laptop alternative" that can run 26 hours on a battery charge. Additionally, the battery can be replaced with a few AA batteries in a pinch. You can't play a dvd on it, but you can certainly check your email (over wifi) or write an article on it in an internet cafe.
The 880 runs Windows CE, which has been remarkably robust (never needed a re-install and has only locked up once or twice). It uses CF cards for extra storage, and has a pcmcia slot as well.
I have regularly gotten 7-8 hours out of it, by turning down the screen brightness. The only thing that I really would have liked to see on it was a ethernet connector, but this machine dates from 2000 or so.
Whenever I am out using it, people ask me about it. I believe that there is an excellent market for systems like this - it just has to be low cost and with newer batteries, probably 10-15 hours are possible. University students taking notes in class in one good example of an application.
I gave up trying to use something other than Windows on my Dell Inspiron 5150. It had 6 hours of battery life, easy, with Windows (I got the larger battery). But with Linux (Xandros 2.0, SUSE 9.1) I never got better than 2 hours of battery life. Nor could I get sleep, suspend or hibernate (suspend to disk) to work (I'm not a kernel hacker) for my machine.
Tired of uncooperative hardware and software I switch (back) to the Mac just yesterday. (I'm happy to see that BASH is the default shell now.)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
for what I do most of the time - pdf with acrobat,
spreadsheets with openoffice, coding and listening to mp3 while traveling - i get out between 6-8hrs during normal business day operations, desktop use with logitech external mouse. i charge the battery once a day mostly, unless i have been watching dvds or using the external firewire disk,
which takes me down to 3-4 hours due to other usage patterns.
6hrs is the average, but you`ll get 8hrs with matching energy profile and screenblanking with no problems.
i`ve been getting the same before from my 14"powebook G3 whitey, too. its the non-slot drive variant in both cases 700/800mhz, all with airport extreme up and running.
the G4 uses more power, and a colleague of mine has a bit of a problem with beeing out of battery
about an hour earlier.
all other laptops i had before (toshiba satelite pro 2080, ibm 7xx etc.) never got above 4 hours
without any tricks. plus they didnt have it "all built in directly already" for about the same price.
only reason for the ibook over the powerbook was color and keyboard layout, i dont like the enter key on the powerbook.
one thing to say after that experience - next time, its apple again.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Currently I'm using a Toshiba Portege 7020CT with the "extended service" battery. I regularly get 6+ hours runtime. The battery extends out the back of the laptop making it hard to find a case (you wouldn't want the weight of the laptop to sit on it) but a Targus backpack case with the laptop sitting on its' side works fine.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
I've got one of the new Apple Powerbook 17" laptops and while on a plane and in airports I was able to watch Kill Bill from start to finish, work on a paper from school, and play a game of Spaceward Ho! on one charge. About 4 hours with no modification of brightness or anything.
Onething that does kill the battery life quick though is Warcraft III, I guess the graphics, the CPU requirements, the heat dissipation needs, etc. drop that four hours to about one and a half.
Greg
All I need is 5 minutes... the time it takes to unplug from one wall, move to another room, and plug back in.
Manufacturers, take that battery out and build the "brick" into the laptop. Just give me a 110/220 plug on the back of the laptop.
// Alan Porter
Although Nicads will have some memory effect after a while of recharging from about halfway depleted, but if you completely discharge the battery and fully charge it two or three times, the memory effect is almost completely reversed.
The TRS-80 model 100 I picked up a yard sale for $5, (and later sold to a colector for $65) ran for the whole 2 months I had it in my posession on a single set of 4 Energizer AA's.
When it was new my significant other's Gen-2 300Mhz G3 iBook (Bondi) would extract about 6.5-7 hours from a battery when used lightly and the screen dimmed. It would also get nearly 4 hours of The Sims! Of course the machine is 4 years old now and the original battery only lasts about 1 hour. We keep meaning to buy a new battery, but then we think about just spending the money on a new 17" PowerBook...Then reality hits and we go buy groceries.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
I have a Gateway M505XL which Gateway appears not to sell anymore (I can't find it on their website). It is a Centrino-based laptop which has given me more than more than 5 hours of battery life. I watched a full DVD and a few episodes of The Family Guy on a plane recently and still had plenty of battery life to spare. Its a 15.4" widescreen with 512MB, 60GB, DVD Burner, etc. There are several annoyances with this laptop though - there is a "media center dealie" on the left side which has a software-driven volume control for the laptop. No actual volume knob anywhere. This means when you are watching a movie or playing a game, you can't adjust the volume. The IR port is on the front facing your stomach (I don't know why manufacturers are doing this - (ahem HP) - PUT THEM ON THE SIDE! This laptop also has an integrated subwoofer which is pretty amusing. If they could get it to last more than a month or two that would really be something. Positive things for this laptop are:
1) Decent style (subjective)
2) Long battery life
3) Great screen
4) Fast
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Which is kind of moot anymore, because most current laptop batteries are Li-Ion, which doesn't have the problem.
my fujitsu lifebook p2120 gets some 12 hours on the batteries (I have the second battery), with the screen at full brightness, and the speed cranked down to about 30%. Goes for a "very long time" with the screen off and the cpu cranked down as slow as possible. Great little laptop.
You can do a lot of tricks with linux to conserve battery life, mount with noatime, turn off swap, don't log to disk, play with hard drive spindown, and use the laptop mode kernel patch.
Perhaps they shouldn't allow laptops (or at least pluggin in laptops) on commercial airlines!
Best Buy can have you arrested
10 years later it still lasts for 5 hours! I don't use it any more (486SX-25), it's a museum piece, but it happily runs scandisk repeatedly to try to deplete the battery. All credit to the Toshiba engineers of '94. Wish I could expect the same from my current X40 Li-Ion.
16 hours max battery.
Transeta Crusoe 667 mhz; steps to 300 mhz if extra power not needed.
Tmobile GPRS and I'm online all the time, listening to Air America and checking Democratic Underground.
Everyone at the airport loves the picturebook!
Posting again because the first time it ended up as a reply to the wrong parent. Sorry.
Yeah, but you didn't mention the Osborne 1 boots to CP/M from the floppy in about 4 seconds.
Click, clickity, click-click
A:\>
No modern PC can do that.
Oh, you wanted to run an application?....that takes a minute or so more if clicking.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Man, I wish my ipod's battery lasted as long as some of these laptops.
I use company supplied notebooks (currently an IBM T23). I think an interesting question relates to battery performance degradation over the useful life of the battery. In my company one is expected to use the same battery about as long as the PC is in use, typically 2 - 3 years. I notice a distinct drop off in battery performance over time - on the order of 50% or so. We keep our notebooks on docking where they act as our main PC, and use them on battery typically on airplanes once or twice a week. Is there any difference among the various brands discussed in this thread in terms of the rate of performance drop off?
I just bought an IBM Thinkpad R50. The thing is like a tank, and it has insane battery life. The battery is so big that it sticks out the back, but it lasts a good 4-5 hours on regular use with a wireless ethernet blazing. If you turn down the brightness on the 15" LCD screen (amazing 1400x1050 res.) and turn off the wireless ethernet, it will easily last 6-7 hours. I've noticed that the biggest power hog is the built-in wireless card.
It's been said before in this thread, but I'll repeat it -- if you need a x86 laptop, the IBM T40, T41, and T42s are the way to go hands down.
My new T40p gets 9 hours of word processing, with battery usage totally minimized, or 5ish hours of high-performance work (including DVDs).
It's also fast and built like a rock. If you're worried about cost, look for "open box returns" from big companies like Zones or CDW. These are usually awesome deals, and even if there is something wrong with it that got it returned, IBM will take care of the problem in a snap.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
Centrino isn't a processor! It's just Intel's fancy package deal with wireless. The processor used is a Pentium 4 mobile.
It's not a P4 Mobile, it's a P3 spin-off. That's why a Centrino processor beats a P4 if running at the same frequency.
The Raven
My IBM T40--with the 6600mAH extended-life battery, regularly provides 7-8 hours of office use. I'm not watching DVDs but I am spinning a second 60GB 9.5mm hard drive in the swappable drive bay (where the DVD normally sits).
1.6GHz Pentium M
14" Screen @ 1400x1050
I also totally dig the white LED keyboard light [Fn+PgUp] for working at night or on those long red-eye flights.
Karma
I've installed PowerNowD . Again, I haven't run it long enough to definitively say what it does for battery life, but my laptop runs so much cooler!. When I'm not putting a load on it, the PowerNowD daemon clocks the cpu down to 500MHz. If I increase the load, it clocks right back up. Before adding the daemon, GKrellM was reporting the cpu temp at ~80C, now it's usually in the low 70s.
Anyone know of a GKrellM plugin that will monitor the cpu freq?
I wouldn't expect anyone to use his laptop for 20 hours straight...
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
My previous laptop was an A31P which I loved except for the miserable 1.75 hours available from the battery. There was no wireless on it. I suspect the 1600x1200 resolution lcd was the hog on it. But it was also a heavy mother.
It's a centrino 1.4Ghz.
I had one of those for about 6 months, and the battery always gave me 5 hours plus a few minutes. With wireless on! Cooling was perfect, no unconfortable heating.
Only problems were cranky keyboard and lousy screen.
But it would suit perfectly most common people (ie: non geeks)
Yours is the only reference to OS X in this thread, so perhaps laying down that crack pipe will help to deal with those hallucinations.
...i'm *sure* it was there before, but it isn't now. i'll get some sleep.
What I wish for is this, even BEFORE the Linux distro is written to disk:
The various distro makers--especially the big ones with lots more hardware and other resources-- would write the install scripts to check for power management capabilities and then TEST the setting from CD or USB devices.
A hibernation partition (similar to IBM's) should be written to disk, maybe via repartitioning and data movement. With the 80 GB disks coming out, it would be nice if the USB hardware could repartition the newly-installed disk and then suck (or dd) over the legacy data to the corresponding partitions, or at least let the user do so after installation.
The monitor/display, input peripherals and more should also be initially checked.
Ideally, the install/tester routine would check for keyboard features and set those up, too.
Once all this stuff is tested, the machine should be in a scripted sleep, suspend, hibernate and other mode of testing PRIOR to the user committing to the distro.
For my own laptop, a Sony VAIO PCG FX-215 (with AMD CPU), 256 MB RAM, 15" LCD, DVD/ROM/CD-Burner, and 40 GB disk, I used to get just over 1 hour of battery life. A year later, it was down to 45 minutes. Now, it's barely got enough juice to play Frozen Bubble on the bus ride to work. Lately, it just blacks out even when the power monitor indicator indicates 50% power remaining.
I really am suspecting memory effect, since when my laptop is on AC, the battery is charging or trickling all the time. When the original batter fell to less than 10 minutes of usability, I resorted to my backup battery. It is the one that now sports 30 minutes of life. I am considering draining it to death, recharging it, then replacing it with the 5-minute-life battery for desktop/AC use, and then swapping back the 30-minute battery for bus or train use. Maybe though, it's already past salvation. Maybe that LI-ON battery already has irreversible memory effect.
My screen dimming doesn't respond. I am not skilled enough to successfully mess with hdparm or the other CPU speed-adujusting stuff, either. I just with the distros would check ALL that stuff, put the laptop in a "fake real operation moded" from CD or DVD or USB media device and let the user or owner of that machine test how much real value is left in their machine if it is to be untethered (on battery, not on AC).
I am really suspicious that BIOS, CPU, and battery makers are in cahoots with microsoft, hence, much of the best battery life being on windows boxes. I HAVE met a Linux user running an IBM Thinkpad, a really small, quiet one. He said he got 5 hours minimum.
However, I think that for Linux on laptops to REALLY go a greater stride, the BIOS, battery, and other power management features of laptops must be genericized (via reverse engineering) or less proprietarized (by willing/friendly hardware developers/resellers).
It would be a whole lot more confidence-inspiring if it were possible to shop for a laptop and NOT have to even think about suspend, hibernate, sleep, and other features many windows users can take for granted. Linux distributors need to aggressively show the capabilities of a user's laptop before the user spends the time installing only to be later heartbroken.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Can anyone top 14 hours from a single charge for an eMate 300?
OK, it isn't exactly a laptop...