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?"

Comments

The ones with the longest life

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the ones that stay plugged into the wall.

Re:The ones with the longest life

[pilgrim23]

well my Osborne 1 works great but you need to plug it in. CP/M though is a bit limiting. Lousy for wireless and the tables at Starbucks are a bit flimsy when I drop it on top...

I've often found...

[craenor]

That if you leave it in suspend the whole time, or bettery yet HIBERNATE...you can get it to last for days.

Re:Plug it in, Plug it in!

[dhakbar]

Geek-scented Glade plug-ins have shown to be rather unpopular, especially in a public place.

Re:Toshiba Satellite

[nocomment]

How about the new laptop from 3M? They've invented a method by which you use a stylus with an embedded graphite core which actually transposes the text onto a flat and flimsy surface manufactured with some sort of parchment-like material.

Comes with a lot of games too!

Re:My experience

[caluml]

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...

But that involves breaking the cardinal rule of geekdom - i.e. never speak to anyone if at all possible. Gruff barking/grunting should be about the tops for a general social encounter such as that.

Re:The most beautiful 12" Powerbook is the BEST

[Anonymous Coward]

12" ... beautiful ... loooooooong
No comment.

I find that I get the best battery life when I have a cord secretly running into some nearby outlet. When an employee goes, "Hey! You can't leech our power!" then I just get the hell out, really damn quick.
-os

Lame

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

There are all sorts of problems with this approach. The manufacturers claim that the surface is rewritable but after just one write/erase cycle you're seeing degradation of fidelity. You can't buy a surface with a backlight (though I believe you can get a light attachment for some styli, at many times the price of the original equipment, though with a limited field of illumination). One good thing about this approach is that the data has a long lifetime. If you use a decent quality surface the lifetime is longer than you need to worry about. But connectivity is poor and don't even think about wireless. It's also worth noting that if you want color you need extra equipment, and if you want a wide color gamut this equipment may start getting bulky and incompatible with the erase feature.

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.

Re:The most beautiful 12" Powerbook is the BEST

[Jeffrey Baker]

Many times I've been with some people in the hallway of a convention, and someone needs a CD duplicated, or wants to swipe some MP3s, or whatever. Normally it's the people with Apple laptops who get to do this chore, because 1) ripping and burning CDs and DVDs actually works under MacOS, and 2) everybody else left their optical drive at home. I even duplicated some guy's WinXP install CD the other day, because he had the ISO but needed to boot the CD. I wrote "Made with a Mac" on the face of the CD ;)

Re:iBook running Gentoo with 2.6.7

[ainsoph]

Where do you find a job that only lasts 2 - 2 1/2 hours a day?

Re:15" iBook

[Anonymous Coward]

My 13" iBook gets 19 hours on a single lithium magnesium alloy battery.

Re:Toshiba Satellite

[abe ferlman]

I gave it a try, but drawing frames for DVD playback was too slow, to say nothing of the CSS decryption algorithm you have to use with that thing.

Re:Apple iBook G4

[ari_j]

I'd have the miniature iBook or PowerBook if it had a better pointer device. I am more accurate and faster with an e-Clit (nipple stick, trackpoint, whatever you call it; I prefer the most politically incorrect term whenever possible), and they are more reliable and less in-the-way than trackpads to boot. Additionally, they require the least finger movement of any pointing device.

And if you say anything about "just use an external mouse", that doesn't work when you're actually using it as a laptop, and it's inconvenient as hell. If I wanted a portable desktop, I'd get one. But I don't, I want a laptop computer that is entirely self-contained.

It goes down anyways

[metalac]

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.

Re:Toshiba Satellite

[Anonymous Coward]

My Lockheed Martin satellite gets 12 years of battery life on solar power.

The slight disadvantage is that it has to be launched into geo-stationary orbit by rocket first, can only be accessed via wireless communications. Cost me $4,000,000, but I can watch 4000 video channels and have 10,000 international telephone conversations simultaneously.

Re:Toshiba Satellite

[Telecommando]

On the other hand, the encryption is great!

I've yet to find anyone who can decode what I have written.

Sometimes not even me.

Re:Toshiba Satellite

[corian]

It isn't mine, but my friends Toshiba lasted for all-night goof-off sessions at Dennys after he got some free-ware power-management software ... I'll ask him specifically what it was and try and post back here.

I know that one. It's called CAFFEINE. Works for people too!