Quick question about battery life.

[evilbix]

Quick question for everyone who's had lots of experience with laptops. I'm mainly looking for a machine to do some programming on it. This machine is going to be used only for the research team I'm working with this summer. I'm permitted to work from home 3 days a week, and I plan on spending those days out on the beach.

I'm basically wondering how long the battery life is on units out there. I'm going to be mostly writing code and occasionally compiling the software. But anyways... I want to go out on the beach for a day with my friends while I get some work done. I won't be using wireless at all, I just want something around 1.5ghz and 1gig of ram. optical drives won't be used, maybe some very basic 3d rendering.

Would it be possible to obtain a 6-7 hour battery life on a laptop like this? If not, is there anything out there I could do this with. I could easily live without the 3d rendering, but it'd be nice to have.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Well, you need one of two things. Either the Gateway laptop that gets 10 hours of life w/two batteries or a seriously stout 12-cell and a backup battery too.
On average, most Centrino laptops get 4-5 hours of life out of a 8-9 cell battery. Maybe 6 hours on a 9-cell.
It all depends how much you want to spend. If you buy a Thinkpad T4x you can get supposedly 8 hours with the 9-cell & the UltraBay battery (goes where the optical drive was). And if you have the UltraBay, you can swap the main battery without shutting down.
Otherwise HP offers 12-cell batteries on their laptops and you can easily get 6+ hours on those.

 

[Ethan2099]

If you're going to be doing programming i'd probably pick the Dell Inspiron 6000. should be fine for what you're doing, you can get abour 6 hours of battery life out of it, but the main advantage is the ability to get a next business day service warranty. Would you want to send your laptop off to a depot for fixing or would you rather have a tech come out to your house next business day and replace any defective hardware instead?

 

[corkyg]

This news release from Toshiba is exciting:

Toshiba Corp. has developed a lithium-ion battery the company said features the short rechargeable time of capacitors and the energy capacity of conventional lithium-ion batteries. Toshiba's new battery can recharge 80 percent of the battery's energy capacity in one minute, approximately 60 times faster than the typical Li-ion batteries.

The energy density is 150 to 250 Wh (Watt-hour)/liter, equal to the lower range of energy densities existing lithium ion batteries have. Advanced Li-ion rechargeable batteries reach densities of 600 Wh/l. "It should be the world first lithium ion battery that can be charged in one minute. The battery has a big potential. It could be used for mobile phones in the future, but we put the priority on applications such as automobiles that require quick recharging time and large cycle time," said Norio Takami, Laboratory leader of Advanced Functional Materials laboratory at Toshiba's Corporate Research and Development Center.

Until that is on the street - consider an external supplementary battery.

 

[evilbix]

Wow.. that battery from Toshiba sounds really intresting. Too bad it's not out yet. I need something relatively soon, so I guess I'll checkout the Inspirons.

Thanks for the replies, I appreciate the help.

 

[ColKurtz]

Aside from the fact that it probably isn't a great idea to take a laptop to the beach (sand, salt, gull-poo, and will you even see the LCD screen over the sun's glare?), your best bet is probably to go with an external battery pack.

I see them all the time at trade shows. They're very thin, and set under your laptop. A quick google brings up this site. I'm not endorsing this brand, as I know nothing about them, just the general design of the thin-battery pack.

Good luck.

 

[fbrdphreak]

If you're looking at the Inspiron, check out the T42 or T43 also. Much better quality and you can get either a depot warranty (send it to them, they ship it back the same day they receive it) or on-site. As I mentioned, with the 12-cell & UltraBay you get like 8+ hours. If you have the money, take the Thinkpad over a Dell ANY day

 

[fbrdphreak]

Originally posted by: ColKurtz
Aside from the fact that it probably isn't a great idea to take a laptop to the beach (sand, salt, gull-poo, and will you even see the LCD screen over the sun's glare?), your best bet is probably to go with an external battery pack.

I see them all the time at trade shows. They're very thin, and set under your laptop. A quick google brings up this site. I'm not endorsing this brand, as I know nothing about them, just the general design of the thin-battery pack.

Good luck.

Those are a very real option. There is a brand sold in Best Buy that I can't remember the name of, but with their system & high capacity battery you can have like an additional 5 hours of battery life. However, I think the cost was over $200........

edit Scroll Down, see Valence I remember reading some reviews and the system worked well IIRC