Laptops with Decent Battery Life? 52
Dave Robillard asks: "I've been looking at new laptops recently (hooray for disposable income) and I can't find a single one that has what I want: relatively 'slow' processor (I do not need a Ghz PIII in a laptop), networking, and most importantly, loong battery life. The real reason I want a laptop is for coding on the run. I don't need to play Quake @ 100fps. Are there any laptop manufacturers out there that machines like this?" Any laptops out there that have a battery lifetime that exceeds 2 or 3 hours of usable lifetime?
Some Ideas... (Score:3, Informative)
Electrofuel PowerPad 120-A Notebook Battery (up to 12 hour) [tigerdirect.com]
Electrofuel PowerPad 120-B Notebook Battery (up to 12 hour) [tigerdirect.com]
Electrofuel PowerPad 160-A Notebook Battery (up to 16 hour) [tigerdirect.com]
Electrofuel PowerPad 160-B Notebook Battery (up to 16 hour) [tigerdirect.com]
PS:Sorry all the links go to TigerDirect, I'm sure you can find the products on Pricewatch also. Just remembered seeing the external batteries in one of thier catalogs, is all.
Not a Troll (Score:1)
Re:Not a Troll (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not a Troll (Score:2)
There's another advantage - when you build your code on multiple platforms, you are more likely to find some types of bug (e.g. those that make assumptions about byte ordering or structure padding).
I think the iBook is a great little platform. The Apple claims of "up to 5 hours" seem a bit optimistic, but it does have very good battery life.
Re:Not a Troll (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're used to having a control key to the left of A, you'll have to rewire the keyboard. Apple laptops use ADB keyboards, which were designed for use with mechanical latching capslock keys. Modern ADB keyboards still behave as if their capslock keys latched; therefore, it's not generally possible to remap the key in software.
As it is on many laptops, the power connector is fragile.
The touchpad is positioned such that my right hand tends to brush in to it, moving the pointer or resulting in a click. If it were positioned slightly further to the left, this wouldn't be a problem. You should probably try one out to see if your hands fit it better.
There is only one battery slot. Supposedly the laptop will last about 25 seconds in suspend mode without the battery, giving you time to swap, but I haven't tested it.
If you're developing for a Unix platform and you aren't writing in assembler, an Apple laptop might be worth looking in to. If you're developing for Windows, look elsewhere.
Apple PowerBook/iBook (Score:1)
Fujitsu S Series (Score:1)
I'm doing all of this on w2k, your linux mileage will be different.
My current two choices: Crusoe laptops (Score:3, Informative)
The first is the Casio MPC-206E Cassiopeia FIVA [casio.com]. It runs the Crusoe TM5600 at 600MHz, which means it's probably comparable to a 400MHz P2/P3. 8.4" TFT LCD, 800x600. Max 192mb RAM, comes with a 20gb HD. Cool toys include onboard 56k softmodem, 10/100 ethernet, 1 Type II PCMCIA slot, sound, VGA out, video out, FireWire, CompactFlash, USB, and an included dual-boot Linux partition. However it's also A5 sized (8.7" x 7.7" x 0.83"), and some people have found it too small to type well on. Nine hours of battery life with the extended life (heavier) battery, and it only weighs 2.18 pounds without.
The other option is the NEC LaVie MX or MX2 [dynamism.com]. Another Crusoe laptop, this one boasts a larger 10.4" 1024x768 reflective LCD (so it's daylight readable) with a backlight you can turn on indoors, and is larger overall. 10/100 is with a dongle, two USB, no FireWire, VGA out is with a dongle, and no video out. Battery life is 8-11 hours standard (no additional batteries to switch in), it's 10.4" x 8.3" x
Dynamism has a neat comparison engine [dynamism.com], linked to there showing the LaVie MX2 and the Fiva.
Also, NEC has the Versa DayLite [neccomp.com], which is the US model of the LaVie MX, so you don't necessarily have to find an importer like Dynamism for it.
Apples and...well Apples (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Apples and...well Apples (Score:2)
On my new iBook (with OS X 10.1), 3:20 seems to be a good estimate after I've fired up the mailer, a browser and a text editor and started working. If you want to do a little code testing and debugging, you're down to just under 3 hours.
As Graymalkin says, the G3-series PowerBooks can take a second battery, bringing the theoretical total up to 10 hours. In essence, it will easily last a whole working day. On the downside, the G3 PowerBooks are quite bulky. But hey, you can't get everything. :-) At least the newer models have built-in WLAN antennae.
--Bud
Re:Apples and...well Apples (Score:3, Informative)
You're right though about the testing and debugging. gcc eats the battery (and toasts my lap).
Oh, my typical program set is 7 xterms, apache, mysqld, konqueror and xemacs.
Re:Apples and...well Apples (Score:2)
Re:Apples and...well Apples (Score:2)
Re:Apples and...well Apples (Score:2)
Re:Apples and...well Apples (Score:1)
Adjust the Energy Saver Control Panel settings for hard disk sleep. I find that very short times (1-2 minutes) don't make sense for surfing, but working inside of BBEdit, 1 min ute is perfect. The system seldom needs to read the disk, so I don't often waste energy on starting the drive.
Remove any media from the drives. The system can access removable drives for no apparent reason, wasting power.
Mentioned above, but worth repeating. Max out your ram. My iBook can take 320MB of ram, and that's just what I've installed. Made a big difference.
Turn off virtual memory. There's no need to use it for most applications. I turned it off when I got my ram, and never turned it on again.
If you're living in a text editor or other lightweight program, try creating a RAM disk. You may not need to touch your hard drive for hours...
Dell Inspiron (Score:1)
IBM Thinkpad A21p (Score:1)
Re:IBM Thinkpad A21p (Score:2)
Compaq Armada (Score:1)
Re:Compaq Armada (Score:1)
One at home that belongs to me and one at the office that belongs to them.
I bought one because they rock and I got a killer deal from compaq.is.dreaming.org.
So, I get 4 hours off a single battery and I can put two in and work all day if I like.
Re:Compaq Armada (Score:1)
(if you forget to turn of distributed.net your battery power goes out the window)
With two batteries (thanks to the battery recall), I can go to all my classes and don't need to worry about battery power. My school day is about 8 hours, but its in suspend/hibernate a good portion of that. Somedays the second battery doesn't get touched, and some days, its almost drained.
The E500 is somewhat fragile, and with more than the 1024x768 screen, the screen is larger than the base, which is asking for trouble.
The second battery goes in where the floppy drive goes in, and a third (not of the same type) can go in the 'multibay'. The floppy drive is mostly useless for me anyhow, i've got an LS-120 multibay drive (and a dvd-rom i can swap out too) that reads and writes floppy disks a lot better than the pure floppy drive could, and the drive door didn't crack on the ls-120 either
Dell Inspiron (Score:2)
Re:Dell Inspiron (Score:1)
As far as I know, linux's powerstep support is broken at this point, so you'd be running at full tilt (I haven't had the time to do a quantitative analysis with the processor at this setting, for obvious reasons). Recently I have gotten into the bad habit of not plugging the system in after getting back home. I usually don't notice that oversight for a few hours. :)
Re:Dell Inspiron (Score:2)
Re:Dell Inspiron (Score:1)
Re:Dell Inspiron (Score:1)
Isn't the "slowed CPU clock rate" intel's speedstep (TM)?
Re:Dell Inspiron (Score:1)
Ultra-tiny keyboards (OT?) (Score:1)
Sorry for the rant!
--JRZ
My results.. (Score:2)
Look for the laptops with multiple battery slots. My F-series has a second battery slot if you take out the floppy drive. If you feel like buying extra batteries, you can generally have a virtually infinate battery life.
Note that most of the laptops with excessively long battery lives tend to be micro-small, which doesn't seem nice for coding on the run. So you may have to make comprimizes.
get a psion 7 (Score:2)
(yes I know psion recently gave up selling to the public but still sell bundles for corp's and will do so for a long time)
MOT CPU's dont do bad(witness the raves about ibook) but really ARM and MIPS are the way to go
(oh and get a small LCD as these tend to eat POWER for breakfast, lunch and tea)
so have a look at CE powered devices that can be turned into linux/BSD machines or just stick to what it came with
regards
john jones
NEC Versa DayLite -- 7.5 hour battery life (Score:2)
You will not find a fully functional laptop with better battery life. It is a bit on the small side, though.
It was priced around US$2000. [Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with NEC, transmeta, Fry's, or Linus Torvalds]
IBM Thinkpad 240x (Score:1)
Getting it running Linux is easy, even the winmodem is supported (see the Linux laptops list for more info). Spec-wise it's fine (800x600 screen, the whole machine is about the size of an A4 sheet; P3-500, 128Mb ram, 12Gb hard disk). They're getting kinda scarce now, but I have seen them going in some discount stores for fire-sale prices, and there's always Ebay.
Sony VAIO FX210 (Score:1)
Sony VAIO FX120 (Score:1)
Re:Sony VAIO FX120 (Score:1, Informative)
Check out the fx210/215 users group on yahoo:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FX210
Battery Care and Other Stuff (Score:2)
Another thing to keep in mind is keeping the power consuption to a minimum. Lower the brightness of the LCD screen. Adjust the other power settings to minimize the power used. Turn off any other things that don't need to run like virus protection or the like. Try not to do anything that beats on the hard drive.
And of course the other thing to remember is get a couple of spare batteries. That way you can run as long as you like, with a few quick interruptions.
thinkpad t20 (Score:1)
You're all wrong - think ARM chips (Score:1)
but if power's your issue, check it out.
Cheap, slow, long life - what you asked for. (Score:1)
It's a PII-300, which is plenty for everything I do (human rights reporting in a developing country with unpredictable power, half 110v, half 220v, half the time not working) and should be fine for coding. Big 14" TFT screen, nice IBM keyboard, built in 56k modem (altho I put in a 3com 10/100 / worldport cellular card). It's also got a digital LCD that indicates % battery remaining, and the standby function with win2k works very quickly (ie you can punch it inand out of standby mode in 3-5 seconds, standby being virtually zero power). I put 320mb of ram in mine.
Also has hardware DVD decoding (dvd drive goes where the 2nd battery does, and you can hot-swap), AC3 audio out, SVideo capture and TV out, NTSC, PAL and SECAM. Infrared on the front and the back if you're palmy. Stereo speakers.
Here's one on EBay [ebay.com] (no affil, this is an auction that's already ended)
Considering how quickly laptops depeciate (the 770X was $3499USD MSRP two years ago), it seems silly to buy a 1ghz machine if you don't need it. These machines have 3 yr wty on them, which means you can buy one that still has a year left on it - word on the street (well usenet street) is that IBM careth not whether or not you're the original owner. A pal in IBM service confirmed this, but ymmv.
Hope this helps, email me if you want more info.
HP OmniBook 6000 (Score:2)
For having a 1Ghz (700Mhz with SpeedStep), 30Gb HDD. 15" SXGA screen running at 1400 x 1050 I still manage to get almost 4 hours out of 1 battery. Add the other in and I can get over 7 hours. Mine may be a tad pricey, as I got every single feature out there, but it starts at around 1100$. Check it out
Dell Latitude C600 (Score:2)
Cheers,
levine
Toshiba Portege, ~70 min (Score:1)
I normally get about ~70 minutes if I'm luckey. Once I got 2hr 50min with the LCD off. It is really annoying because it goes from about 60% to 2%.