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Laptops with Decent Battery Life? 52

Posted by Cliff from the squeezing-every-last-drop-out-of-those-dry-cells dept.
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?
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Laptops with Decent Battery Life? More

Laptops with Decent Battery Life?

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  • Some Ideas... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ehinojosa ( 220524 ) on Saturday October 13, 2001 @05:46PM (#2425115)
    You may want to consider a refurbished laptop, like some of the ones here [tigerdirect.com]. And if you're really serious about long battery life, these claim to give you up to 12-16 hours of usable battery life, with the downside being that they are external, and a bit pricey:
    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.
  • Have you considered getting a mac? The iBook is an amazingly decent little beastie for the price, and the Ti is simply astounding. Good (and I mean good) battery life, you can underclock the iBook easily for more battery life if you like that tradeoff, OSX, OS9, or Linux, built in networking... seems to satisfy your every desire.

    • Re:Not a Troll (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      But since he is developing software, his target platform may not be for the Mac. Sure you could do emulation, but why not just get the real thing?
      • That won't be an issue if you're programming for a higher-level target (Linux, POSIX, KDE, etc) - develop the code on the iBook, then just re-compile it on an x86 box when you need to create a production release. I did this with my last project, and it worked quite well.

        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)

      by William Aoki ( 392 )
      On my iBook, I've gotten about four hours runtime under Linux without having set up any power conservation, but the battery didn't last the next hour in suspend mode. (There is no suspend-to-disk mode.) IMNSHO power consumption in suspend mode is too high. I expect I could squeeze out an extra hour or so if I adjusted my system configuration - currently the disk never spins down because of the various daemons I run. The main problems I've encountered are:

      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 claims up to 5 hours for the iBook [akamai.net], and the same for the PowerBook G4 [akamai.net].
  • After using Vaios for a long time and hating the battery life I just upgraded to a Fujitsu S Series and got the 2nd battery. You can get embedded ethernet (although I went with the firewire instead), and with the primary battery I get over 2 hours doing perl development at the airport/on the airplane. I also got the optional battery that takes the place of the dvd/cdrw and get about 5+ hours. This of course depends on what you are doing. For example converting a video project (raw) to mpeg will kill my battery in not time.

    I'm doing all of this on w2k, your linux mileage will be different.

  • My current two choices: Crusoe laptops (Score:3, Informative)

    by Vito ( 117562 ) on Saturday October 13, 2001 @10:24PM (#2425762) Homepage
    I'm currently planning on replacing my six pound Gateway Solo 9300 laptop (P3/800, 160mb, 20gb, 15.1") with one of these two Transmeta Crusoe-based laptops. Mostly because they're uber-light, and with all-day staying power. I'll take offers on the laptop, btw. :)

    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 .83~1.16" (?), and weighs 3.27lbs. Battery life is reportedly around half that if the backlight is turned on the whole time.

    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)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Sunday October 14, 2001 @12:18AM (#2426025)
    I have a Lombard series Powerbook that I can get about 5 hours of on a single battery charge. From what I have read and heard about (look on forums.macnn.com [macnn.com] for more info) the Wallstreet, Lombard, Pismo, and Titanium series Powerbooks have excellent battery life as well as performance under the battery. A good deal of the time I'm running my Powerbook at home or hotel room (like right now) on line power but lots of times have to go to the battery. You can easily set up a low power profile in the location manager in MacOS (8.5-10.1) so you can switch pretty quickly and easily to low battery mode to get every last bit of power out of your battery. With the screen brightness down as low as it can get and the hard drive set up to sleep after five minutes of inactivity I have gotten five hours usage (running Office2001). With the screen set low I can get nearly 3 hours of playing games like Star Wars racer and Diablo2. Unfortunately I don't have and iBook but they apparently have the same battery performance. One cool aspect of the Wallstreet, Lombard, and Pismo series Powerbooks is you can use a second battery which literally doubles your power lifetime. With plenty of RAM Mac laptops will go for a very long time. You can pick up 400 and 500 MHz Pismo Powerbooks on MacResQ and Powermac for a little over a thousand dollars. IIRC Yellow Dog runs just fine on the G3 based Powerbooks if you're interested in running it. OSX can run X apps through XDarwin and about half of the FreeBSD Ports collection pretty well if you want to go that route too. Besides the battery life of the Mac laptops you get the low weight only rivaled by the smallest PC laptops (Sony and Fujitsus as well as a couple others), though with the caveat that the Mac laptops have an internal drive bay where some smaller PC laptops have external ones which means they have one more thing to lug in your bag. Hopefully that helps. Luckily the hype is to be believed when it comes to Apple's power claims on their portables.
    • I agree to this. In normal usage Apple's laptops will easily do over 3 hours on a fresh battery, 4h is attainable with a little effort, but in order to reach 5h you have to go to great lengths to conserve batteries.

      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

      • In linux running 'noflushd', using the screen at the lowest brightness, and turning off auto save in xemacs, I can code for a good 4.5 hours without running out of battery. I have my 'pmud' scripts set to have the hard drive spin down after 5 minutes. Disabling ethernet increases the runtime some, and a USB mouse will take a good 20 minute bite out of the total runtime. There is new kernel support for low power usage on PPC that I'm not yet trying, and I'm hoping that will increase my battery life even more.

        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.
        • Oops, I didn't notice you were talking about an iBook. I'm using a 333mhz lombard. I don't know what the battery life differences are between the lombard and an iBook.

          • My friend just got an iBook (of which I'm quite jealous) and he says its battery life is about the same as mine if not a little better because of the smaller screen. AppleSpec Online says the power requirements for the new iBooks are about the same as a Lombard. One thing that holds me back from getting a new iBook or maybe even a new Powerbook since they've dropped in price so much is the lack of a second battery. I wish Apple's engineers could have figured out a way to get a removable drive bay inside the thin profile of the iBook or Powerbook.
            • I have a second battery for my PowerBook, but I never use it in the removable drive bay. Apple did a very good job making it so that you can change your battery while the computer is sleeping, so I just use it until it goes to sleep from lack of power, and then I swap bateries. You have a good 10-15 seconds to switch. I know that this isn't the case on my sister's iBook though, as you need a screwdriver to remove the battery...
    • Agreed. Linux is pretty good, but IMHO, classic Mac OS is probably the best platform for battery life. Just stick to OS 9 (9.2.1 is current). Unless something big happened with OS X 10.1, X is a battery hog. Other people mentioned turning the display's brightness all the way down. Probably the single best gain there, but some other ideas:

      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...

  • I have a Dell Inspiron 4000. With the second battery I get about 8 to 9 hours in Linux. The one disadvantage is the 2nd battery shares a slot with the cdrom and the floppy, so you can have only one of the three at a time.
  • My A21p, admittedly a high-end machine when new, has about a 5.5 hour battery life with both batteries installed. This machine is an 850 P3 with 512 MB RAM, 32 GB HD and (best of all) 15" 1600 X 1200 X 32 display. It is heavy, about 7.5 pounds, and large. The battery life noted above is achieved with Red Hat 7.1 and performing a series of compiles and frequent saves (old habit). If you are willing to pay the freight, it's a fine machine. The display just has to be seen to be appreciated. FWIW.
    • I've got the same laptop (less memory though) and I get 3.5-4 hours plus per battery if I am just writing email or a docuemnt in Word. Light stuff like that. Maybe a little bit of programming. But I've been very impressed with it.
  • Look at the Compaq Armada series. I have heard many good things about the Armada E500 series. One of the neat things is that you can pop out the bays for floppy and CDROM, and stick batteries in there, giving a total of 3 batteries, and apparently pretty good battery life. I haven't used one myself, though.

    • Re:Compaq Armada (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I have two of these things.

      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.
    • I've got an E500 here, and its pretty good with battery life... depending on what you're doing

      (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 :)

  • I use a Dell Inspiron 5000e (CuMine PIII-750/650 w/SpeedStep, 128MB RAM, 10GB HD, DVD, 15" LCD) that gets a full 3 hours per battery under light (e.g. coding, as opposed to encoding MP3s) use, without even enabling any powersaving features. With a second battery in the DVD bay (floppy is non-removeable), it gets a total of 6 hours.
    • Ditto, I can get 6 hours on my Inspiron 8100 (two batteries) with the screen on and having it play an internet radio station with an editor (Xemacs for win32) or excel in use, along with an X server and a wireless card.

      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. :)

      • I think that to some degree, SpeedStep works independently frrom the OS. You can't change operating speeds while running Linux, but if you power the machine on without AC power, the BIOS (or whatever handles that) automatically puts the processor into low-speed mode.
        • I have heard rumors that one group in the energy-aware computing class here at CMU is working on making a speedstep patch that actually works while you're up and running. Apparently the code from Intel is out there, it's just broken and needs to be fixed! Check back around december... :)
        • I thought it was done automagically by the APM drivers, in particular, CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE: "this can activate improved power savings, such as a slowed CPU clock rate, when the machine is idle."

          Isn't the "slowed CPU clock rate" intel's speedstep (TM)?
    • Ditto on the long battery life for Dells. I have a Dell CPx (650) with 256MB of memory (purchased back when that meant real money) with a 18GB toshiba HD and I have gotten 7+ hours of programming (vim, make, g++, gdb) with two batteries installed. It isn't a super light computer, but I really like the battery life. Currently dual booting RHLinux and W2000 although I haven't booted into Windows since I setup LILO and wanted to verify the setup :-).
  • A lot of these long-life laptops are ultralight, ultra-tiny as well (especially the Crusoe ones), and they drive me nuts with their tiny keys. So why don't any mini-laptop keyboards follow the "happy hacking keyboard" model? They manage to be small, while still having big keys, by omitting crap like caps lock, function keys (use fn+1 for f1), windows keys, home, pause, etc. I really don't need any of that crap, just 26 letters, 10 numbers, and half a dozen special (modifier, enter) keys. Maybe some arrows would be nice too, but that definitely does NOT add up to a 101-key board! Don't even get me started on the space wasted by touchpads (as opposed to trackballs)....
    Sorry for the rant!
    --JRZ
  • I can get 2-3 hours of reasonable battery life on my Sony Viao F-series laptop, per battery.

    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.
  • simple get a psion 7 it runs on a strongARM two AA batterys are all thats required to run a strongARM lets see ANY x86 CPU do that !

    (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
  • I saw this [transmeta.com] notebook at Fry's the other day. It's got a 600 mHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, a decent sized hard drive, networking, and the battery life it up to 7.5 hours. It comes installed with Windows 2k, and I assume it's possible to put Linux on it, since Linus works for the company that developed the CPU (transmeta).

    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]

  • I have one of these and it's just great. I have three of the extended life batteries and I can get nearly three hours use out of any one them without any low power modes and whilst installing software (with all the drive churning that involves). I imagine I'd get at least four hours with low power modes and all the other doobries switched on.

    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.

  • I get a whopping 40 minutes on a full battery :)
    • Yeah, I get right around that too. Using the bundled software to slow the processor doesn't seem to help. I think I'll have to buy a 2nd battery and swap it with the CD-ROM. Thankfully I don't need battery power all that often.

      • Re:Sony VAIO FX120 (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        DON'T go out an buy a second battery. Sony has a mail in rebate for one. If you call them and complain about the battery life enough, they will give you a second decent battery as well. Although the decent battery is only worth about 1 15 minutes, it is still better than 37.

        Check out the fx210/215 users group on yahoo:
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FX210

  • One thing you can do to make sure your batteries stay good is to drain them at least once a month. That keeps them going well.

    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.
  • In most(all) current thionkpads, you can remove the CD-rom drive, and replace it with a battery. In my thinkpad, with the second battery, i get 6 hours of battery life. The laptop has a 650mhz pentium 3, but i have it set to clock down to 134 mhz on battery, and the screen set the lowest brightness.
  • I hate to mention it because it runs WinCE but what about a Hewlett-Packard Jornada sub notebook. You don't need speed, so you're in... and you want battery life uber alles, and that's what this wee puppy does... days of battery life, not hours. Smaller than average so if you get carpal you could be in trouble but otherwise I found I could just (JUST) touchtype on the damned thing...
    but if power's your issue, check it out.
  • I was looking for pretty much the exact same thing as you, about two months ago. I settled on a refurb IBM Thinkpad 770x I got off ebay for $700, but I've seen them as low as $500 depending on the video features. It can hold two LiOn batteries at once, and you can hot-swap batteries (ie if you had ten batteries, you could keep swapping between them, yanking one out while the other powers the machine - with the money you save on the thing, you could buy a bag full of batteries).

    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.

  • is what I have, the specs are here. [hp.com]

    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
  • My Dell Latitude C600 is both very light and contains a relatively long-lasting battery. I've gotten 4 hours or more out of it at times, doing pretty normal stuff the whole time - wireless Internet, MP3 listening, DivX viewing, etc. etc.

    Cheers,
    levine
  • The manual says '3.8 hours on low power, 2.6 hours on full power'.

    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%.

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