which laptops get 7+ hours on battery? - Page 3

Wait, so you stick a 2nd battery in the swappable slot, but use a plug-in CD-drive into the USB?

Also to emphasize:
HP Compaq nc8000 and nw8000 have a fixed optical drive, a fixed main battery, and one free modular bay. You can put a second battery, a second hard drive, a second optical drive, or whatever, to this bay, and still have access to the fixed optical drive and the fixed battery. No USB cables, docking stations or anything needed. All this in a computer which weighs less than 6.5 lbs (2.96 kg).

Depends on the laptop as it's a feature of the laptop model. It seems to be more common in buisness oriented lines (for example Toshiba Tecra & Dell Latitude) rather than home user lines (for example Toshiba Satellite & Dell Inspiron), which tend to be a bit more expensive.

As Tommi and mikemex's posts point out, really the whole thing (whether you can use two batteries, simultaneously with or without an optical drive) depends on how the particular laptop models are designed. But in the end, they tend to be more common in buisness oriented latptops that do cost more then home oriented ones.

Ok. Thank you!

Well, ok. Thank you, though!

Don't forget that, unless I'm mistaken, you can take any Centrino notebook and drop an ULV Pentium M into it. (ULV=Ultra Low Voltage). They come in speeds of up to 1.2ghz, which is probably about the speed of a 2ghz P4.

Normally a PM draws roughly 1.34v at top speed, and 0.988v at min speed (600mhz). The ULV model draws 0.956v at top speed, and 0.812v at min speed (600mhz).

If you've got dynamic switching on, your laptop spends most of it's time at 600mhz, so you go from 0.988v to 0.812v. A nice 20% decrease in CPU power drain.

Other suggestion would be to go for a small laptop, get a suplementary battery for the optical bay, get the largest battery supported by the notebook, keep a spare on hand, and possibly buy an external supplementary battery (The kind that act as trays under your laptop). Also, get a notebook with onboard graphics (Dothan 400mhz era (Pre DX9) is probably better), and if you can't, underclock/undervolt whatever discrete graphics solution you get. I'm also guessing that 1 DIMM draws less power than two smaller DIMMs. Get 1x512MB DIMM, and get the highest density DIMM you can. The less chips on the PCB the better (I would guess)

Also, keep CPU in dynamic switching or max battery, set HDD to lower power mode and allow it to spin down, turn backlight to minimum brightness, turn OFF wireless (Big difference), do NOT plug in ANY USB devices (No optical mouse, that drains power), set the PC to turn off the LCD entirely after a very short interval (A few minutes), and try not to do anything that would stress the CPU or GPU.

i undervolted a 1.5ghz and it uses .7v at 600mhz and .900v at 1.5ghz, lower voltages than than a ULV, faster, and cheaper too.

Wow, that's nice. Did you use some kind of special program like RMClock for undervolting?

He did. It also makes it run cooler!

Okay...i'm learning a lot here today.

First, let me tell you my system. HP DV1000 running a 1.8Ghz Dothan Pentium M (400mhz bus). With my standard 6-cell battery, i get up to 3 hours on low brightness. With the 12-cell i get 7.5 hours average with the screen on low. I undervolted using Notebook Hardware Control (NHC a.k.a CHC), so @ 600mhz I'm running at .700V.

I love this laptop, but i'm currently looking for a smaller, lighter laptop. The 12 cell battery brings the DV1000 up to 6.5 pounds. From what i've gathered here, the ULV processors actually don't perform better or run longer than an undervolted standard Pentium-M. After looking at some ultralight laptops, the ULV processors seem to be the only solutions for laptops under 4 pounds.

So here's my suggestion for the original poster. Look into the Sony S Series. This is the laptop i would have purchased if i had the money. The current offerings in the S-series use the new Sonoma (533mhz bus) which greatly reduces the battery life from the previous S-360/460 line. The S-360/460 use to get 4 hours on the standard battery and 7.5hrs on the extended, and the new S-560 gets 2.5hrs on the standard, 4hrs on the extended. What's great about the S-series though, is it's size and the performance it offers. It is the only laptop i know of at this size that has a dedicated video card. The S-360/460 would have been perfect if they offered a double layer DVD-Burner for their store models. Now that they have the S-560, they included the burner, but not the great battery life.

Anyway....good luck finding a laptop with everything you want.

But aren't some of Sonys laptops not available in the U.S.?

I guess not.

the sony vaio tx ultraportable series gets 6hrs on std battery and 9 hours with ext battery.

Only if you don't turn the power switch on. Otherwise get a rig that can hot-swap battery packs. The extra battery battery packs may cost a much as much as buying a portable generator to carry around with you. We're all waiting for portable fuel cells. Hope you're a patient person.

wow way to necro-rez this thread

He is, apparently, very much so. He's been looking for a new machine for almost three years.

Which laptops get 7+ hours

The ones that have internal fuel cells running on hydrogen. Just kidding, sort of. Current battery technology is not quite ready to grant your wish.

Sony S-series can get 9-12

Go nuclear. Run for 50 years on one charge!

My HP 8510w has an 8-cell battery that gets about 5 hours of battery life. Then I have an HP travel battery that is also an 8-cell adding another 5 hours. Using just XP's Portable power setting and dimming the screen does actually get me 8-9 hours. With wireless and Bluetooth turned off, I get 9-10.