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Dell 8600 battery life questions?

post #1 of 14
3/12/04 at 12:25am
Thread Starter 
I'm looking to get the 8600 with the following:

1.7Ghz proc
128meg radeon 9600
1 gig ram
60gig 7200 HDD

What can you guys tell me about the battery life I should expect?

And what is the optional addition 48Whr battery for the modular bay? Just an extra battery that you can use at the same time as the primary battery? What is the modular bay? Do you have to put this battery in where the optical drive normally goes? What sort of battery life extension should I expect this this extra battery?

Regarding the AC adapters, does the 90W one just charge the notebook faster than the 65W one? Whats the advantage?

Thanks!

On a side note, isn't the notebook lid customizable or something? I've seen pictures of these notebooks with some sort of fake wood looking top. Is there someplace on dell's site that shows the different external customizability options for this thing?

Jakobud
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post #2 of 14
3/12/04 at 12:43am
My battery last a little over 4 hours with just internet surfing light duty on the processor, and the 65w charges in a hour.
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post #3 of 14
3/12/04 at 1:47am
i also get 4 hour on light use,
yeah thats pretty much it, another battery plugged at the same time of course it will give you a lot more juice. and yes the modular bay is where the optical drive is, i dont know how much time can you expect from that extra batterry but i woul say about 7 hours with both of them plugged in light usage.
i've got the 90W AC adapter, and is quite fast, i read some post about the 65W one having problems while updating the BIOS but im not sure about it.

yes there are some snap things for the 8600, but they are just a plastic cover that snaps on top of your lid, a waste of money IMO, but they can add some "style" to your laptop
yes go to the product views page, you can see them there...

if you are going to get 1Gig of RAM, get it from some where else than Dell and save a couple hundrets $$$, go to crucial.com or newegg.com
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post #4 of 14
3/12/04 at 2:46am
3-4 hours while surfing dvds and playing games, the modular battery is instead of an optical drive so i got a spare battery instead.

90 adapter is the way to go its damn fast
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post #5 of 14
3/12/04 at 3:32am
4 normal use almost 5 hrs with 75% brightness
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post #6 of 14
3/12/04 at 4:12am
i get around 4-5 hours with the maximum battery selected
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post #7 of 14
3/12/04 at 5:24am
Thread Starter 
Awesome guys thanks for the quick replies! It's just what I have been looking for. I never thought I'd be able to find a Pentium M 1.7 GHz notebook that offered the 128mb Radeon 9600 with it! All I kept finding were NVidias and 64mb radeons...8600 here I come
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post #8 of 14
3/13/04 at 6:28pm
Here's a good question......

If I had a few DVD movies ripped to the hard drive, would I get substantially longer battery life than I would if I were running them off the DVD drive?

(Of course, I know this would let me use the secondary battery in the modular bay).
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post #9 of 14
3/13/04 at 7:15pm
yeah, i suppose it would, less moving parts
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post #10 of 14
3/13/04 at 8:12pm
WinDVD 5 has a 'notebook optimised mode' where it copies the movie into RAM (while its playing) and then it shuts the DVD Drive off when it's done. I have 1GB ram and it copies around 600mb into it (I can watch it go down in the task manager!) and then it shuts off the DVD drive. Apparently this saves a ton of battery life, but I only got this recently so haven't tested it fully yet. Intervideo claim really sweet battery performance with it enabled.
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post #11 of 14
3/14/04 at 1:41am
I dunno how a 8 GB movie can fit into 1GB of ram
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post #12 of 14
3/15/04 at 4:20am
8GB movie? PuleeeeeeeeZ! We're talking about one movie here, not a whole library full of them.
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post #13 of 14
3/16/04 at 12:00am
were talking about a dvd it can be anywhere from 3GB-8.5GB
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post #14 of 14
3/16/04 at 12:22am
Quote:
Originally Posted by DELL-Machina
were talking about a dvd it can be anywhere from 3GB-8.5GB
It would probably be less than 8.5GB no matter what, since DVD's usually have multiple audio tracks, or extra features (even on the movie disc for dual-disc sets). Even still, I think it would probably have to cache a little more than once for a full-length movie (maybe later on it will spin the disc up again to read more data).
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