Re: [Hampshire] Long Life Netbook style device

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 12:18:01AM +0000, Philip Stubbs wrote:
> With the recent proliferation of netbooks, it seems strange to me that
> they seem to have such a short life on batteries. For something that
> is designed to be used on the move, I would want it to work all day.
>
> In fact, my wife has a very good use for such a device, but it would
> only be really useful if it had at least a six hour life. All my wife
> wants to do is take notes. However changing batteries multiple times,
> is really not ideal.
>
> Does anybody know of a netbook style device that can operate for this
> sort of time? It only really needs a to be just big enough to have a
> reasonable size keyboard to make it useful.

For about 4 years, I've had a normal laptop (ASUS M3000 -- 14"
screen) with a secondary battery in the CD drive bay. When it was new,
it did 7.5 hours with both batteries in. Even now, 4 years on, it'll
do 4 hours, more if the screen brightness is cranked down.

Come to think of it, my dirty great 15" widescreen Dell managed up
to 6.5 hours with a secondary battery in it. With a third battery (a
main one), I could do a full day's work at a conference -- 10 hours or
so.

In my opinion, the solution is to get a machine with a swappable
drive bay and a spare battery to go in it. If you can stand to get one
of the large extended-life batteries that sticks out of the main
battery bay, do that, too.

Small, dim screens also save lots of power, and I'd recommend
getting something with Intel graphics rather than nVidia or ATi
graphics, as it appears that neither ATi nor nVidia have particularly
good power saving on their chips -- even the mobile ones.

Hugo.

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