Laptops with good battery life?

[KallDrexx]

So I'm thinking of buying a new laptop, as the power adapters I have in my house do not seem to work too well with my laptop.  If the adapter isn't plugged into my computer just right, it won't charge, and it seems to be getting worse.  Since this happens on my adapter, as well as my fiance's HP adapter, I fear it's an issue with the laptop's connector itself.  I'm also wishing I got more than two hours of battery life out of my laptop (due to the badly positioned outlets in my fiance's house).

So I was wondering what companies make laptops that actually have good battery life? Is two hours pretty much the norm or can I get a good laptop that gets more on a regular basis?

The primary purpose of the laptop is for programming (with .Net and Visual Studio, so I can't use Mac OSX unfortunately).  I am looking for a laptop with at least 3 gigs of ram and a 15" screen, and I'm trying to keep it on the cheap-ish side ($500 or so).  I don't plan on using this for any gaming, so not having a good 3d card is fine with me.

Any ideas on what to look for and where would be greatly appreciated.

[Trippy]

MacBooks

[Miguel]

... (with .Net and Visual Studio, so I can't use Mac OSX unfortunately)...

Hast thou not heard of VM Ware?

[Trippy]

Or Parallels.

[KallDrexx]

Not heavily.  I know one of my friends whose company issued him a Macbook dual boots to Windows 7 for development.  I've read some things that Visual Studio is sluggish in VMWare Fusion, which isn't ideal since i'ts the primary usage of the laptop

[Trippy]

You could just use Boot Camp then and boot into Windows as the default.

Lenovo probably has some models with good battery life (that don't need extended life batteries). Dell probably has some business model laptops that do too.

[Merusk]

Yeah, sounds like a connector problem.  My mom's laptop had the same issue and she foolishly paid to replace the power port. (Moms. Why don't they ask before they decide to pay for computer things...) It still didn't work quite right and had the lovely side effect of glitching the hard drive.

The Dell Inspiron 15R we just got my wife for school says it'll go 4h on its charge.  She doesn't have a lot of bells & whistles on it as it's only a word processing/ browsing/ miscellany computer she can take to the library when she needs to.   Not sure how that compares to your needs for programming, but the real-world battery life seems to be holding to that 4h window.  I imagine the 9 cell would give you another 2h of life.  It was ~$650 after we added on all the memory and what-not so it might be more than you want to pay.

Dell also has an "outlet" store where you can buy returned or refurb'd pieces from them and I imagine HP and the others have them, too.  If you really want to go for cheap & dirty, HSN (the home shopping network) has a whole section of specials but I've never browsed them because I can get 0% financing from Dell.

[Sand]

You could just use Boot Camp then and boot into Windows as the default.

Lenovo probably has some models with good battery life (that don't need extended life batteries). Dell probably has some business model laptops that do too.

My wife and I both use Lenovo's. Her for her company (PWC) and me for mine.

Solid. Can take a hit. And has great battery life (7-8 hours on average).

You arent going to get a Lenovo for less than $500 though.
For that I would recommend Asus, which is what the wife uses as her personal lap top. She hasnt had any problems with it. It does come with more bloatware than the Lenovo though.

[Thrawn]

I just made sure to get one with a bigger battery when I bought one for school (9 cell in this case I think) and I've been very happy with it.  About 17" screen and I can take notes in class for a full 3 hours easily.

[Raging Turtle]

Got an Acer netbook a few years ago, still has a consistent 7-8 hours of battery life. 

[KallDrexx]

You arent going to get a Lenovo for less than $500 though.
For that I would recommend Asus, which is what the wife uses as her personal lap top. She hasnt had any problems with it. It does come with more bloatware than the Lenovo though.

Amazon and Newegg actually seem to have a good number of Lenovo's at 15.6" and 4gb of RAM for $450 actually.

Got an Acer netbook a few years ago, still has a consistent 7-8 hours of battery life. 

How big of a screen do you have? 

[Furiously]

My suggestion is to get a second battery. Course on a transatlantic flight you will still run out of power.

[taolurker]

My suggestion is to get a second battery. Course on a transatlantic flight you will still run out of power.

This... After recharging the battery numerous times it can sometimes not hold a full charge, and can affect the amount of time it will actually remain charged. Having an issue with the cable also could be part of the problem, and buying a new battery could extend the time between recharging.

I bought a Power adapter for a laptop, with a set of connectors that fit most basic laptops (like ten different power jacks that fit onto one Power box and plug). The new batteries can sometimes be bought for cheap, but honestly sometimes you can extend battery life immensely by discharging the battery and then fully recharging it, as well as with lowering the screen brightness, sound output and HD/Hardware intensive things you use while on battery power (no usbs, disable the Lan or wireless if on one or the other, headphones instead of internal speakers) . You should be able to adjust these by finding the battery icon near your time (in Windows OSes)  and adjusting properties.

My laptop gets about 3+ hours from a full charge when playing music or using basic internet browsing, but doing anything graphical or even notching the volume up past 40% can reduce it even more. I was actually having around 2 hours life with the battery with the default Windows power settings, but I also have a crappy 2+ year old Dell.

Lenovo as already mentioned has good duration battery life, again with adjusting properties just right, but a friend of mine's Toshiba laptop from last year has easily 5 hours life now that the damn thing isn't sucking the battery dry with lots of things he doesn't need.

[Furiously]

I've heard throwing a SSD in in place of a hard drive also saves a bit on power.

[Tebonas]

SSD is always  a good idea, but mainly because the faster access times make a lot of difference speed-wise.

On average the hard disk needs about a tenth of the power the CPU needs (2 to 3 watt), whereas the SSD needs 1.5 to 2 watt.

Thats when I last checked the numbers for my own notebook decicion. That was in 2008, but it should still be the same ballpark.

[Engels]

power, speed and more importantly, shock resistance. 90% of all the broken laptops I deal with are due to busted hard drives.

[Sand]

Whats the biggest SSD's laptops are coming in these days? Can you run all the basic Office products off one?

[naum]

The MBP I bought Mrs. Naum last year gets ~10 hours battery life (and I have tested and confirmed this IRL XP). Unfortunately, it looks like the model-ramp-up diminished that figure to ~7 hours.

A few months back I picked up the 11" Macbook Air and it is the sweetest little laptop I've ever owned. Only 128G SSD drive, but startup and shutdown (not just sleep/awake) takes like a second, weighs ~2 lb, snappy performance -- even have done development work on it… …no DVD drive on it though, which is mostly no problem for me (except for those old-school games that require DVD in drive). But 11" is too small for a some folk, though there is a 13" (and 13" bumps up battery life to 7 hours, from 5) model too… …have not run BootCamp or Parallels or whatever the Sun VM is called these days, so I cannot attest to how it performs there.

[Trippy]

The MBP I bought Mrs. Naum last year gets ~10 hours battery life (and I have tested and confirmed this IRL XP). Unfortunately, it looks like the model-ramp-up diminished that figure to ~7 hours.

No, Apple changed the way they measure battery life to better approximate real-world usage which lowered the hours for all the models using the new measuring scheme.

Edit: article describing the change in testing methodology:

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/377980/new_macbook_pro_battery_life_tested_differently_outgoing_model/

[naum]

The MBP I bought Mrs. Naum last year gets ~10 hours battery life (and I have tested and confirmed this IRL XP). Unfortunately, it looks like the model-ramp-up diminished that figure to ~7 hours.

No, Apple changed the way they measure battery life to better approximate real-world usage which lowered the hours for all the models using the new measuring scheme.

Edit: article describing the change in testing methodology:

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/377980/new_macbook_pro_battery_life_tested_differently_outgoing_model/

No. I have tested it, and indeed was shocked & surprised when it did get ~10 hours battery life. And that includes WiFi… …purchased it in March 2010 -- perhaps they did change their measurement schema, but I am giving you my personal XP…

[Trippy]

And I'm saying if you test the new models using your same method you'll get about the same battery life -- i.e. the new models don't use more power and the batteries are the same size.

[KallDrexx]

Well I decided to up my price limit a bit, and after going to Best Buy I decided that I really didn't need a 15" screen, smaller screens are fine.  I ended up going with a 13.3" Toshiba laptop (Pentium I3 @ 2.1Ghz, 4GB RAM). 

So far I am liking it a lot.  I seem to go through 7% or so battery in a 30 minute period of time, giving me 5+ hours in my usage so far. Much nicer than my 2 hour max previously.

[Yusuf Mohammed]

Advice :  don't buy dell labtop because the life time of its battery is 6 months only 

[Rasix]

Advice: prepare to be banned.

[ghost]

Can't we keep him?  He's making me laugh.   

[Ironwood]

If my battery could last six months between charging, I wouldn't be fucking complaining.