Note Book with Longest Battery Backup

gsouthee

Obliviot
Hello,

I am looking to buy a Notebook with battery backup of 8 hours or so. However, I don't even find a single notebook that can offer 4 hours of backup with heavy Multimedia.

Any recommendations or suggestions! What about Mini-notebooks are the worth buying.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Hey Gsouthee. I've seen some impressive results on a few laptops... the best is probably the Macbook Air, which is about to be refreshed. However, any dual-core Sandy Bridge laptop, 14-15" in size, with an 8 or 9-cell battery should be able to hit six hours with moderate usage. Larger 17" laptops and/or Quadcore processors will drop the battery life by several hours under load conditions.

If you really really want nine hours of battery life out of a laptop I'd either suggest carrying around a second 9-cell battery, or actually considering a newly refreshed MacBook Air as that's the only laptop I've seen hit nine hours with web surfing. I am assuming the next-gen model can do the same, something that needs to be proven...
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
Aww, and here I was hoping to read a dirty joke first thing in the morning.

unledirx.jpg


The longest what?

Anyway, solid state drives will be a key component too (I'm surprised you didn't mention that, Robert :p). Laptops are hitting a major sweet spot right now in price/performance/thermal performance/battery life.

Just wait until Ivy Bridge based lappies launch! Wow!
 

Tharic-Nar

Senior Editor
Staff member
Moderator
The Acer Timeline series have some of the longest battery lives out there. You are unlikely to find 4 hours of multimedia, like DVD playback and such, they tend to cap at around 2-3 hours, but web browsing and such, they can hit 8-10 hours.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Anyway, solid state drives will be a key component too (I'm surprised you didn't mention that, Robert :p).

SSD's don't play a huge factor in battery life. :D Although they can help in many cases, it's a bad idea to upgrade to one just for battery life improvements as the benefits won't be anything near the investment cost. Those 5400RPM laptop drives are pretty light on power, and the higher-performing SSDs can use a few watts even without moving parts in them.


Just wait until Ivy Bridge based lappies launch! Wow!

Yes, should be a really really nice improvement with those! But that's gonna be what, December or January?
 
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