M6400 Extra battery

My old Inspiron 8600 has a spare battery that fits into the optical drive bay. It's really a nice feature and lets me get over four hours battery life out of this dusty old laptop. Does the M6400 have a similar feature? I was wondering if there was a way to get some extra battery life out of it.

 

Unfortunately the E-Serie & the new Precisions have no battery option for the modular bay.

 

The bay height is only 9.5mm (3/8") so they probably could only squeeze 2 cells in there and decided it wasn't worth the effort. So they invented the "slice" instead.

I don't know what run time the M6400 can get with a 9 cell battery but I would expect it is more than 4 hours of light usage.

John

 

I wish it were 4 hours of light usage. The most I could get out of my M6400 is about 1 hr 55min light usage on XP64.

 

That's not impressive. 6 or 9 cell battery? Potent CPU and GPU must be leaking power! Stick to P series CPUs and Intel graphics if you want battery time, or carry a Samsung NC10 netbook in the bag as reserve.

John

 

Sadly there are no really good P series options with the M6400, IMHO. I would love to see the P9500 as an option. That's really the processor I've been looking for as I evaluate notebook options.

 

My sales pimp told me that modular bay batteries would be available in 2009 for the M6400.

Don't know if this is true or just if he was pushing for the sale.

 

There is no battery-port in the modular bay like it was on the D-Series or is in the Thinkpads notebooks. Therefor a bay-battery will not be available. You propably talked to one of the guys that were claiming the Covet-Screen isn't a glossy screen

The M6400 battery life is very poor compared to the M4400. I get 2 hour of light use with the 9cell battery. With the same settings I get 4 hours with my M4400 out of the 6cell battery!! (Vista 64bit, LED dimmed to 20%, WLAN on)

A bay-battery would push the 2 hour to 2,5 hours.. a useless upgrade. Hopefully there will be a e-dock battery with 12cells pushing the 2 hours to 5 hours, that would be useful.

 

Yep, I agree. I actually can't even get my M6400 to get past the 2 hour mark with the 9 cell battery with wireless disabled and minimum load, only about 380MB of memory usage. I haven't tried any of the power savings mode stuff though. I wish the battery lasted more around 3.5hrs.