External battery pack for m15x

Hello!

I'm new to the forums, so I apologize if there already was a topic about this.
But I didn't find anything useful so I started one myself.

So the battery life isn't much on the m15x. So I wan't to know if there is a external battery that would score my laptop at least 5+ hours ?
If not or if it it's to overpriced, would it be hard to build your own battery pack ? I have good soldering skills but the lack of knowledge about batteries.

Thanks for any kind of info!

 

You can certainly build one yourself, grab few high capacity li-ion cells, run 4 cells in series to get 14.8volts (4*3.7) and then according to capacity needed add few of these in parallel. Add a 12v car charger made for alienware laptops (to make electronics side easy). Put all of this inside a box and there you have it, a simple yet functional external battery pack.

But by the end you figure all of the price and hassle, you should be able to get at least 2 9cell batteries for m15x.

 

Just get 1-2 batteries and swap them as needed.

 

I agree. Multiple 9 cell batteries that you could keep charged and swap as needed would be the simplest, if not the cheapest way. I have the 6 cell, and unless I use stealth mode, 1 hour is doing well. One of the reviews reported 106 minutes (1 hr 46 minutes) for video playback from the 9 cell battery in regular mode. Of course gaming will shorten that. So, to get to 5 hours of video playback you would need at least 3 nine cell batteries - more if you push it. This is expensive, but likely the most portable solution. A less expensive, but much heavier option would be to purchase a 12 v car battery and 150w 12 vold adapter (careful about the latter, the vast majority of car adapters are designed for ~ 10A, or 100-120W - not enough for your laptop, which will complain if it cannot draw 150 W). You could set the battery up in parallel with your car's battery so it would stay charged.

Fortunately, the future looks better. Newer laptops (particularly IvyBridge) run faster, wiegh less, and use less power. Of course, if your goal is to run games as fast as possible, you can run even their batteries down pretty fast.

Good luck,

Joe

 

You could get a 9 cell. Also you can swap out the dvd drive and put a 5 cell battery in it's place. This is pretty neat! With economical usage and less powerful specs (i5/i3, 75W GPU) and an SSD you could potentially squeeze 5 hours out of the old beast!

 

Where can you get one of those?

 

Thanks for all your reply's !

So I was searching for a 9-cell battery, can't seem to find one cheap. But I kinda have a lot of free time at the moment and was thinking on o project to build something, so i thought, why not a external battery.

About that CD-bay battery upgrade, aren't those batteries for the area 51 models? Or did they make them for the late 2009 models (our beloved m15x's)??
If so I am joining tetsusasaiga's question, where can you get those ?
I am kinda of a nerd, so building some electronics is like to me, haha

 

Also, having multiple batteries is kinda bad, you have to turn your system off, swap the battery, turn it back on.....
So having juice from one battery would be kinda cool.

 

Genuine CD-ROM drive Battery Dell Alienware M15X SQU-722 SQU-724 M15X6CPRIBABLK | eBay

I believe 6 cell. So you could have total 15 cells of battery inside. Would make the M15x a heavy beast though!