Battery options for my M1530

Hi folks,
I have just invested in an M1530 (it arrived about a week ago) however the battery life is pretty poor and I was hoping to use it on a 5 hour plane journey to watch DVD's etc.

I bought the 6-Cell battery and i am wondering what my optins are in terms of extending the battery life. Should i bite the bullet and buy a 9-Cell battery, which is a bit expensive - around £50 (or $100) or should i invest in an external power pack.

I am looking for advice and/or websites where i might find the battery and/or alternatives cheaper than the price mentioned above.

Thanks in advance,
James

 

Part of the problem with watching DvDs is it spins up the optical drive which consumes a lot of power. If you saved the movies to your laptop and then watched them you might see better performance.

 

Look into a portable DVD player. It'd be cheaper than a battery. I'm not sure of the battery life on them, though.

 

You're turning off the bluetooth/wireless yeah?

 

Hi guys,
Those are good suggestions. I have ripped a few dvd's to my hard disk however i was more looking at other uses too such as gaming, coding etc. My problem is with the battery life as a whole rather than for specific uses. I would turn off wireless (and maybe bluetooth, although i may use a bluetooth mouse). I would also run it in low power mode as the sceen wouldn't need to be too bright on a plane.

Any other tips/suggestions?

James

 

Try undervolting, there's a good thread on it somewhere.
Cooling pad maybe - might leave the fan off a bit longer.

 

Ripped DVD's or not, the 6-cell wont give you 5 hours of runtime. Not even close, even with all the power saving features turned on to max.

So, if you must use the notebook for playing a few movies on those long trips, I see no other alternative then to get urself a spare 9-cell, or find one of those power transformers for the plane's DC feed.

 

I managed to find a second battery for £36.00 on ebay. Thanks for all your help!

 

That battery is 6-cell or 9-cell? I bought a brand new 9cell for 65€ , also on eBay (51GBP)

 

Extreme case, install an LED screen. I get 2 hours 39 mins with 6-cell and 3 hours 46 mins with 9 cell with max brightness, wifi-on. No gaming obviously. I dunno if you'd call that low battery life, but... I think its great compared to my E1505 with only an hour and a half with a 9 cell.

 

2h 39 mins is very respectable for the 6-cell with everything running on full. Very nice. I'm not sure I'm getting that much with mine, but then again, I haven't yet done a full battery rundown test.

 

That was a 9 cell battery. It was listed as 'on offer' so i offered £25 and negotiated up. I get about 2h 30 with my current 6 cell when on 'full whack' which i think is impressive in comparison to other laptops

 

i find the 6cell pretty neat i get like 3 hours out of it when on powersaving and screen on 50% and using wifi.

Is there btw any bigger battery available then the 9cell ?

 

FWIW, I'm running on a fully charged 6-cell and I could juice out about 3 hours of pure, unadulterated alternative music plus some web antics, everything set to high though WiFi's off...

But I have yet to subject it to an acid test.



This might be a good resource. Let's ask the pros here!