Smart Batteries ?????

I have an aging, but reliable Dell Latitude C400 that must be almost 5 years old by now. Even back then, Dell was shipping battereis with a status button that could be activated without the machine being turned on.

Comments withstanding the recent Dell/Sony battery fiasco, Do other manufacturers equip their laptops with these batteries, and if not, why? I find this to be a very useful feature.

 

i used to have an old old dell that had that, as for your question, i think there could be many answers.
sony might give dell a good dell and not one else
sony can only produce enought for just dell
everyone(all other computer manufactures) else can see some problems with them

so to some degree i just don't know and unless there is a dell rep around here likely no one will know either, so my solutions are guess' for the most part.

 

This may be slightly off-topic, but still related... fisherdmin, how much battery life do you get out of your C400 on regular usage? (word processing, web surfing, etc) I am looking into possibly buying one of these used and I'd like to have an idea.

C.

 

I think you are talking about the battery gauge? I believe this is a dell proprietary technology, so they probably hold a patent on it (for notebook batteries). I could be totally wrong - but I agree, it is a really useful feature.

 

I get about 2 hours worth, but I always run the screen at its brightest with a PCMICA WiFi card in. The only other comment I would make, is that this model's screen becomes very loose and wobbly because the attaching screws are a bit under-engineered.

It works very well for me.