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Go Bag: 30 Hour Laptop Batteries

By crooky | October 7, 2008

Like all self-employed professionals, I have a “go bag” with everything I need in it to get through a workday away from my home office. LifeHacker had a great post last year where readers showed off what was in their Go Bags [READ]. This posting is the first in a series of four. The next three will cover my laptop, my cellphone and the sundry supplies that I take everywhere with me. Without further ado, let me tell you about my 30 hour laptop battery:

I started searching for a new battery for my old laptop earlier this year because the factory battery was completely shot. When I bought the laptop, it got an impressive 3.5 hours of battery life. Two years of heavy use later, it gets 20 minutes if I don’t use WiFi. To get a replacement battery from my local computer shop was going to be close to $200 after taxes. There are some dealers online that claim to carry the right battery for my laptop for $75-$100. The huge discrepency in price made me nervous so I didn’t order from any of these online battery warehouses.

What I did find during my travails was the Battery Geek website. These guys, unlike the sketchy-looking battery warehousers, carry special-purpose external batteries designed to power portable electronics through their DC jacks. I ended up buying their largest model (go big or go home) which will power a normal PC laptop for 20-30 hours on one charge. If you click on the picture of the battery above, it will take you to a description of the battery.

It’s a very slick device but not light. It’s literally a giant Lithium Ion battery (like the kind that inserts into your laptop) so it’s heavy. The stock laptop batteries for my current laptop are 49 Wh while my new external battery is 200 Wh. This means in practical terms that I can run my laptop for 15 hours. The internal battery lasts for nearly three hours with my power-hungry laptop while the external battery delivers quadrupal the energy that the internal one does. Hence, the 15 hour battery life.

For small, energy-efficient latops like my old one, this exernal batter can power it for up to 30 hours. In addition to its long life, this battery also a 5V powered USB port that can charge your smartphone when you’re in a bind. I used it this morning to charge up my iPod Touch so that I could listen to tunes through the auxiliary jack in my car.

So while this battery will add significant weight to your go bag, if you’re a true mobile warrior, the battery weight is a small price to pay to drive your enemies before you and to hear the lamentation of their women. In the next post in this series, I will talk about the Sony VAIO FW series notebook.

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Topics: Business of Consulting, Technology |

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