How do I Find a Laptop with Good Battery Life?

Battery life is crucial to a good laptop. Buy too little, and you’ll get frustrated pretty quick.

What type of Battery?

The first thing to consider in selecting a battery is the material it is made of. NiCd (Nickle Cadmium) is an old style of battery, which is very difficult to find these days because it has been replaced by lighter and more efficient alternatives. NiMH (Nickle Metal-Hydride) is also very rare for the same reason. Most laptop batteries today are made from Lithium, because they are lighter and last longer. Lithium Ion is what most laptops use, while Lithium Polymer is gaining in popularity. For the most part, laptop battery makers switch very quickly to the latest materials available, so you probably couldn’t find a battery included in a laptop that itsn’t Lithium right now.

How much power does it hold?

Laptop batteries are composed of several smaller batteries called ‘cells’. The more cells, the more powerful the battery will be and the longer it will last. But, the number of cells doesn’t tell you how large each cell is. For a better measure of how much power a particular battery will hold, look for ‘amp-hours’ (Ah) or ‘milliamp-hours’ (mAh). These two numbers are the same rating, but one is measured a thousand times more precisely, like meters and kilometers. It’s hard to give ranges for what’s good, but an inexpensive battery often starts at around 2000 mAh, a decent battery is going to be around 4000 and an excellent battery is going to be 6000 or more.

How long will it actually last?

That’s a tough question to answer, because there are many factors which affect the performance of a battery in a given laptop. The basic idea of the mAh rating system is to provide an indication of how many hours a battery should last. So, a 2000 mAh battery should last 2 hours on a typical laptop under typical usage. A 6000 mAh battery should last for six. But, there are a lot of ways efficiency can be improved or reduced.

Construction and Components

A laptop that is put together efficiently, which has solid connections and well organized components will use less battery than a laptop that is put together sloppily. A laptop that uses high quality components will often perform better. Also, how much hardware is included in a laptop can make a big difference in how well it performs. A laptop that has 2 GB of RAM will use less power than a laptop running 4 GB. Right now there is debate over whether a Hard Drive or a Solid State Drive which has no moving parts gets better battery life. A 17″ monitor built into a laptop is going to use way more power than a 14″ screen. If battery life is more important to you than raw processing power, consider buying less machine or upgrading to more efficient components when selecting your laptop.

Operating System

The operating system, such as Windows or Linux, is constantly making decisions about how to allocate power. Do I shut down the monitor because the computer hasn’t been used in a few minutes? Do I shut down the hard drive? Does the DVD drive need to be spinning right now? There are many ways in which an operating system can be designed to recognize how a user operates and how a machine performs and to coordinate the machine’s use of power to best suit the user’s pattern. Take some time to fiddle with the power settings on your computer, and you could eke out a few more precious minutes from your battery.

Usage

How you use a computer affects how long the battery will last. If you are writing a document, or watching a movie or playing a video game, each of those activities will use a different amount of battery. If the computer has to be constantly accessing the hard drive or keeping the DVD drive spinning, then it’s going to use more power. Dimming the brightness of the screen can also make a big difference. Putting your computer to sleep when you know you won’t be using it for a few minutes will preserve the battery.