I'm looking for a new laptop to substitute my (very old) Acer Travelmate. I have a powerful desktop system in the office, so I'd use the laptop only when travelling. In fact, in the last months I started travelling a lot, going to Budapest visiting our customers at least once a week (6 hours of train back and forth) as well as spending at least one week in Italy every month (12 hours of train-airplane-train from Pecs, Hungary to Torino, Italy).
For these reasons, I'm more interested in portability than computing power. The crucial point is the battery life: I'd love to have a laptop which I could use for 12 hours without a recharge while travelling across Europe, but I know that this is a dream.
Well, maybe it is not a dream anymore: according to the Dell website their new Latitude E6400 can achieve 19 hours (yes, 19 hours) of battery life with two 9-cells batteries (standard and additional). Of course I know that if they write 19 hours, they really mean 12 hours of real usage or so, but it is still amazing. I asked for a price quotation, and it seems that it is not that expensive (about 1.500 euro with a good configuration), making it an ideal candidate.
So, dear Lazyweb, do you have any experience with the Latitude E6400, especially with Debian? Do you have any suggestion for a laptop with a very (very) long battery life?
For these reasons, I'm more interested in portability than computing power. The crucial point is the battery life: I'd love to have a laptop which I could use for 12 hours without a recharge while travelling across Europe, but I know that this is a dream.
Well, maybe it is not a dream anymore: according to the Dell website their new Latitude E6400 can achieve 19 hours (yes, 19 hours) of battery life with two 9-cells batteries (standard and additional). Of course I know that if they write 19 hours, they really mean 12 hours of real usage or so, but it is still amazing. I asked for a price quotation, and it seems that it is not that expensive (about 1.500 euro with a good configuration), making it an ideal candidate.
So, dear Lazyweb, do you have any experience with the Latitude E6400, especially with Debian? Do you have any suggestion for a laptop with a very (very) long battery life?
Note that the Dell Latitude E6400, like most Dell laptops, only accepts one large battery at a time. If you want to switch, you'll have to either plug in, hibernate, or shut down.
By that definition, many laptops can give you that kind of battery life. Try an eee, for instance.
Well you wouldn't want to carry around more then two batteries at a time. Otherwise if size and weight wasn't a issue then you might as well bring a generator and a desktop tower. :)
The new Atom hybrid platforms should offer some very impressive batter life. I have a original EEPC and that was a bit disappointing with only about 2.5-3 hour battery life (as I expected when I bought the thing).
I was in the market for a travel laptop I'd take a strong look at the new Dell Inspiron 910.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080818-dells-eee-killer-to-ship-with-ubuntu-preinstalled.html
It's a Atom-based system with 8.9 inch screen and 1024x600 graphics. (the 800x480 graphics on my EEEPC is limiting, but with my old P3 Dell laptop 1024x768 is very usable with something like LXDE or a modified Gnome environment).
So if your a command line oriented guy with Emacs or Vim passions then 1024x600 is nearly perfect. It would be difficult though with a GUI-oriented IDE though.
And what I like is the fact that it ships with Linux by default; Ubuntu. I have a strong opinion that Linux on the desktop cannot happen without good OEM support. It simply takes to long to get Linux supported on new hardware without it. So when OEMs support Linux it makes sense for Linux users to support that OEM's Linux products. Plus you have official support and you have issues with ACPI or something fundamental like that you can bitch to the OEM and they are actually obligated to support you.
I don't know what the battery life is, but I suspect if Dell offers a 'large' battery and you get that in addition to a second battery, or one of those generic battery packs made for much larger notebooks then it shouldn't be difficult to get 12 hours of life from it. Smaller display, Atom processor, integrated graphics, solid state drive, etc. These things should contribute to efficient battery life. With some tweaking with powertop you'd probably be able to get some impressive results.
Nobody do - it's not yet in stores (well, in Russia, at least), but it look that Lenny will handle most of the hardware just fine.
I'm vacillating between the Dell inspiron 910 and the Acer Aspire One.
The Dell is said to have an instant on feature that could make the difference for me. I assume that's Linux on the motherboard, perhaps with Firefox easily available as part of the instant on. If that's the case, I'd love it. Instant on with Firefox would suit me most of the time, and I'd boot into XP on http://www.batterygoshop.co.uk/dell/dell-inspiron-910-laptop-all-8.9-inch-series--battery.htm those rare occasions that I need Windows.
Acer is in the top 5, and I thought about that when writing the statement, what I am really talking about is known to consumers, and I was thinking about those people who generally go to buy a computer at a physical store/aren’t too involved in technology. Also I’m talking more about the US where people recognize Sony, HP, Dell, and others before Acer. I might edit the statement in my review if I have a chance so it better reflects that.