Portable Laptop - i5/i7 dedicated GPU 13-14" 6+ hour battery life

Hey guys.

I've currently got a Toshiba Satellite P750

It has:

Core i5 2410m
NVIDIA GeForce 540m 1GB
8GB RAM
15.6" 1366x768 screen
3 Hour Battery life.

It's fine performance wise. Battlefield 3 runs on low, CS Source runs maxed out, but It's a tad too heavy and the battery doesn't last long enough under normal use for my liking.

I had looked at the Asus U46SV as an alternative. 14" screen, so resolution is more reasonable on it, as well as the screen quality being better. Much longer battery life, same hardware specs as the current one I have. (GeForce 555m would have been lovely but still)

It's around the £749 mark, and since I only just got this one and it still has all the stickers and stuff on it I'd be selling it as new, probably £649 then pay for the rest of the laptop.

It seems to be the best I could find for the money. Anyone know of anything better or is this definitely what I should go for?

 

You should look at a laptop with 8-9 hours of battery life. Because battery life degrade over time. Of course.. it's not gaming time. That you can easily cut more than half.

 

I disagree. When the battery life starts to drop, head over to the bay and spend 20-30 quid on a brand new battery. Will be much cheaper than trying to find a laptop which fulfills the requirements and is within a reasonable price range.

 

20-30 quid/$.. you are funny. A good, 9-cell laptop battery, from Chinese unknown source is well over 100$.
My laptop battery was 150$ on eBay, 130$ without shipping and taxes was the cheapest, non-genuine battery.

I called Dell, negotiated, and I got a new one, genuine for 135$ with free shipping.
Anyway, 134$ is not 20-30$. Battery upgrades when buying the system is FAR better than buying it after, as the price of the laptop pays for it.

 

This is the battery for my laptop. A 6-cell battery for the HP 2510p. The cost? 25 dollars. I even mentioned the 20-30 as quid meaning pounds. Including shipping and other charges I believe that to be a fair price for a new battery and by all accounts much cheaper than spending hundreds of dollars on a laptop with much longer battery life.

 

Well I ideally wanted 4+ hours of actual use time. 6 would be grand!

I know gaming on battery is gonna shove it down to 1-2 hours, but I wouldn't do much gaming on battery anyway.

I've seen some other Asus lapops that are decent but the one I posted first still seems to crack on a bit better in terms of performance.

 

Plus it'll take a while before the battery life drops even to a 10-15% wear level, 6-12 months probably depending on use. When I'm using it, i'll have it doing nearly full charge cycles anyway since It'll be getting run into the ground, or i'll have it 100% and on AC power. Batteries on ebay for it at £50 give or take, which is not bad for a 8 cell 5500mAh battery.

 

A fellow forum member did a review on the U46SV

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=216528&highlight=u46sv

 

Put a SSD in would save a lot of power...

 

Not really, laptop hard drives barely draw anything anyway. Less than an amp I believe. Less than 10W at any rate.

 

Yea ok only 4400mAh, no wonder.
My battery is 90Whr (that is why it can deliver 10hours of battery on my 14inch Dell Latitude system, with Nvidia GPU, Core 2 Duo P8400 series (it's almost 4 year old my laptop), 1440x900 resolution, 4GB of RAM DDR2, wireless-N ON, browsing the web, backlight keyboard off. )

How many hours does your laptop provide?

 

I make that just less than double Picarro's WHr rating. Is that right? If so, I don't understand why such a massive price difference.

 

Also was wondering if the optical drive can be turned into a second hard drive bay? I've got a 60GB OCZ Agility SSD sitting doing nothing. I've got a 240GB Sandisk SSD in my Core i3 rig which I could transplant and put the OCZ into it since it has 2 x 1TB hard drives in it too, but I'd rather have the 2 drive option on the laptop too.

Or hell, if it could have a secondary battery!

Can't wait till this shiz is all perfectly modular and interchangeable!

 

A lot of optical drives can be turned into a second hard drive bay. Not all laptops are equipped with high speed SATA ports in the optical bay however. For instance mine had a SATA II connector there and a SATA III connector in the regular HDD bay (so I swapped SSD and HDD position).

I received mine from newModeus - you can see a review of it in my threads started history. There are some laptops out there that are built for this sort of thing as well and the optical drive is hot-swappable. Generally though you pay even more to get one of the caddies from the manufacturer for these systems then you would for an aftermarket solution.

I wanted to find that ultimate laptop as well. I had an old Dell with all sorts of cool features that you don't see that much, at least not in the mainstream market. It had two bays that you could use for extra batteries, different removable media types, and hard drives. Dell and Lenovo have some good options in this regard still but you generally pay a premium for these extra modular features.

 

A lot of optical drives can be turned into a second hard drive bay. Not all laptops are equipped with high speed SATA ports in the optical bay however. For instance mine had a SATA II connector there and a SATA III connector in the regular HDD bay (so I swapped SSD and HDD position).

I received mine from newModeus - you can see a review of it in my threads started history. There are some laptops out there that are built for this sort of thing as well and the optical drive is hot-swappable. Generally though you pay even more to get one of the caddies from the manufacturer for these systems then you would for an aftermarket solution.

I wanted to find that ultimate laptop as well. I had an old Dell with all sorts of cool features that you don't see that much, at least not in the mainstream market. It had two bays that you could use for extra batteries, different removable media types, and hard drives. Dell and Lenovo have some good options in this regard still but you generally pay a premium for these extra modular features.

 

I think his whole point was that you pay a premium for the laptops that can offer 10 hours while also offering the features the OP wants. You have made his point a lot stronger mentioning how much more expensive the higher-capacity batteries cost to replace. ... If you absolutely couldn't deal with less than ten hours, then I think your recommendation would be wise.

 

Hello,
I have a nearly new acer i3 laptop, my mum has a sony i3 laptop. Watching sky via wifi we are lucky if the batterys last an hour and a half, i think battery specs are a load of old cods wollop.

 

Haha. Well they're not entirely a 'load of old cods wollop' . . . I think . . I don't really know what that means. They are a best case scenario representation of battery life. You can find machines that do better than an hour and a half of video though.

 

lol, i think the batterys are meant to last about 4-5 hours on our laptops, but that must be just sat on desktop and running the clock, lol.

 

This is exactly how the specified battery lives for most brands are measured. Screen at minimum brightness, wifi off, no load... Yeah that tells absolutely nothing about the battery life...

I have no idea who they're still fooling with that crap, everyone already knows the specifications are bollocks, so why bother still lying to the customers?