Welcome to a laptop battery specialist
of the dell laptop battery
It's the holy grail of any laptop user who spends most of the day out of the office.
Yes, thinner and lighter laptops are a blessing. But how about a notebook that will run all day without recharging? When will we be able to hit the road but leave the AC adaptor at home?
The answer to that question is "today", depending on the price you're prepared to pay and the compromises you're willing to make (see sub-section below).
Within the next few years it won't be an issue. The march of technology in computer chips and other components will make all-day computing a trait of almost every laptop.
"The challenge for us is to bring all-day battery with like dell Inspiron 1750N battery, dell Inspiron 14 battery, dell Inspiron 1750 battery, dell G5266 battery, dell Latitude C640 battery, dell 1691P battery, dell 75UYF battery, dell Latitude D610 battery, dell Inspiron 1100 battery, dell Inspiron 5100 battery, dell Latitude D600 battery, dell Latitude D620 batterylife to the mainstream so that you take the laptop to work and leave the power supply at home," says Mooly Eden, the general manager of Intel's Mobile Platforms Group.
"But all day means different things to different people. For me it might be eight hours, for you it might be 10 hours. And we need to do even more than that, because as the laptop gets older, the battery life will slowly get lower. We need to deliver 10 to 12 hours without the charger. And we will be able to do that, because all-day battery life is not just possible, it is inevitable."
Making notebooks better is what Eden does. Through his revolutionary work creating Intel's Centrino laptop technology, the foundation of the Core line of processors, Eden is considered the father of modern mobile computing.
The Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 chips run faster than any previous generation of Intel silicon, while drawing less power. And even that extra speed is being channelled into eking out extra battery life.
If you divide the laptop's typical working day into tiny slices of time, most of them are spent being idle. More processing muscle means the notebook can do the heavy-lifting faster, allowing it to return to the low-power idle state more quickly. The more time it spends there, the longer the battery lasts.
Eden calls this feature "hurry up and get idle" and it's enhanced by turbo boost modes that further accelerate the processor for short but intense bursts - opening an email attachment or displaying a PowerPoint deck as thumbnails.
"The idea is wake the notebook up, do the job and then go to sleep again," Eden explains. "If the chip does the job faster, it can go back to sleep sooner, so you get better performance and you also get extended battery life. This is the real secret of energy efficiency."
Ad Feedback Yet the processor is just one part of the notebook. The screen is responsible for the largest portion of a laptop's power drain, followed by the hard drive. Efficiencies in these are slower to come, with fewer breakthroughs and smaller leaps.
That said, notebook screens with LED backlighting draw less juice than the non-backlit models, while also providing a brighter picture.
And while solid state drives draw almost no power compared with the conventional platters of a hard disk, their high price and relatively low capacity makes them impractical for many notebook users.
Seagate is leading the way to a new wave of hybrid hard drives that partner a high-capacity hard disk with solid state memory that automatically stores the most commonly used files and data.
There's also a growing trend towards lightweight operating systems that allow email, music or movies and web-browsing without loading Microsoft Windows.
Typically based on Linux and embedded in a flash memory chip inside the laptop, they spring to life within seconds instead of the hard-disk hammering (and power-sucking) minute Windows often demands - which makes them a boon for shorter work sessions on the go.
Asus, Dell and HP all offer some form of "instant on" mode. Dell's impressive Latitude ON implementation is bolstered by a tiny secondary processor and has inbuilt Citrix VPN support, making it possible to sidestep Windows for much of the day and let the notebook stride into Day 2 without an AC outlet in sight.
Once we hit true all-day computing for all laptops, this will be the target: a notebook that rocks around the clock, and then some.