Making best of battery life and buying new laptop advice?

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sk2k52

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I'll be making 2 posts, first asking about battery, second asking about laptops.

Ok first off my battery question. I had a laptop for like 2 years which I hardly used due to it being too large to be practical to carry around wherever and because it ran slow (2g ram but had vista)

So anyway lately I been experimenting a lot with networking and having couple hours idle time before work (car broken and only ride i can get).

I did a search, in this forum among other sources to see the best means I could get to extending my battery life, here's what i've come up with.

-Fully charge battery only when necessary, the less charged the longer it lasts.
-Keep it cool as reasonable possible.
-When plugged in and battery charged remove either battery or plug.

As I'll be using this often out of home, keeping it as fully charged as possible is necessary as I cannot expect to carry the cables to keep it plugged in wherever. I was wondering though if there is any other means I could go by in extending battery life?

I set the computer under power saver (hp pavilion dv9000), and muted my speakers in hopes of helping extend its life during my out trips. Would I be correct to also assume use of dvd, usb devices, and wifi would too work to drain battery faster?

Is there any other means I could actively seek while using said laptop, not just with keeping the battery as well as possible, to reduce the speed of power drainage?

This laptop is also using Vista if there anything I could manually do/deactivate with it to reduce power consumption.

Mucho thanks for anyone so much as taking the time for reading this, and mucho thanks to anyone posting in hopes of aiding.

Here's my question about purchasing new laptops. Is there any suggestions/brands of laptops to favor or stay away against? Any sites I could compare and contrast?

Things I'm looking for in laptop -
- Speed, 2gram minimum
- Wifi connectivity
- Bluetooth connectivity ( not necessary, dunno if it comes with any or expensive)
- 1-2 usb ports, any more is not needed.
- Simple and capable of running video decently (no need to be great just not laggy)
- A windows or linux os. Dual boot for both is preferable. I'd prefer windows over linux.
- Tablets/touch screen I'd like but last I checked, seemed gettign a decent one started over 1,000$, way too high for me.

Things I don't need -
- Numerous extra ports besides usb/power plug.
- Cd/dvd player. Rarely do I find myself using discs over usb cards for storage.
- Gaming pc, any games, if any, I play on this will tend to be simplistic such as stuff from newgrounds.com.
- widescreen. The smaller the laptop and screen the better, just not handheld.

Price range - Around 500$, cheaper the better but i'd reluctantly pay a bit more if needed.

Again thanks for any advice. Work has been hectic lately, so might forget about this post for a bit but i'll try not to and checking as often as possible.
 
I'll be making 2 posts, first asking about battery, second asking about laptops.

Ok first off my battery question. I had a laptop for like 2 years which I hardly used due to it being too large to be practical to carry around wherever and because it ran slow (2g ram but had vista)

So anyway lately I been experimenting a lot with networking and having couple hours idle time before work (car broken and only ride i can get).

I did a search, in this forum among other sources to see the best means I could get to extending my battery life, here's what i've come up with.

-Fully charge battery only when necessary, the less charged the longer it lasts.
-Keep it cool as reasonable possible.
-When plugged in and battery charged remove either battery or plug.

As I'll be using this often out of home, keeping it as fully charged as possible is necessary as I cannot expect to carry the cables to keep it plugged in wherever. I was wondering though if there is any other means I could go by in extending battery life?

I set the computer under power saver (hp pavilion dv9000), and muted my speakers in hopes of helping extend its life during my out trips. Would I be correct to also assume use of dvd, usb devices, and wifi would too work to drain battery faster?

Is there any other means I could actively seek while using said laptop, not just with keeping the battery as well as possible, to reduce the speed of power drainage?

This laptop is also using Vista if there anything I could manually do/deactivate with it to reduce power consumption.

Mucho thanks for anyone so much as taking the time for reading this, and mucho thanks to anyone posting in hopes of aiding.
As for the battery life:

That is about all you can do. Today's lithium ion batteries are pretty 'high tech' in comparison to old ones. There isn't a whole lot you can do to prolong the life of a battery. Back in the day batteries had memory modules that would become corrupt if they were plugged in too long when unecessary. This is NOT the case with todays lithium ion batteries. The above steps can definately help the battery life, but if you were to test two batteries side-by-side, one do nothing special with and hte other follow the steps above (only plug in when needed, keep cool, etc) there would be very little difference in battery life deterioration. After about a year you'll notice a gradual decline in battery life of both batteries, and after about a year in a half to two years they probably will hold very little if any charge.

That is just how batteries work, they aren't eternal materials, and by nature have a natural shelf life. I've followed both samples (proper use and not doing anything with the other) and both died within a few months of eachother.

Thanks to HP I got two new ones four years later b/c of a recall though :) Thanks HP!

Hope this clears some things up for you.
 
I was in a similar situation and man I can tell you it's best just to enjoy the thing while it has a charge, keep the music low and the screen semi brite.
 
Is there any sites I could go that lets me select what I want in a laptop and they show me all that meet my specifications, rather than just going to laptop makes sites and shuffling through the laptops they offer and having to chekc the specs of each?

is there any companies I should look for laptops in or stay away from? Salty I looked up that HP tx1 but it seems they not selling any at hp's primary site so I suppose I'd have to do more thorough research and find somewhere still holding old copies or just buy it used.

I was recommended to go with an hp as they save the core os in a chip so if anything critical goes wrong you can easy reformat from that rather than finding a disc every time.

Also I heard 64bit vista isn't worth it unless your system is 4g ram min? but is there any reason against getting it over a 32bit besides price?

Satellite U400-ST6301

Is the laptop I'm currently looking at. Hope the link works. Like I said, my major want are fast, capable of playing video np (mainly youtube likes) easily carried around and small, thus easily stored. Not handheld, wifi and bluetooth. It the only tablet PC I could find so far that didn't START at 1,000$ AND wasn't widescreen, which I really would like to stray from.

Any comments or suggestions? I wish I could get rid of them bundling ms office with it since i prefer openoffice but meh. Btw I want a tablet laptop mainly for use of photoshop/illustrator (which I was able to get cs2 of while at college, and do not plan on upgrading), that and I always wanted to try a tablet screen o_o
 
Most major sites like Dell and HP allow you to customize your laptop. Yes you have to choose the 'generic' model, but once you choose that you can customize the CPU speed, RAM, screen, DVD drive speed, etc.
 
So what you guys think about the laptop that i posted in my previous post, like would it fit all my specifications? any problems, advice, critique, suggestions, other you guys may have to offer?

My main wants is a laptop I can take aroudn easy, able to last long purely on battery, mainly for basic stuff such as internet, most demanding application i'd probably use would be photoshop.

So what you guys think?
 
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