Battery Life

In my opinion, one of the most important features, if not the most important feature of a laptop is its battery life. You can have the worlds greatest laptop, but if the battery can’t last more than an hour, you may as well have a desktop because an hour of portability is nearly useless.

Laptops are slowly, for the most part, getting better when it comes to battery life, as new notebooks are being announced with five and six hour batteries or longer.

Fuel cell technology continues to push forward and promises longer lasting laptops. The dream of being able to go to a Starbucks and spend a whole business day unplugged is getting closer and closer to reality.

When I worked for a computer store, people would ask me which laptop was best for gaming, and I would cringe. Laptops that are made for gaming are not traditionally great as a portable machine. High end graphics cards and giant amounts of hard drive space and ram quickly gets heavy and hot, which means fans, and fast power draining. Also, putting high end parts is very expensive. You’d think working on commission I would be jumping on selling a gaming laptop, and while I did want to make money, the primary concern of someone hoping to travel with their laptop should be battery life.

So if you are going to get a laptop, ask them how long the battery lasts, or do some research before hand because with some machines, you might only have two hours to play your game, movie, or type a document before your machine needs a cord running to the wall.

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