Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist
of the Apple Laptop Battery First post by: www.itsbattery.com
They're off by maybe 10%, where battery claims may be off by 50%. The standard battery for my laptop is rated for 2.5 hrs. It lasted about 70 minutes when the battery was new and I was doing nothing but word processing.
As for EPA ratings, I have pretty conservative driving habits (brake and accelerate gradually, don't speed, shift early to avoid revving up to high RPMs, etc), and I almost always exceed the EPA rating for my vehicle. Now, it may be partly because I drive a 5-speed. Every automatic I have owned has performed at about 10% short of the EPA rating. Still, actual fuel economy depends a LOT on driving habits.
Has anyone ever actually bought a laptop where the battery length claims were anything close to what you actually got? I know I haven't. I tend to read online reviews from various testers to get a better sense of how long a battery can really last, but apparently some are so annoyed by the bogus claims from PC makers that they've filed a class action lawsuit. I'm all for things that would encourage computer makers to be more honest, though these sorts of class action lawsuits always seem a little silly. Are people really significantly "harmed" if the battery life doesn't live up to expectations? These cases usually seem more like opportunities for a few lawyers to get a bunch of money out of companies. The real issue should be that the FTC should have investigated the false claims from laptop makers.
"But what bothers me is that - to seem honest - they actually ship you this stuff configured the way they tested it, NOT the way most customers would prefer it. Have you ever bought a mobile phone, and while you're playing with your new phone, the screen goes dark every 10 seconds? First thing you have to configure is a reasonable backlight setting.
And for laptops, make sure you adjust the processor speed when on battery power such as Apple A1175 Battery, Apple A1185 Battery, Apple M9324 Battery, Apple M8403 Battery, Apple M7318 Battery, apple PowerBook G3 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 Battery, Apple PowerBook G4 15 inch Battery, Apple A1012 Battery, Apple M8511 Battery, Apple M8244 Battery, Apple A1079 Battery. The default is a low-power processor speed, which is not the reason we buy powerful PCs!"
I dunno...the default settings aren't scaled back _enough_ for me. First thing I did was lower the screen brightness all the way (and wish it went lower) and change the energy saving setting from scaling both cores to 800MHz to scaling one core to 600MHz and shutting the other down entirely.
If you're the kind of person that wakes up half the passengers on a plane/train/bus with your ultra-bright laptop screen while playing WoW on your cell network card, then yea, you're gonna have poor battery life. Duh. But I've found that the manufacturers tend to do a pretty good job at estimating battery life with reasonable usage. People just aren't reasonable. They want it at full brightness even if they're in a pitch-black room.
Oh, and if you want power, don't buy a laptop! No matter what you get, it's primary purpose is to be _portable_, not _powerful_. I did not buy a powerful laptop because I always need that much power. It's nice sometimes, but usually I would be fine with this old 667MHz Celeron box I've got sitting here. Most of the time I'm not plugged in I'm either reading websites or writing websites. If it can run notepad and firefox, I'm good. I bought my laptop because it was portable. That's _the only_ reason I have a laptop.
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