Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with batterylife

Looking for the best value AA battery available (or "Let's Have Some Truth in Battery Advertising")

zaebiz — Sun, 13 May 2007 00:08:56 -0800

So Energizer or Duracell? Or some other brand? I'm confused. Apparently they are both 5 times more powerful than the other. I'm looking for the best value-for-money AA battery on the market (i.e. battery hours per dollar). I understand it depends to some extent on the device. Let's say two devices - the TV remote control - and a digital camerra. Anyone have a link to the definitive report? (Oh and I heard of an excellent report on Which.co.uk but cannot purchase it because my credit card doesn't have a UK address. Anyone want to buy it and have me reimburse them by PayPal, and get to use the whole site for nothing for a few days?)

How much exactly will using my laptop on AC destroy my battery?

qvantamon — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:20:23 -0800

How much exactly will using my laptop on AC destroy my battery? From what I've read, when the laptop is in AC with the battery inside, every now and then the battery gets below a certain threshold, and the computer tops off the battery (trickle charging). This "burns" a charge cycle, reducing battery life.

My question is: what's that threshold? and exactly how much time is this now and then? is it like once every five minutes, once every hour or once every day? And how is the effect in battery life compared to full cycles?

Justification: I use my laptop mostly at home, when I have AC always available. Right now I use it some 2 or 3 times a day, 2-3 hours each time. I really don't want to take the battery off, so, my decision is between plugging it on the wall whenever I'll use it, or alternating using it discharging the battery (until 10%) then charging again on AC (until 100%). I assume leaving it always plugged is not an option (I don't need it to be on when I'm not using it).

By the way, is there a problem if I leave the charger always plugged on the wall, even when it's not plugged on the computer?

If it matters, it's a HP Pavilion dv2000t. It was bought last month, so I think it should have all mainstream battery preservation technologies.

Squeezing more juice out of my laptop

altolinguistic — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:47:13 -0800

How can I optimise my laptop's battery life? Are the things I'm doing helpful? I have an old and creaky, but fully functional, Sony Vaio laptop. Its main drawback (apart from the fact that it's trying to run Win XP Professional with 256MB RAM) is its battery life - I seem to be very lucky to get an hour out of it, and that's with a new battery. I have been disabling drives and ports I do not use (DVD, floppy, parallel port, mouse port, infrared) and not using the PCMCIA wireless card I bought unless I am plugged in to AC power. I work on files contained on a USB thumbdrive and have taken to copying them to the laptop hard drive and working on them from there, on the assumption that using a USB device uses battery juice.

I use it as a 'satellite' machine for work (main machine is in my home office) and sometimes (on trains etc) would like more autonomy than I can get at the moment. Are the things that I'm doing helpful? Is there anything else I can do?

Cell phone battery life

Sinner — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 22:33:33 -0800

I've got batteries on the brain today (slightly-earlier post about aftermarket laptop batteries), but this thread and my growing frustration with my increasingly-relied-upon cell phone brought to mind another question: how much battery life does your cell phone really get? No matter where I am, how much I use it, or even if it's on or off, my Samsung SPH-N400 gets 24-36 hours per charge, at best, compared to the advertised "Talk Time: Up to 2.9 Hours, Stand-by Time: Up to 7 Days." (more inside...)