Dell Notebook battery question:

[acsguitar]

also to make the batteries go longer, i usually turn down my brightness down a lot and remove all cd/dvd from the drive.

Like BDF here said, the two biggest drains on power are the screen and spinning a CD/DVD, so turn the brightness down when running on battery power. You can also save batteries by saving your music/movies to the hard drive and running them from there. This is a useful trick for airplane flights, etc.

I got 2 games in of MVP 2006 on my computer before it died on the plane

[BitterDodgerFan]

You can run just with the power adapter and not have the battery in correct?

yes, but not all laptops can do that. some wont run unless battery is there.

if your battery dies quickly, it might not be a bad idea to buy a spare battery. some third-party custom batteries come with higher capacity. however, don't expect to play that many games of MVP on your notebook, as such high-intesive softwares (graphic+cpu+memory intensive in this case) will drain your batteries quick.

[acsguitar]

You can run just with the power adapter and not have the battery in correct?

yes, but not all laptops can do that. some wont run unless battery is there.

if your battery dies quickly, it might not be a bad idea to buy a spare battery. some third-party custom batteries come with higher capacity. however, don't expect to play that many games of MVP on your notebook, as such high-intesive softwares (graphic+cpu+memory intensive in this case) will drain your batteries quick.

yea I considered buying another battery but 2 games on plane is cool with me.

[Coppermine]

A lithium ion battery typically loses about 20% of its capacity per year. Temperature also plays a key in this; it can be almost twice that much lost if the battery is kept in higher temperatures (such as in a hot car in the summer). Additionally, when a lithium battery is used to a "deep discharge," that is depleted to 0% over a period of time, it's capacity will decrease even more; 100 deep discharge cycles results in a loss of about 25% capacity in addition to the typical 20% per year and the loss of capacity due to temperature differences.

Using this information, if it doesn't explain your loss in batter capacity, you may be able to get a replacement from Dell... although I think they're batteries typically only have a one year warranty.

[BitterDodgerFan]

good article on battery from nytimes

article

[Coppermine]

Has yours exploded yet?

[acsguitar]

Has yours exploded yet?

Mine hasn't i looked at it wasn't on their list of explosive death batteries...although i wish it exploded they woulda had to pay me off