Good idea to get the Ultrabay Slim battery for my T42?

[rocketman]

While I'm waiting for my 15" T42 to ship I was going over some of the add ons, the one that intrigues me the most is the Ultrabay Slim Li-Polymer battery. From what I've read it says on some model it increases the battery life up to 8 hours. I'd love that so what I'd like to know from those of you who are using the Ultrabay slim battery is are you happy with it's extended battery performance?

[lfeagan]

Yes, I have been very happy with its performance. It has a capacity equivalent to a 3-cell battery, about 25Wh. The 6-cell normal pack is about 50Wh and the 9-cell extended pack is about 75Wh.

Why I personally like it is that it keeps me on the go for a lot longer and without carrying a 2nd battery around. From how it sounds to me, many people seem to carry a whole case and will likely suggest you just carry a 2nd battery around and swap them out. But for me I really just like carrying a sleeve case with the notebook in it and nothing else. I don't like plugging into the wall and things like that as I tend to be moving around a lot between my lab room, the department shop, my office, and other places while looking up webpages of parts, listening to music, checking email, replying back to students, and other things.

If you have the money and you are someone who really is on the go walking around all the time, the Uslim bay battery is really a nice thing to get. With your 15" screen, you will be sucking a lot more battery than I do on my 14.1" screen and it will make it so you don't have to carry around a 2nd battery. Also, I never use the CD-ROM drive, not even for software installs as I have almost all my CDs stored on a large RAID5 array, so for me the CD-ROM is just dead weight that I never use. However, if you use a CD-ROM very much beyond intstalls this might be a rather annoying thing to swap the two all the time.

[kjarrett]

I picked one up new on eBay for $77 shipped. It's not here yet but neither is my T42!

It is exactly half the capacity of the standard battery, making it a "three cell" design. With the 9 cell battery, you effectively have twice the battery power of a standard T42.

I got it because I wanted to be completely wireless all the time and I don't want to sacrifice screen brightness or system performance. I will charge it overnight regularly. Also, the 15" screen has got to be a major power hog. Fortunately it's also effin' goregous!

-kj-