| If you frequently find yourself on flights from New York to Singapore, you might want to consider a laptop in the ultra long battery life category. This type of laptop offers the absolute best that money can buy when it comes to long battery life. However, be forewarned that long battery life comes at a price. Processor speeds will be slower, to conserve power (even slower than a value-priced laptop), and you will pay a premium to get longer battery running time. Sorry, but there is no option today that combines high CPU performance and long battery life. Here are the characteristics you should look for when buying an ultra long battery life laptop: Processor Intel Pentium M Low Voltage (LV) or Ultra Low Voltage (ULV). As already mentioned, the Intel Pentium M LV and ULV processor run slower to conserve battery life. The top speed for this type of processor is 1.5GHz for LV and 1.2GHz for ULV. These speeds are still fast enough to get most work done, so if you need a long battery life laptop, you are not giving up that much when it comes to performance for most tasks. If you need to be absolutely certain, check with the laptop manufacturer or retailer to see whether they will accept a return if the laptop doesn't meet the performance requirements of your type of work. Chipset Mobile Intel 915 Express family (915GM, 915GMS, or 915PM). Memory 512MB DDR or DDR2 SDRAM. Wireless Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG internal wireless card (802.11a/b/g). Internal hard disk 40GB or larger. Optical disk DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive (burns CDs, plays DVDs). Battery High capacity, or room for a second battery in the laptop body. As mentioned earlier, if the manufacturer offers a high-capacity battery be sure to get one. After all, long battery life is the point here. In addition, with some ultra long battery life laptops you can remove the optical drive and put a second battery in the drive bay. This is very desirable because you get the benefit of double the battery life without having to shut down your laptop to change batteries in the middle of your working session. Operating system Windows XP Professional. Productivity suite Microsoft Office Professional (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Outlook).
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