Battery/Power Packs

King Boo Hoo

I just got a MSI Wind (a tiny laptop) and although it's very pretty and runs very well (can run WoW and HL2), it suffers from an insanely small battery (3 cell) that only lasts like 2 hours unplugged. They're coming out with a 6 cell soon, but I have another idea.
I can't seem to find many of these online, maybe because I'm using the wrong term or something, but here's the idea:
MSI Wind is too big to put in a pocket, so it's going into a backpack most likely. Other than the laptop, I have very little else to put in the backpack, so I want to put a huge battery in there. I want to just plug it into the laptop charger, or via USB, or whatever other crazy method there is, and get an incredible amount of extra battery life as a result.
However, although I'm finding the occasional power pack or whatnot, it's clear I'm doing something wrong and haven't hit some motherload central site for this kind of stuff.
-Is there one?
-If not, how are the battery amounts measured? 7400somethingorother? 3cell? 400volt? I really don't know enough about that.
-What kinda prices am I looking at?
-Any good companies?
-Anyone have experience with this?

Size isn't too big of an issue... I want a lot of juice. If I could cut a car battery in half and attach a 3-prong outlet to it, that would be my new power pack, lol.

i n c u b u s

I couldn't find the actual computer for purchase a few days ago let alone the battery. I know this is gonna be off topic but how do you like it? I was pretty close to getting one but just bought a macbook instead.

mrbernz

Depending on how much weight is too much, what about putting a car battery in the backpack and hooking an AC/DC converter to it?

wunderbar

you are thinking about something like this:

link

But honestly, you will carry that around with you for one day, then regret for every second after that that you actually at one time thought it would be a good idea to carry something like that around in a backpack all day.

Just get the 6 cell battery for the Wind.

That_Guy

You might get a smallish uninterpretable power supply (UPS) to carry in your backpack. They would weight much less than a car battery and already have the whole DC to AC thing worked out. Since a mini laptop draws very little power, I would imagine it would last quite a while per charge. When you get somewhere with power you could just plug that bad boy in and charge everything.

Also, it looks like APC sells universal external batteries for notebooks.

BubbaT

Are you looking for something like this?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000SZVMRW

According to the review, it's not designed to run/power a laptop directly, but rather to recharge it.


Or something like this

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VKZR7U

which according to Black & Decker (and one of the reviews) is for running your laptop as if running off a wall outlet.

(not an endorsement of either product, both have mediocre reviews on Amazon)


edit: beat'd

Or you could go crazy and try to mod your battery.

http://forums.msiwind.net/hacks-and-mods/bigger-battery-7400mah-battery-with-hours-life-t1245-120.html

King Boo Hoo

1. I don't have the MSI Wind yet so I can't review it but I'll keep you posted
2. I agree car battery is too big, but I'm looking for something like... 6 hours of battery at highest LCD brightness, overclocked CPU, Wifi enabled, and anything else you can think of to drain battery.
3. The modding thing looks awesome but I'm afraid to void my warranty so early on
4. I don't know if 100 Watts is enough for me or not (hell, from what little I remember of physics, I thought Watts wasn't even a system of measuring how much juice a battery holds but evidently I've forgotten everything)
5. Can someone explain to me the whole 3 cell vs 7400maH vs 100 Watt battery business? In cells, I figure I'm looking for something like... 10 cell battery? I'm told the 3 cell barely clears 2 hours on high performance, so I figure for 6 hours this is what I need.

shotime

Patrick Norton actually just built a portable battery pack on Systm a few weeks ago. Check it out here: http://revision3.com/systm/ppower. He explains what battery sizes to get and where, and he goes through the whole process of building it. You should at least get some good ideas from it.

Essentially what you're looking at is a small(ish) 12V lead-acid battery. Then you connect a car cigarette lighter plug to it. Then just plug in the computer with either a car charger (I'm not sure if these are available for the Wind) or a DC-AC inverter, which you plug your normal wall charger into. Using a 12Ah battery, you should get something like 6-7 hours plus the two from the internal battery.