Battery life Dell C640

[msterzer]

I picked up this Dell Latitude C640 for next to nothing. I plan on giving it to my soon to be 13 year old Grandson. It works great except that I want the battery life to be up to as good as possible. As a test I fully charged it, unplugged the charger and played a DVD. It lasted a whole 12 minutes before I got a warning that the battery was low. It seems to me that one should last a lot longer but I've never owned or used a lappy. I know that you wouldn't normally play a DVD without the charger plugged in I presume. I just wanted to test the battery. Can anyone add their experiances to this? If you bought a battery where and what would you look for? Thanks for any help.

[msterzer]

Lets try this one more time. Surely someone has experiance with this or are you all keeping it a secret from me?

[_Switch_]

Depends on how old the laptop is, usually the older it is the more the battery diminishes therefore giving you bad battery time.

Either that or the battery is going wonky on you, or it just never had great battery life in the first place.

Try doing a test of it just running doing normal things, playing a DVD eats up a lot more because it has to spin up the DVD drive.

[msterzer]

I would just go get a new battery if they wern't so gross in price. I just want to be sure this is normal or not. Has anyone run a movie on the battery only? How long will it run? Thats all I want to know.

[_Switch_]

You could always get one from ebay. http://cgi.ebay.ca/NEW-BATTERY-FOR-D...QQcmdZViewItem
That's what my dad did for his acer, bought one that was a higher capacity (I think he went from 3000-4500mah, and it have him an extra hour and a bit.

Well worth 50 bucks if you really want it.

[msterzer]

Excellent find. Thanks Switch. The best I've come up with was $65.

[carl33p]

Depending on how old the laptop is, that doesnt surprise me. Playing a DVD proly drains it 2x as quickly as surfing the web.
Ive heard quite a few people with similiar complaints.

Notebook batteries seem to die a lot quicker than one would expect. I know people who have this problem after ONLY a year.

[sr71000]

my laptop is bout 2 years old and i've had two batteries (at the same time for double the battery life) and both still hold a good 3 hour charge. They're both about 40 mins shorter than brand new though!

[Keymaker]

I have a 9 cell in this Inspiron 6000 and it will last 3 hours. Never played a DVD with the battery yet. I am sure it would last all the way through the movie as did my Inspiron 8100 did.