NP8130 battery life suitable for college ?

Hi guys

I'm contemplating purchasing a Sager NP8130 stock when I go to college later this year.

I've got no clue about college life, and I wanna know if the 3.5 hours it runs on battery is suitable for college use.

If that helps, I'll be going for Computer Science or Electronics Engineering as my bachelors.

The other option is Dell XPS 15, its 540M will provide me an extra hour or two on battery, I guess. But since I'm gonna be using this lappy for four years, I fear that a mid-range card like 540M will be redundant by that time. (Price difference is not a concern, since I'm in India, and XPS 15 is expensive in India, and NP8130 will have to be imported, so they end up costing the same.)

Any advice ? Thanks a lot.

 

I'd really appreciate a reply here. Thanks.

TL : DR - Do you think that the 3 hour battery life of a Sager NP8130 will suffice for a college going computer science student, as opposed to 5-6 hours of XPS 15 ?

 

Yes unless your lectures are longer than 3 hours, and as a comp sci student the extra power doesn't hurt however your first few years your basically writing hello world so you won't need to worry about multi core multi threaded coding...

 

The 460M graphics are more of an insurance for me so that it will not be redundant trash 3-4 years from now. Even 540M will do, I guess, for now, as I'll be using the 15.6" screen for gaming, and I think 800x600 or 1024x768 will suffice for that size.

And I'm still not very sure. A lecture is 45 minutes, I think, but we have many lectures in a day. I don't want ', I gotta get to an outlet soon.' to be on the top of my mind. I'll be more than willing to go for a 540M if there's a good chance this will happen.

 

Generally, if battery life is going to be a huge concern I would recommend getting a secondary battery. With these performance machines, the battery life isn't usually long. That's the unfortunate trade off.

 

to be honest, as a student, you never really should travel without your power supply. You're going to be on your computer a lot, and generally you will be in multi-hour segments of time. I think overall, weight is the issue more than finding a power outlet/space as there will always be a power outlet at most schools. Additionally, weight only becomes an issue when you have to walk a lot and carry a lot of things with you, such as when I was going to school in new york. Laptop weight became an issue in that limited situation. Otherwise, you just throw everything in your car and move it from class to class.

 

I'm also going into electrical engineering next year, but I don't think you'll need your laptop that much in class unless you're gonna be programming all the time. Unless you're 100% sure you're gonna do computer science then I think you should get a laptop with better battery life. Well, I'm doing electrical engineering so I will have to write a lot of symbols and stuff and doing that on your laptop is more of a hassle, so I probably won't bring my laptop to classes unless there's programming that day...so...unless you're sure that you're definitely gonna do CS, I'd suggest you to get the sager np8130.

 

Yeah, I'm EE and you definitely don't need to lug your laptop around for all the math/science stuff you'll be taking early on, or even the EE classes you'll be taking later. The trusty ole paper and pencil will do fine (unless you have fast fingers to type equations/greek).

 

Actually you are going to use your pc most of the time, Im a SC major and I vouch that even on supposedly theoretical classes you are going to face some programming time.

 

I walk with my 8150 probably 2 miles a day and its not THAT bad... I always need it though because I go to law school at night. (You use laptop a lot more for liberal arts classes than sciences I find, I almost never used one for any of my science classes as a biochem major.)

As for power outlets, at least at my school every seat has one.