How can I improve Battery Life in a P100-SD3 or A100-SK8...anything bad with these 2?

I am really considering the Satelitte P100-SD3 (2h 17m) or the A100-SK8 (3 h 27 m). The final choice will come down to how much life I can suck out of the battery. I have not yet purchased the laptop. So I don't know yet what features I can turn or not. I plan on getting the Targus Chill Pad. But I don't know if I need to run that the whole time the computer is on, or just intermittently. When I am on battery power I would be either doing: Word Processing, using microsoft word, or wordpad and then copying to word (if there is any battery life saving), playing either Poppit to go, Wordjong to go... some disk access required, as I don't know how to copy the disk directly to the hard drive so I don't have to use the disk all the time. Watching a DVD, doing an excell spreadsheet, or working with emails, offline... as there is no bluetooth available and I don't know how that works anyways. I need to with a second battery (I would by the 8-cell), need to get as close to 8 hours of time if not 10 hours, between the two. I hope to get a third battery down the road, but not immediatly... so even if I had 6 to 7 hours I could cope with that in the short term. If you can help me with some suggestions with tweaks I can do I will make note of them in my files so I can do them when I get the computer in the next week or so. I have to have the computer up and running by August 1st.

Also, does anyone know where in the Lower Mainland, of British Columbia, purchasing either of these, but preferrably the p100 model could be done.

Thanks.

CJM.

 

I think 8-10 is optimistic even with two batteries. The screen is the biggest juice sucker on a notebook.

 

I cant see that being the case.... When i turn the screen off on my notebooks and close the lid so the LCD turns off and not just the back light it shows in NHC that I only gain about 5watts by turning it off. The CPU uses more than that, and GFX doesnt help...


insane