Impact of upgrades on battery life

[iwinulose]

Hey all,

I'm looking at getting a new laptop. Having last bought a beastly laptop, I'm definitely looking to scale down, but at the same time I hate not being able to do anything besides browse whilst on the go. I've found the Dell m1330, which seems to fit my needs nicely, but as I'm in the process of tricking it out I'm wondering what i'm doing to my battery life.

The computer defaults w/ a 2.0 ghz c2d w/ 2mb cache. Since c2d's scale, would battery life be signifigantly impacted if i bumped that to a 2.4 or 2.6? Same w/ the bump from 3gb to 4 gb ram.

Thanks in advance

[thefultonhow]

The faster C2Ds throtle down to the same speed as the slower ones when on battery anyway (800 MHz, I think, and the second core is disabled). The RAM shouldn't have a huge effect on battery life, although 3 GB should be plenty at this point.

[iwinulose]

thanks tfh.

The reason I'm thinking about bumping the ram is that since the thing comes pre-installed with windows "ram hog" vista, and upgrading is cheaper than buying another OEM xp version...something i might end up doing anyway depending on how well sp1 deals w/ vista's shortcomings

[thefultonhow]

So most Dells are available either with XP or Vista. I haven't checked the M1330, but I don't see why it would be any different.

EDIT: Looks like the XPS models only come with Vista. 3GB should still be plenty for Vista though.

[glc]

If you are looking for a lightweight small screen Dell laptop with XP, you can get the Latitude D430 from the small business side of the house - and there are others with a 14 inch screen if that's not too big.