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Battery Boosters

Sick of running out of juice at the worst possible moment? Here's how to squeeze every last drop out of your gadgets' batteries and charge them up quickly and conveniently.

Christopher Null

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Juice Up Your Laptop

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Photograph: Rick Rizner
If you need 5, 8, or even 12 hours of computing time untethered to an electrical outlet, invest in a slim battery slice that rides beneath your notebook and greatly extends your laptop's running time.

These notebook battery extenders contain anywhere from 80 watt-hours to 300 watt-hours of additional juice, courtesy of lithium ion or lithium polymer cells. Depending on how much power your machine consumes, adding a battery slice to your notebook's internal battery could give you 3 to 10 hours of extra running time without a recharge. The slab plugs into your laptop's power port.

We tested Valence's $250 N-Charge VNC-130 and Hi-Capacity's $170 PowerPlus 60. The N-Charge weighs 3 pounds and provides 120 to 130 watt-hours of power. On a Dell Inspiron 710m, that translated into an extra 5 hours, 49 minutes of running time; and on an ultralight model, the Sharp PC-M4000, we got an extension of 9 hours, 8 minutes. The PowerPlus 60 weighs 1.2 pounds and provides 60 watt-hours of juice. In our tests, it powered the Dell laptop for an extra 2 hours, 40 minutes, and the Sharp model for an additional 4 hours, 33 minutes. The battery you select should depend on the running time you need and the extra weight you can carry.

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