Digital Home Thoughts: Valance N-Charge VNC130 External Laptop Battery Reviewed

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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Valance N-Charge VNC130 External Laptop Battery Reviewed

Posted by Jason Dunn in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM


So How Does It Really Work?
I'm a big believer in real-world testing, so I took this product with me on my trip for Mobius Thailand 2006. I carried the battery in my laptop shoulder bag (a RoadWired Skooba Seventeen+), so I felt the heft of carrying a four pound laptop and a three pound battery – along with at least eight more pounds of books, cables, and gadgets – a total of nearly 50 hours both ways travel time and layovers. Do I wish the N-Charge was lighter? Sure. Would I leave it behind on my next trip? Not on your life – it worked superbly. On the full day of the Mobius conference, I booted up my Fujitsu P7010D at 9 am and connected it to the N-Charge. Screen brightness was set to 50% (quite bright for the room), WiFi was turned on and connected to an access point, and off I went. I wasn't compromising with my work style that day – I treated the laptop exactly as I would if it were connected to AC power. I used it aggressively, including using the memory card reader pulling images off a CompactFlash card. The laptop was configured to never go into standby, and only turn off the monitor and hard drives after 30 minutes without use (which never actually happened given the schedule).

At the end of the conference day (5:47 PM) nearly nine hours later, the laptop was still running off the N-Charge – it hadn't even touched the internal batteries! I was extremely impressed by this result, because it means I could probably have gotten another 90 to 120 minutes out of the N-Charge before needing to rely on the laptop batteries, which would dish up another 8 or 9 hours given the settings I had. Do the math: that's about 20 hours total for my laptop with this battery, and that's real active use, not turning the brightness down so low it's hard to read (which is what most conference-goers do when lacking AC power).


Figure 1: The N-Charge was a perfect companion for my small laptop on an airplane - plenty of space for everything to fit, and massive battery life.

On the way home from Thailand I watched three movies (about 7 hours in total) ripped to the hard drive, at 30% screen brightness, and the N-Charge still had two bars of power left. It's the best three pounds I ever carried on a trip. I seem to have the unfortunate luck of never getting airplane seats with power, so running out of power on long trips is a common problem for me. Now that I have the Valence N-Charge, it's much less of an issue.

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