Power Woes: It Shouldn't Be This Difficult

Tag: Switching Power Adaptor

All our gizmos and gadgets need power, and for the most part I only get grumpy about power issues when it's time to go away on a business or personal trip. This time, it was our two-week vacation in Japan, and I was extra grumpy about power. Why you might ask? I called Air Canada two weeks before our trip and was informed that the plane we were flying on had no power plugs for laptops in economy class - it seems like every long-haul plane in the world has power except for Air Canada's.

Normally that wouldn't have bothered me because I've been rather fortunate when it comes to laptop power: for nearly two years I used a Fujitsu P7010 laptop, one that I could remove the DVD drive on and insert a second battery to get a solid 10 hours of power. To get even more juice on the go, I tried out a Valence N-Charge that gave me a huge battery boost - can you imagine 20 hours of laptop battery life? I was living the dream. I also had a Proporta laptop battery that gave me less in terms of extended power, but was much more portable. I was completely covered...until I got a new laptop: the Dell XPS M1330.

The M1330 is an impressive laptop, balancing portability with punch - I got mine last September, decked out with the best Dell had to offer: 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 200 GB 7200 hard drive, 4 GB RAM, and the NVIDIA GPU. It's fast, it chugs through RAW photo files like the bad mother that it is, and I'm generally quite pleased with it - until it runs out of power. Sure, I got it with the biggest battery possible (a 9 cell), and I've gotten used to the "hump", but after about four hours, the laptop is dead. Here's where I get frustrated: the Proporta battery, which I was so enthusiastic about when I had a laptop that worked with it, doesn't work with the Dell. At first I thought it was the lack of an adaptor (the M1330 uses this bizarre six-sided plug), but I eventually found one of the plugs that fit - yet even switching the Proporta battery between both voltage modes, it wouldn't power the XPS M1330. Damn.

I emailed the folks at Proporta and they worked with me to investigate whether or not they could get their product to work with the XPS M1330 - even going to far as having me order an AC power adaptor for the M1330 and sending it to them in the UK for research. In the end, after several months of back and forth emails, I was told that it was highly unlikely they could get their product to work with the XPS M1330. During that same time period, I emailed the people at Valence, asking them if they had any plans to make an XPS M1330 adaptor for their N-Charge unit. They replied back that they had no plans to support the M1330.

Isn't it ridiculous that I have two external batteries, around $500 in total value, and neither one of them can be used with my new laptop? That's just mind-boggling to me. Sure, I know and understand the reasons why these companies can't keep up with every new laptop on the market, but their products are certainly much less useful than they should be because of this. The laptop manufacturers themselves bear most of the blame here though - if all Dell laptops had the same power connector, it would be much easier for these third-party batteries to support every laptop out there (within certain voltage requirements, of course). The lack of standardization, even amongst the same company, is at the root of this problem.