You'll never guess which laptop had the longest battery life for 2011.
Dan Ackerman
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
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Which laptops had the longest battery life this year?
Presented here are the top five 2011 laptops for battery life, as measured by our in-house video playback battery drain test. It's easy to guess that Apple makes at least one appearance on this list, but there are some surprises as well. Note that these rankings only include integrated batteries, not secondary add-on slice batteries. If we included those, systems such as Sony's Vaio Z, with a combined 634 minutes between its internal battery and a $150 add-on slice battery together, would make the list.
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No. 5: Apple MacBook Pro Winter/Spring 2011 (2.7GHz Core i7, 13-inch)
With a boost from Intel's Core i-series CPUs and the switch from Nvidia graphics to Intel's built-in HD3000, this version of the popular MacBook Pro ran for 418 minutes. Read the full review here.
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No. 4: Toshiba Portege R835
This popular, reasonably priced 13-inch laptop also managed to deliver awesome battery life, running for 421 minutes. Read the full review here.
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No. 3: Apple MacBook Pro Winter/Spring 2011 (2.2GHz Core i7, 15-inch)
Another appearance by Apple, this time with the larger 15-inch version of the Pro, which ran for 425 minutes. Read the full review here.
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No. 2: Lenovo ThinkPad T420 (2.5GHz Core i5)
Lenovo's ThinkPad business laptop line is known for its excellent quality, superior keyboards, and often, very good battery life. This recent update (which is currently being reviewed) to the very common ThinkPad T20 turned in one of the best battery life scores of the year at 442 minutes.
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No. 1 HP Pavilion dv7-6b55dx
Pulling off something of an upset, the longest-lasting laptop of 2011 is the HP Pavilion dv7. Few large laptops actually take advantage of the bigger footprint of a desktop replacement laptop to pack in a gigantic, powerful battery, but CNET Labs editor and laptops tester Julie Rivera explains that this particular HP configuration, "had a huge 100WHr, nine-cell battery," that ran for a very impressive 513 minutes. Read the full review here.
