Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Laptops and Battery Life

I'm considering requesting the purchase of some laptops for our staff. It will be easier than finishing the wireing of our exam rooms.

Do any of you have any suggestions for laptops? I know there are some Tablets that have 10 hr. battery life, they would be costly but I may be able to work around that.

I'm not tied to the idea of the tablet though. I'm not even interested in it, just the ability to run the computer from the days beginning to end.

I saw this so I'm optimistic.
http://www.emrupdate.com/forums/t/15724.aspx

Long battery life is the holy grail of all portable computer usage. Tablets tend to be better at it since they are designed for mobility and good battery life and usually at a cheaper price then the "ultra" mobile crowd. (Of course there are plenty of exceptions). The solution that I will use is multiple batteries that I just swap out. The thinkpad line has a recharger for the battery itself that can plug into the battery and recharge it without the computer (I am still waiting to get mine). Good discipline with multiple batteries is your best bet for long term mobility.

10 hour batteries are probably a stretch and are dependent on so many different factors that you could never know your actual limits. For example bluetooth wireless or ethernet wireless can certainly kill battery life along with bright screens and fast processors (or processors not optimized for battery life). The best advice would be to select a mobile processor from intel (AMD just sucks too much power), lots of memory to reduce hard drive access and integrated graphics are the focus of the hardware. You can get a solid state hard drive but those are pretty expensive for the benefit. From the user stand point dimming the screen and quick auto turning off the screen help a lot. Throttling the processor down (slowing it down) helps but extract too much of a performance hit, especially in Vista.

One good performance metric when looking at online reviews is can the portable play a DVD movie from start to finish. If not then the battery life is not very good.

During my training I worked at a clinic where they deployed an HP solution in which the computer batteries could be placed in a well that would store and recharge several batteries at a time. I am not sure if HP still makes this, you probably have to talk with an HP rep. This was a very effective solution for the multiple portable users, they always had a spare battery. You lost a minute switching out but that was not a big deal, just plug the unit in the AC and then switch the battery. I would certainly look into this if you are trying to keep multiple people mobile in a single location (like a clinic). Obviously the road warrior would just need a spare battery.

You can spend a lot of time and money looking for the ultimate battery solution but you will probably be disappointed. Just get a couple of spares and discipline yourself to keep then charged (which can be challenge to do, I know).

I use a desktop touchscreen computer (HP) in one room and tablet laptop (Toshiba)in the other (although I don't use the pen function that much on the tablet). Both connect wirelessly to the server. When I switch rooms I plug my laptop in on my desk and it charges for 15-25 mins while I'm in the other room. (My office is right across the hall from my exam rooms so the walk is short) As long as I start the day with a charge > 60% I get through the whole day on the laptop. Many times I end the day with almost a full charge. (I lock the laptop at night so it doesn't get the opportunity to charge overnight). Consider buying an extra AC adapter (and small surge protector) and plugging in while in the exam room. (By the way, my battery life is 3-4 hours when doing clinic work and using AC.)

We just have an extra charger in the main examroom. If you bought multiples of the same model and their related chargers this could work. But as of right now we leave the laptop in the examroom and the MA and our Doc just sign in and out as they come and go. So out doc has a charger at her desk and in the examroom. Now the screen is nice and bright, no performance issues, small footprint on counter and good machine.

We bought two convertable tablets with the idea of using the tablet feature a lot because with our first mistake EMR she was using it quite a bit. But she has not really used the tablet features at all with AC and it seems that it just isn't needed. I have heard many other users here say the same thing... I'd say just get a good strong laptop with the features you want. Don't forget screen size, because you will be looking at this all day five days a week and that makes a big difference in the long run.

Do you secure the laptop? My fear is someone walking off with it. I lost a fingertip pulseox that way (the patient I suspected soon sent a change of doctor request). I know a laptop is much bigger, but it can be easily concealed in a backpack by a patient left waiting in a room just a little too long and leaving before being seen.

Also, you could get almost 2 nice laptops for the price of one tablet. The only difference is you may have to pay extra to upgrade the operating system as the Windows XP Tablet is basically XP Pro. (I have no idea what Vista OS is used on Tablets).

J:

What I would do if I were to leave a laptop in a patient room is to purchase one of the many "off lease" laptops from ebay. I am partial to Dell, since they overall are tough as nails. I've purchased 9 C640's/C840's in the past 8 years and most are still working, although worn out by me through daily usage. The C840's for example, have a 15" screen and always come with Win XP Pro, and occasionally with MS Office 2000/2002 or 2003... and nowadays go for about $250 to $500 depending on the configuration (I like 2GB ram and 2 120GB HD for ghosting, so $500 is usually my cost after upgrading). URL: http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=m38&_nkw=dell+c840&_sacat=See-All-Categories . These usually are heavy, clunky, and difficult to walk away with, but you can purchase a laptop lock for about $7 on eBay- used Dell laptop listing .

I just purchased another Dell laptop, but this time a dual-core 17" 1720 for $700. It was used, but in excellent condition, and it came with all the bells and whistles... Dell 1720 laptop . Now, that is the top-of-the-line Inspiron model, but if you wish to buy it I suggest going through the Dell warehouse that is having a sale- my laptop could now be purchased "refurbished" (i.e. not new, not used, but fixed or returned, so almost new) for about what I paid for mine, and possibly less: http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/inspnnb?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

Tablet PCs? The Motion tablets are going for cheap if you don't mind a slightly slower model. Check this one out for less than $400 (including shipping)- eBay motion tablet .

The reason that I would go with the dual core systems is for speech recognition... I hear that DNS flies with the dual core CPU (it does pretty well with a P4 3GHz, but I want even better performance!).

Thank you all.

I've decided to take your advice and look for multiple chargers and expect careful use instead of trying to get the entire day out of one battery.