I am contemplating buying the M200 and was interested in what kind of battery life you are experiencing? I realize that using a DVD player will use up a lot of the battery so mainly I'm wondering what kind of battery life are you getting just with normal use w/o the optical drive but including wireless networking/bluetooth?

Also, have you noticed that the battery is degrading or you are still getting maximum recharge from it.

For traveling I thought about using DVD Shrink to copy a couple of movies onto the hard drive that would allow me not to have to tote the DVD player as well. I assume that the spinning hard drive will use much of the battery but I think it would use less than an external DVD drive would.

thanks!

I am on AC most of the time, and use a Chill mat. But when I go to batterry I easily have 3.5 hours to use the M200. I could probably go longer but I generally don't need to run it a battery longer (that's longer than most DVD's). As to loss of power due to recharging, I haven't seen that yet and I've owned my M200 for about 7 months and there has been no noticable drop off. But I've not tested it. I think heat and age are the enemies of batteries, I usually replace a laptop (any device) battery every two years or so and it eliminates any/most battery issues. Hope this helps. Welcome (almost) to the Toshiba Tablet community. I think if you buy the Toshiba you won't be disappointed. Of course I may be biased ;) .

p.s. There are true tablets (slates) with longer battery life. See the hardware FAQ/spreadsheet.

Linuxmon

You have a choice of using Windows power management or Toshiba's control panel power management.

I've been keeping the Toshiba setting on normal battery so I can have a decent screen brightness, CPU power, and still get 3 hours or longer of battery life. I could turn it down further and get even more time, and have the choice about what to compromise (turn display off after one minute, for instance).

One of the options in the Toshiba panel is for presentation mode, so the display doesn't turn off at an inopportune time and you still have enough power to get through the presentation. Very handy.

Right now I'm on running in Normal, on battery and have 33% remaining, which will give me about another hour and twenty minutes.

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