Just today, I recieved my new-old-stock Dell Slice Battery for the Dell
Lattitude E6430 that I use. I mentioned this machine in my previous blog post,
and it's been holding up nicely under Fedora. The battery life has been
absolutely impressive, sticking around 7-8 hours on a single charge of the
97 Wh 9-cell battery that I have for it. But with the slice battery?
17-19 hours at idle, so probably around 16-17 with my typical use case on
battery power. That's insane, since it means that it's an "all day" battery.
and given that the slice battery also makes the laptop more ergonomic, I see no
downsides to the $35 I paid for the upgrade.
Of course, when I normally charge my laptop with the docking station I have
for it, I can't charge the slice battery as well. They both use the dock port
on the bottom of the machine, and there's no passthrough. But, the slice
battery itself has a barrel port on it for my second power supply to charge it,
so I'm not losing out on anything there.
I'm *very* happy with this upgrade. I just wish my module bay HDD caddy would
arrive so I can replace the optical drive with my Windows SSD, or a second data
SSD. Not sure which I'll go with yet.
