If I had a rupee for every person who has ever asked me for laptop advice—that had all the latest shiny features with great battery life—I wouldn’t need to be sitting here writing this article. I would be probably in Goa in a shack sipping a margarita. Dreams aside, the fact is while laptops have increasingly gotten powerful over the years, it is ornoical that battery life has just not kept up.

Most of us today either buy laptops on a budget or because of the "I-SEE-IT-I-WANT-IT" spur of the moment purchase. Very few of us actually go looking for a laptop based on its battery life and little else. Even if battery life is at the back of our minds when setting out to make a purchase, the bewildering variety of chips and combinations and the mind-boggling terminology makes the search akin to hunting for a needle in the haystack. Manufacturers love to bury us with acronyms and promised power savings that actually really add up to nothing, while snazzy advertisements and glib campaigns confuse us no end. So if you're looking out for a high performance laptop with a long battery life we makie your life simpler by rounding up the top 4 laptops with extensive battery life and cutting edge features.

Asus—better known for its motherboards—has over the last few years ramped up their laptop range. With the advent of the dual-core era Asus has introduced some great laptops that have long battery life without compromising on features. The Asus U5F is built on this philosophy and comes fully equipped with a 2GHz Core Duo processor and around 1.5GB of DDR2 system memory. Storage space in this ultra-portable is serviced by a 100 GB HDD that is quite huge for a laptop in this range. The range of goodies doesn’t end at that. Bluetooth, an 8 in 1 card reader and a carry case are offered as options that at not much extra cost. The screen on this laptop is a 12.1 inch LCD panel capable of outputting a modest resolution of 1024x768 which helps in increasing battery life due to its lower power requirements.

Where this laptop really shines is in its battery life. A standard 6 cell battery is easily able to give around 315 mins (5 hours 15 mins) of battery life which is outstanding. If you want more battery life you will need to add an extra 3 cell battery that will add around 2 to 2 ½ hrs more of battery life for a total of over 7 hours on a single charge. This is also where the smaller screen helps out. Its modest resolution is not so power hungry and allows the laptop to post some of the best battery life figures you will come across in any category. With a carry away price of Rs 79,000 this laptop is not cheap but throw in its dual-core processors, its huge storage space and most importantly its excellent battery life, it sure is a keeper.