If your notebook battery puttersout after a mere hour and a half, we have great news for you. Notebook manufacturers face a constant conundrum when it comes to balancing performance and power because as components such as processors and video chips increase in speed, battery life inevitably drops. But thanks to recent efforts by such companies as Matsushita, Intel, and others, we can soon expect to use notebooks with batteries that stay powered long after current notebooks need recharging.

Matsushita and Intel recently announced plans to develop notebook batteries that can last an entire workday, or eight hours, before needing a recharge. Matsushita already has a notebook on the Japanese market that it claims will deliver up to 12 hours of battery life, though the benchmarks used to measure the runtime include quite a bit of idle time, so it remains to be seen whether the company’s existing battery could actually be used for an entire workday. In the past, Intel discussed plans to revamp notebook platforms by minimizing the power of such components as the CPU, motherboard chip set, hard drive, and others. Assuming that Intel is using a similar approach in its plans with Matsushita, the all-day battery would appear to be a realistic goal in the near future.

Matsushita is using nickel oxide in Li-Ion (lithium-ion) batteries instead of cobalt oxide, which is a change that helps improve the batteries’ energy density. If you don’t want to wait for this newfangled battery technology to appear in notebooks, check out Sharp’s new M4000 WideNote ($1,799; www.sharpsystems.com).

This notebook features a 13.3-inch widescreen display and a high capacity battery that delivers more than six hours of life per charge, which is one of the best battery times available today. Surprisingly, this notebook doesn’t skimp too much on its components to deliver that battery life, as it includes a 1.73GHz Pentium M processor, 512MB of 400MHz RAM, and the aforementioned display that has a 1,200 x 800 native resolution.

The M4000 also features aggressive power management tools that let you tweak the power levels of up to 11 subsystems, including the hard drive, optical drive, WLAN (wireless local-area network), system standby, audio, CPU performance, as well as the LCD (liquid-crystal display) for brightness, backlight, and refresh rate.

CPU manufacturers continue to do a nice job of ramping down the power requirements of their mobile chips, but for components that aren’t so well behaved in the power consumption department, it’s nice to have access to controls that can suspend or disable them when necessary to preserve battery life.