I'm flying to Buchen,Germany this month and I want to take my laptop, which I have not done on Intl flights in the past,,,

Question,, do I have to use battery only on the International flight, or can I recharge my battery on the flight if I watch some DVD's ?

Does the plane you're taking have outlets at the seats? If it does, you may need an adapter. Otherwise, I would think all you can use is your battery / extended battery supply.

I will call them and see what they say.

Bogus had an external extra battery back-up type thing that he used for cross-country flights. I'll ask him to reply in here.

When I flew to Hawaii, both planes had outlets in the armrests. None of the other regional flights in recent memory have though.

I figured that was standard for the overseas flights?

It depends on the air line and if you are stuck in economy or business class.

I had this thing called an Electrovaya.

http://www.electrovaya.com/powerpad/master/Default.aspx

My only caveat - the plug failed on the battery. The chuckleheads at their service dept tried to tell me I bought it in 2002, whereas I had bought it in 2003! I suspect I got yanked by a vendor on Yahoo shopping who sold me used as new. Either way, they pissed me off. To top it off, they wanted $150 to fix a $200 item. Huh?

The upside, my laptop would last FOREVER on the one I had. It was the entry level unit, too. It would last for every bit of 5 hours on the powerpad.

My last laptop was a Compaq, and when the powerpad broke, I went ahead and bought a 2nd Compaq battery... it was seriously stronger than the OEM (4400 mah v. 6600 mah!!!!). That 2nd battery would get you across country with little issue.

Final thought, IIRC, airplane power jacks are a wacky 24v power source. So you will need an adaptor.

my lap top only gets 1hour and 30 mins off a full charge because i have everything overclocked and high performance. i have to turn every thing down if i dont have a plug

Thanks guys, its been 3-4 years since I flew overseas,

I ordered a new Thinkpad laptop 3 weeks ago and figured I would take it along, I use a Blackberry but since I will be gone for 1 week and I figured the Thinkpad could keep me company.

The upside is that I stripped my Toshiba Satellite down to the bare necessities so I can now use it exclusively for tuning the Vette.

For most flights to Europe the major airlines are using the Airbus 330's, which have power outlets in all classes of seat.

Flights to Asia are typically still on the old 747's, and they have nothing in coach.

I have three extra laptop batteries I bring for the 15 hour flight to Japan...

Suggestion - put whatever it is you want to watch into a .wmv or .avi file and store it on your hard drive. It takes much less juice to run the hard drive than to physically spin a DVD in your DVD drive. Batteries last longer.

Good idea, Danke schön!

yea, well... there is this bug-a-boo with DVD copywrites... annoying... won't let me copy my DVD to a hard disk.