I went ahead and bought one tonight. It should be here within a week, just in time for me to take it on vacation with me. I may also use it in my 150 from time to time (I use that machine for tutoring).

Hard drive spinning is the key to saving battery life on any computer. I used to spin down the hard drive on my iBook G3 when its battery still worked using the option to do so on the Control Strip. With brightness turned down, I could easily get about five hours per charge, sometimes a little bit more.

I do know the 180c drained batteries more than the other laptops available at the time because of its active matrix color screen. I have an IBM hard drive under the hood, are these decent at not consuming battery life?