laptop battery

I have a compaq v2030us. It is small, compact, VERY bright, and fast... only thing is even with the screen on lowest brightness the battery meter shows 89% and 2.5 hours... compaq says that it gets at most 3 hours but i cant understand why other, even bigger notebooks (like gateways) get 5+ hours... i would buy an extended battery but they are enormous! are they any generic extended batteries that will NOT harm my computer

A battery's a battery. Generic ones, if you can find them, should be fine. Typically, though, they hold less than your regular battery(weither it be the extended or regular)



As for overall time, my Avertec lasts about 2 to 3 hours on battery. Something that really helped mine is I underclocked it. Of course you have to have a processor that allows this.