How to Charge Your Laptop Anywhere With a Portable Charger
Image Credits: Howtogeek
Do you want to have more battery life on the go? You can get a portable battery charger for nearly any kind of laptop whether it has a USB port or not. Portable battery chargers are not just for smartphones alone. Put one inside your bag and you will always have some backup power at all times.
USB-C Chargers (for Laptops That Charge Over USB-C)
Image Credits: Howtogeek
Many recent and modern laptops come out of the box with a USB type-C Power Delivery for charging. This is becoming very common on new PC laptops, too especially ultra thin-and-light models.
If your own laptop can charge through a USB type-C PD, you can plug in a portable batery charger that supports USB-C and charge your laptop from it. But you can’t use just any battery: You will want to use a battery that has enough charging speed (watts) to charge your laptop and with the sufficient capacity (mAh) to fill it up. Smaller portable batteries that are designed for charging smartphones in most cases don’t offer enough of either for a laptop.
A battery that is designed to charge a laptop may be a bit heavier that one for a mobile phone, but it can still fit nicely into a laptop bag or into your backpack.
AC Chargers (for Laptops Without USB-C Charging)
Image Credits: Howtogeek
If you are using a laptop that dosent have a USB type-C charging and let’s be honest, that is the defacto standard for most laptops that people are using these days you will need a portable AC charger.
This is basically what it sounds like. Imagine a large battery that is complete with an AC outlet. You can plug your laptop’s charging cable into it just like you would do with a standard AC power outlet.
We say these would work for “most laptops” because they can only deliver so much amount of 'watt'. They might not be able to charge your device extremely power-hungry gaming laptops.
These chargers are mostly expensive and "heavier-duty" than your regular USB type-C charger. However, they’re also more flexible you can plug almost any kind of device with a standard AC power connection into them. It is basically a power bank that can function for a broad range of devices in a wide variety of use cases.
Wirecutter recommends the Mophie Powerstation AC, which can deliver up to 100 W of power output and is still slim enough to slip into a bag. It would cost you about $200. For a more inexpensive option, Wirecutter also recomended the RAVPower 27000, which offers 700 W of power for $130 but has an “unwieldy charging cord and power brick.”
These are far from the only options, and you will find out many portable laptop chargers and power banks that can offer you with AC power both in online stores and brick-and-mortar electronics stores.
New Batteries (for Laptops With Removable Batteries)
Of course, if your laptop has a user-removable battery these are not too common anymore, but they still exist you can also just get yourself a second battery and swap it in whenever you run out of power.
However, you will have to turn off your laptop to change the battery. Swapping the battery is mostly inconvenient, to do. But it is still worth considering if you have a laptop where the battery is easily swappable, as rare as those are becoming.
