New laptop advice.

Yes, I know that AMDs are battery hogs, which is why I'm going for Intel. Admittedly, i7 quad core isn't much better, but with a 12 cell battery, progress is progress. Now I need to see how my student loan money is distributed to see how I can pay for it...

Edit: How are you able to discern the conditions my battery is under based on the information given? There probably are some tweaks I could do to squeeze a few minutes out of it, but those are still a few minutes. I have treated my computer well and the advertised life of the battery was false.

Regarding an hdd change, the computer was only 500 usd. A replacement like that would just be dumb.

And a netbook would be nice, but they are just too small. I have massive hands and a condition that causes muscle tremors, and typing on them is a joke.

Umm... well... the most basic check is to just do a comparison between the current battery life, and the battery life when you first got the laptop.
I believe a Li-ion battery in the best condition degrades like 4 ~ 6%/year (compounded, by the way), and poorly maintained ones degrade somewhere from 20% ~ 100%/year.
Though, manufactuers like HP include programs that supposedly tell you what condition your battery is in (no clue if they are actually accurate, the last time I checked, my battery was still at full health, but this was like 3 months ago).

The main one, besides actually throttling or undervolting your CPU and whatnot, would probably be the programs that run.
Some antiviruses and firewalls access the HDD a lot, and may eat up a lot of background resources, which can lower your battery life by as much as like 5 ~ 15 minutes, check to make sure that your HDD activity light isn't constantly flashing.
Other things include disabling WLAN when you don't need it, removing removable media when uneeded, dimming the screen more (in fluorescent lit displays, the brightness can affect the battery life by quite a bit, even in LED ones it matters), allowing the laptop to disable components when uneeded, and a whole lot of other things. The WLAN is a power drainer, and should be disabled when you don't need it.

Oh, and just a tip about battery maintenance, do NOT leave the battery in when you are using the computer, the extra heat will only speed up the degradation.

Edit:
Yes, netbooks are annoying small, but they got the best battery life, so, what can you do? =P
My netbook's keyboard is actually decently sized as it spans the full chassis length, so it's actually not bad to type on, but I hate how it won't stay on my lap properly unless I close my legs fully (inevitably, "Ow, my balls").
So I wouldn't recommend a netbook to anyone, really, unless their budget absolutely demands one (even then, there ARE alternatives, just won't last as long on a single charge).