Poor E4310 Battery Life

I have a company supplied E4310, 128GB SSD, extended battery, Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit with 4GB of RAM. To say I am disappointed with the battery life would be a big understatement. On the maximum power saving profile I get just about 2 hours of battery life with minimal screen brightness.

I had an E4300 at my last company and it would regularly get 4+ hours with the same type of battery.

I've tried all the power settings/profiles I can think of, with no appreciable difference in battery life.

Any ideas what the issue could be? It's driving me crazy. I know it should be able to to better, but I can't figure out what the problem is.

Thanks in advance

- Tim

 

Perhaps your IT guy took your new battery and gave it to the boss, and gave you an aging battery.

You could try recalibrating it... run it down in Windows, run it down some more in the BIOS, and then recharge it.

You could send it back if they agree it should last longer.

GK

 

Maybe your battery is shot? Try it with a new battery?

 

First figure out if the battery has lost capacity or whether something is guzzling the power even in power saving mode.

Run HWiNFO32. On the main page under Smart Battery you can see Designed Capacity, Fully Charged Capacity and Wear Level and then, when running on battery, select Sensors and it will show the power drain (as negative charging). Under light usage you should be looking for a power drain of less than about 12W (12,000mW).

John

 

I have an E4310 and I get 4-5 hours in power saving mode, it ranges based on screen brightness and wireless usage.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions. E4310 is 4 months old, battery shows 4.8% wear. 53.28Wh capacity. I'm showing an average of about 12W on battery. I'll keep an eye on it, I also have another battery I can try.

John - thanks for the recontamination on HwInfor32, that's a neat program!

 

Thanks for this extra info. The battery looks quite healthy although sometimes the capacity can disappear when the battery approaches empty (and you can go from 25% remaining to 5% in a few minutes).

I suspect that there are occasions when something is loading the CPU in which case the power consumption will shoot up. One possible culprit is animated Flash content in the web browser (I use Firefox with Flashblock to control this). Look at CPU usage on the Processes tab in Task Manager to see what is hitting the CPU.

John

 

Evil and not uncommon: Flash based screensavers

Michael