New User - pitiful battery life

Hi

I'm new to this forum and to acer's/laptops in general.

I have an aspire 5044wlmi (80 GB & 512 Ram) running XP and wth McAfee rather than Norton AV and have had it for a month or so now.

I've loaded a few bog standard apps, Low end numpty user stuff, office, photoshop etc but only generally access one thing at a time (web, mail, docs etc).

My battery time is pitiful, an hour from fully charged to dead is the best I get, even with running one app at a time, set a couple of things off and it 40 mins at best. It's a doscument machine, I'm not a gamer, theres no mega sound or graphics killing it, just outlook, firefox, Photoshop and the like

I read the average is suposed to be 2~ hours, is this what people generally find and how is best for a newbie to optimise things.

Are all the acer pre-loaded stuff sucking power in the background or am I likely to have a duff battery/charger circuit.

sorry if theres a million posts on this one, 288 pages of threads and searching poor acer battery time and variants didn't hone it down much for me.

cheers all

 

It's certainly possible that Acer's preloaded apps are draining the battery, but I wouldn't think they'd be so app-happy they'd kill the battery life (you never know with corporates, though).

You may have a bad battery, but you may also want to consider turning your LCD brightness down as low as your eyes can stand. A full-brightness LCD can drain the battery pretty significantly.

I would suggest contacting Acer support to see if they have any tests they suggest running on a battery (use their tests first, as they will put more stock in their own recommendations) and to see what wear/life the battery has to show before they will consider replacing it.

 

As a starting point, I'd also check the rated capacity (maH) from the label on the battery. It's possible that, in order to make a price point, Acer shipped your model with a low-capacity, 4-cell battery (i.e., 2000maH).