Tips on extending battery life on Alienware 17

Hi everyone,

Since I've had my Alienware 17 I've been struggling to get some of the battery life that some have claimed to get. After days of tweaking I hit my record high reading of 3hrs and 6 min remaining on full charge. This is with AlienFX off, screen brightness at 30% and power saver mode selected (settings on default for this profile).

I've heard some saying they can get a reading of 4 to 4.5hrs on it yet I can't get anywhere close to 4hr considering I could barely get to 3hrs!

Any suggestions or anyone can anyone share what they've done to achieve this on their Alienware 17?

 

Well, you may extend your battery life by a good 45 minutes to an hour by simply getting rid of those HDD's and replacing them with some efficient SSD's, like the Samsung 840 series. Even the non-pro version is an excellent option in place of regular hard drives. When I put a Samsung 830 in my system for a couple days, I was seeing a good 40 minutes of extra battery life.

And another thing I have noticed that helps is buying a powered USB hub for all of your accessories. Having them directly connected to the system draws power. I purchased a 7 port USB 3.0 hub and I noticed quite a difference in battery life by having my devices hooked up to that as opposed to directly into my system.

Right now I am running the stock HDD and an mSata SSD, with the USB hub, averaging 3+ hours on 'High Performance' with screen brightness around 80%. I bet I would see another hour if I had SSD's instead of HDD's.

 

I actually find it very annoying that Dell doesn't offer any 5400RPM model drives. I'd love to order a 17 with a 1TB drive, then drop in an SSD.

Generally speaking, the advanced power settings are your friend. Maybe set your hard drives to turn off after ~10 minutes of inactivity as well.

Even with that, I don't see you gaining a whole lot. It's possible you have a dud battery. What does HWMonitor/HWiNFO64 say about it? Can you stick up a screenshot? The last time I had a Dell (17R SE), it shipped with a battery that had deteriorated to 85% capacity out of the box. I was getting 45 minutes less than I should have been getting (of what I later learned was a terrible 2.5 hours maximum).

 

So I guess I'm a little confused now. On one hand J.Dre has suggested actually accessories and hardware changes to improve battery life.. Which suggests I'm around where I should be but those are ways to get more out of it.

Then Serephucus has me concerned that maybe there's a problem with my battery

Either way I'll try to upload that screenshot. What will that show us exactly?

 

I don't have a laptop on hand to give you specifics, but there should be something like Current capacity, Design capacity, Wear level, and possibly a couple of voltage readings too.

You might very well not, but it's something worth checking into just to be sure. It's also handy a year down the line, if your battery has worn by 20% or something, you can request a new one before your warranty runs out.

 

I don't think there is a problem with the battery, remember that the battery life varies from one PC to another because of the components that are in there.

 

My suggestions above come from experience, and I do own an Alienware 17 with the same specifications as you.

This is what I am seeing with average use: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-17-owners-lounge-thread-141.html#post9313515. Also, if you think about it, perhaps my cooling pad (connected to my powered USB Hub) helps a little bit as well. (Keeping the fans from spinning up as much.)

The little things add up.

 

Thanks everyone for the tips. I guess I'm just trying to eliminate the possibly I have a defective battery. Not that I'm complaining about 3 hours of battery but I figured if others are getting 4 hours well clearly I should be as well.

I do own the Notepal U3 cooling pad but usually only use it if I'm on the bed to prevent the vents being covered by the bed sheets. Perhaps I should run the battery down a few more times.

 

Try this:

Set your profile to Balanced.
Leave the laptop idle for five minutes, just wander the mouse around the desktop, click icons, etc.
Check your battery status.

Windows takes the time remaining based on snapshots every couple of minutes. If you happen to be opening an intensive application at the time of taking the snapshot, and the CPU spikes, it'll read it as having less time remaining than you actually would.

 

Makes sense, I'll give that a whirl.

And out of curiousity, if I'm gaming on battery which battery profile do you recommend? I played FIFA '13 on max settings on power saver mode the other day and didn't notice any performance issues.

 

I'd pretty much always recommend Balanced. I've never seen any difference between Balanced and Performance in anything, so of those two Balanced would be my choice, and between Balanced and Power Saver... I haven't seen massive gains in battery life, unless you're in a situation where you need every last minute or something.

@ L Porras, that's true, but remembering that we're talking about idle usage here, and given that every processor currently offered will throttle down to 800MHz on idle, every dedicated GPU will turn off, and most people running the same 19x10 screen, the only real difference comes in hard drives, which should only account for +/- a half hour, tops.

 

And he's running two HDD's, external accessories, and a cooling pad, which all add up.

 

Well I assume he's unplugged all the externals while doing these tests. We have to establish a baseline for his laptop at its maximum. From there, we can add in accessories, change settings, and see what's causing his problems.

 

So you're correct, last night my 3 hr 10 min reading was on 100% juice, no accessories or anything plugged into the USBs while on power saver and 30% brightness. But after J.Dre mentioned the 2nd HDD would decrease my juice by about 30 min I guess that might make sense.

 

Surely the hdd powers down when not in use? Is your OS on your ssd?

 

I'm going to assume. I haven't changed the power profiles so they probably shut down after 5 or 10 min of inactivity. And yes my OS is on the mSata 256.

 

If I am doing stuff on the battery (High Performance), I see about 2.5 hours to 3 hours. It changes quite often. I don't think you have anything to worry about.

 

Ok that's reassuring. Is there a benefit to "high performance" I should know about? Like if I'm gaming on battery would I expect better fps or anything?

 

Here's a thread that should answer your question: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...between-balanced-high-performance-gaming.html

According to some members, CPU utilization is not limited when in High Performance. However, playing on the battery can limit the GPU from reaching higher voltages, resulting in decreased performance.

 

The GPU potentially being throttled back can be remedied somewhat by changing PCIE Link Management in the power profile. Note that you'll still be limited by the maximum current the battery can deliver however.

 

Thanks I'll check it out

And yeah I know what you mean. I noticed one game in particular chugs on battery but while plugged in it's perfectly fine. I'm curious now if High Performance will fix that. But even with Evga Precision manually raising the target temp will that offset that GPU performance?

 

What you're experiencing is GPU throttling. This is completely normal, and unfortunately unavoidable. The GPU requires more power per second than the battery can supply, so the GPU throttled back to compensate.

 

go into your power settings then go into advanced settings for a plan, and change certain things to save you more power.

also see how intel graphics is set to perform on battery, make sure it says save max battery to get max juice out of your battery.

i've noticed making killer wireless save battery gives me a little extra juice. similarly i noticed a lil more juice from the 840 ssd than what i used to get from the 830.

 

I am getting just over 4 hours on my R4 but that is shutting the 7970 off and running on the integrated and putting the computer on power save and not really using it. If I do pretty much anything with it that drops dramatically fast. These machines are simply not designed with great battery power in mind