Battery Life / Dell Tech Support

Hey there,

I ordered my M11x in March. SU7300, C2D.

The battery life when I ordered the system was fantastic - 8 hours+, easily.

Right now the system is providing me barely 4 hours. On the Intel graphics.

I've contacted Dell, and they have told me 1) It is not covered by warranty and 2) The laptop only gave them 4:30 hours battery life.

I've looked at many, many reviews, and I told the agent this, they're all at least 6, 7 or 8 hours.

Dell's own website quotes the SU4100 as being 8 and a half hours. The tech support told me that this is halved simply because I have the core 2.

I have no number I can phone to complain, I was just given an email address I can email.

Any advice on how I can proceed with this? Am I insane, or was my battery life actually that long?

I have a hard time believing a brand new M11x only gets 4 and a half hours, sitting IDLE. I was told when I actually USE the machine to browse the net I should only expect 3.

Any advice? Thanks.

 

4.5 hours is more like the m11xR2 battery life with the core i7... how long have you had your m11xR1? download battery bar and check the battery wear? are you sure you are not running alot more processes in the background that is chewing up battery?

 

I completely formatted the computer to check for that. The battery life is still the same.

Using HWMonitor the battery level is under the designed capacity, but not by a huge amount - It could be another fault besides the battery, but Dell don't seem to be interested regardless.

 

Well, still download battery bar and use it to check your discharge rate. If the capacity divided by discharge rate doesn't match the actual battery life, then there is a "fault besides the battery", and if it does match, then it isn't.

 

The discharge rate is ~8mW right now, at complete idle. Playing an mp3 bumps it up to ~14. Seem normal?

 

Yep, that's perfectly normal. The battery is rated for full capacity at something like 64 mWh, so at complete idle you'll get 8 hours, and at a 14mW discharge, you should get ~4.5 hours to drain it to absolute 0%. And those discharge rates are normal.

You can see in this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...1-users-what-your-idle-mw-discharge-rate.html (and others if you search the forum) that you're right around the average.

You may be able to squeeze a bit more battery life if you go through this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ry-life-what-you-getting-how-make-better.html. I suspect the reason you're getting worse battery life now than when you got it is you have installed more programs so have more running processes, so the thing to do is disable or uninstall as many programs that start at boot as possible.

 

Yeah, that's what came to my mind - I may have things running in the background, etc.

The problem is I have formatted Windows, and there's barely anything installed. I updated the drivers, installed 7zip, VLC and Skype. That's it so far.

I just don't understand the discrepancy in battery life then. When I had the system before I was getting much, much longer out of it while listening to music and running Word/Excel/Whatever.

Someone in that thread is getting 14mW while browsing the net and playing a DVD fullscreen.

Ah well. Thanks for the help.

 

Hmm interesting. Perhaps the factory install of Windows ships with some tweaks to the power plans. Maybe try messing around with those settings. Those helped a lot with battery life for me.

There might be tweaks to the Windows programs that start at boot with the default factory install, also. This page is good for helping with that http://www.blackviper.com/Windows_7/servicecfg.htm