Here is a new one! Batt. issue

Well after everything has been working fine for a while now i had a solid 4 hours on battery life on high performance. It was like this for a while both battery bar and windows confirmed but yesterday it now is only 3 hours. Bad battery perhaps?

 

you've actually tested unplugging it for 3 hours, or you're going off some estimation? i wouldn't necessarily trust an estimation

if you have tried it, have you installed any programs that run all the time? also, does battery bar show your battery has lost capacity?

 

yea i have let it run out before i did it when i first got battery bar. haven't installed anything new that i don't know is running. optimus is working fine as well

 

What's your discharge rate? What are you doing now? What were you doing then? You aren't really providing much info.

 

Well the 4 hours was just web surfing with some video. Usage would vary but battery bar said the full lifetime was 4:06 now its 3:11. Discharge rate is -21,981 mv. Capacity is 67,300.

 

That discharge rate is insane! Are you running on high performance, AlienFX on, screen all the way up?

 

Yes except screen is half way down.

 

Your discharge rate should be around 7k and 8k to get better battery life. You can get this going power save, go dark , kill any program in the background and relaxing.Remember no OC.Also look to disable bluetooth,firewire.
Let us know how it goes

 

Well there you go. Mystery solved.

 

lol i just realized that my discharge rate might be up higher than normal scince i am Dling SC2. I have a few things turned off in the bios already. bluetooth firewire, & network port. I will take a look at the powerplan settings.

 

ports and bluetooth only help a little with battery life. it's the cpu, screen, wireless, gpu, and hard drive use that matter most

On a different note, when I said have you tried leaving it unplugged, I meant now (since it's been bad), not before. For instance, if I leave mine in idle, battery bar with change the max life to 7+ hours, then when I start using it, it counts down from 7+ hours even though it's using potentially double the power. Then, when if it updates while I'm working it hard then I stop using it, it'll show worse battery life than I'll actually get. To stop belaboring the point, it doesn't reconfigure the estimate immediately; it takes time to do it. So, what I meant was, did you unplug it for awhile and keep track of the time to actually see how long it'll last like that? It could be that you were using a low of power, battery bar updated the estimate, and then the use dropped back down, but the estimate hasn't updated yet.

sounds like you have it figured out now, but I wanted to post that in case it happens in the future . The estimate is just that--an estimation, which is based on data that might be relevant at one time but not at another.

 

Well i been trying to figure out why my battery life has gone down with no luck.
Made a lot of the changes on the forums & battery bar shows no changes. The only thing i can think of that i changed was the update to command center but that was supposed to give better life.
I took off O.C, disabled all what i wasn't using etc.. Startup progs are good too.