m11x R2 Battery Life - What are you getting and how to make it better

7600mW is what I get on my R1 with min brightness, wifi on, and not doing anything. Posting on NBR nets me a nice 8800mW.

 

@Shimmy Do you have an R1? Because those would be pretty good numbers for an R2.

 

Rypac, that's a negative! I have a R2.
I gained a lot of battery life based on going through this thread and following multiple tips and tricks.

 

Hi guys.

So decided to do a test.
Left my R2 on balanced mode, with brightness at 50%, screen on all the time, connected to the internet (wifi) throughout, browsing with chrome for about half the time.

I got 5hours and 57 minutes when I got a critical warning telling me I have 10 mins left, so I stopped and put the charge back on.

Not bad at all I think! by far the best results I have aver had out of any laptop.

 

Yes, that is very good

Better than my R1, which drops to about 5 hrs, flat, when web browsing (though I have the WiFi drivers set to fastest possible + afterburner, or something like that).

1 tick above min backlight settings.

 

Oh I also had alien fx disabled.

 

These are very impressive, but can you state what processor you have, and what your average discharge rate is? Also, any antivirus programs or background programs running? Trying to get a feel for what you're doing to get such high numbers :O

 

Um, I7 background ahd nothing running, I think mate. I honestly don't know how to check the discharge rate, mega pc mong. If you tell me how to i will do it for you again. I basically set my stopwatch and let it run down. Anti virus I have is kaspersky, FX was off. All I was using it for at the time was internet browsing between watching tv etc.

 

hey I followed most of the optimizations n here and found the culprit I think that is stopping some of us getting below 11k on idle on the r2... throttlestop! I imagine the users who cant get down to the 8-9k idle mark have TS in the taskbar, and a ac profile and battery profile set, even if the battery profile is at default 10/30. The problem is that TS stops the CPU from being able to fully idle as it's constantly pinging it... (I think). Anyhow when I exited TS while l;ooking at battery bar, my idle went from 12k to 8.9k RESULT!

 

All of the suggested optimizations for battery life in this thread were made way before TS hit the M11x scene.

 

I was getting 3:51 hrs before i installed the newest intel and Nividia drivers. Now i am at 3:23 hrs. gonna have to run through all the settings again to see if i can bring it back up.

 

I'm having this same issue.

With battery bar free version, I installed it last night, used it some, watched a movie internet, played a little civ v whatever.

This morning (it was sleeping unplugged in all night) I opened it and battery bar was reading 2:30 while windows was saying 4 hours. Couldn't get battery bar to give an accurate time. :dunno:

 

What's the newest intel driver? I installed 260.99 yesterday for nvidia. For intel I just used whatever was on the dell site, and it told me I had a newer version already?

Also, my intel icon in the task bar has disappeared. I mean the space is there and I can adjust notifications,etc but the icon has literally disappeared - still missing even after a restart (in fact thats when it disappeared).

 

I am turn off LAN port, Turbo boost, NO wifi/alienfx.

And I take 7 hours idle on i5. I love this notebook

 

I've never recommend running ThrottleStop while running on battery power. It's more of a maximum performance tool and battery life was never high on the priority list when it was originally written.

My friend nando4 asked me to improve this so I re-wrote a big chunk of code recently to make ThrottleStop more efficient. On the M11x-R2, you don't need to have either type of clock modulation checked and you don't even need to have the Set Multiplier checked. The latest version of ThrottleStop will be much more efficient when set up like this. Having it minimized to the system tray will also reduce its CPU cycle count.

The latest beta is in the TS Guide thread.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/6946306-post65.html

When trying to max battery life, I agree that it is best to have ThrottleStop turned off. Sometimes you might forget to do this so I added a new INI option for this purpose.

DCExitTime=10

This will force ThrottleStop to exit approximately 10 seconds after you switch from AC to DC. You will have to restart TS when you plug back in. If you plug back in within this time window, ThrottleStop will automatically cancel the DC exit request. You can set it to however many seconds you like. 1 second is the minimum.

Hopefully the new 2.90 series will consume less power for those that are running on battery power and if it still consumes too much, use the exit option so it consumes zero CPU cycles when on battery power. Can't beat that.

 

One thing to note with the services -- I was having trouble logging into a Network Drive here at my work (Windows Explorer would crash and give me the fault module as FACredProv2.dll along with the exception c0000005) and it turns out, I need to have the service "FAService" running in order to connect to any network drive.

Needless to say, I can manually Enable/Disable this service when I need to log into a network drive but man, in my research, I heard everything from me having a virus to I'm password illiterate.

Anyways, hopefully this saves someone from wiping away their computers in order to fix the issue like I almost ended up doing.

EDIT: See the next few posts for updates on my particular issue (all good things)

 

FAService should not be necessary for network drive connections. I've had it disabled since day one and I connect to network shares and mapped drives on multiple networks every single day.

I'm not sure how FAServer has managed to become involved with your drive connections. Perhaps you had it running for a time when you initially connected to certain drives and therefore it's still attempting to use it as the credentials to connect. You might want to check/reset them in Credentials Manager.

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Credential Manager

 

Interesting -- There is something to be said about this, indeed.

I did go ahead and disable the FAService, I disconnected from the network, reconnected to the network, and was able to open the previously mapped drive with no problems while the service was disabled.

Thanks for the advice, slickie! Funny how stuff operates sometimes...

 

OT but wow, I did not expect to see this thread get so big.

 

Guys I seriously need help...I just got back my laptop after having an issue with the fan and my discharge rate on on battery bar is avg 20,000mW with the laptop on lowest brightness, wifi off and having it set to use 30% of the CPU and while I have two tabs open on chrome and windows live messenger running there are currently 83 processes in the task manager...should i format it ?

 

No. Relax.

The number of processes isn't anything to worry about in and of itself. What specific processes or services your system is running is far more important in terms of fine tuning. Without that information no one is going to be able to provide you much help.

 

These are my running processes atm....thanks for your help

 

Much better.

You need to do two things, maybe 3.

1. Disable AlienSense if you aren't using it. It's the facial recognition logon that's part of Command Center. It takes up a lot of resources.

* Click WindowsKey + R
* type "services.msc" without the quotes in the Run field and click OK
* Scroll down to FAService and double-click on it
* Change the Startup type to Disabled and click OK

2. Disable the Dell WLAN Tray Service. It's been reported to have a memory leak and killing it helps lower your power consumption if I recall correctly. It's junk.

* Do the same thing for DW WLAN Tray Service as you did for FAService above
** While you're there do the same thing to Alienware Fusion as it's known to cause problems with power plan settings and display
* Close the Services management window

1b. Last, you want to remove any startup items you don't want or need. I use CCleaner or Autoruns for this, but msconfig works just as well once you tell it to stop nagging you after you reboot.

* Click WinKey + R
* type msconfg and click OK
* Go to the Startup tab
* Uncheck the box for FAStartup. This is the startup item for AlienSense.

Try that out and see if this helps.

Other things that will impact your power consumption are things like Flash or any other flavor of video using the 335. There's no reason for any video playback, including HD to be using the 335. Make sure you white list browsers and media players and set them to use the IGP. It can handle anything you throw at it.

Always be aware when any application is using the 335. Its primary purpose in life is games.

Not using Bluetooth or firewire? Disable them in BIOS.

The device that consumes the most power on any notebook is the display. Knock down the brightness to a level that works for you. If I'm in a dark environment I have no problems taking it all the way down to minimum.

Another thing to be aware of is how your AV is configured. Does your have the ability to limit real-time protection to a preset list of files types? If so, enable that. Also make sure that you can set your real-time protection to ignore network drives IF you're in an environment that's protected at each node on the network.

 

I barely use my m11x in battery, maybe 4-5 times in 4 months, but the other day, just using messenger and some youtube videos, I was at 4 hours in battery, and still 41% left, of course, lowest bright and no FX lights, no overclocking, no TS....

Coming from my Dell Inspiron with 2 hours max (with low bright) for me anything over 2 hours IS A LOT!!

 

Thanks veryyy much for the help I decided to clean install W7 Friday bcuz the laptop seemed to be in a mess and I just wanted to start fresh...So I did that and followed what u said to do and now I'm getting a discharge rate of average 12-15,000mW which gives me 4-5hrs battery life which is MUCH better thank before...Really appreciate the help Anything else I could do to squeeze a bit more life out of it ?

Btw just for anyone else having an issue like mine, I realized that sidebar gadgets which monitor system resources boost the discharge rate by about 2,000mW so turn that off.

 

Hmm, I updated the Wireless Card to the Intel 6200, and I noticed I lost a lot of battery life when running wifi, is there any way I can improve the power management to the card? Or at least the power management in general (I already turned off services, etc)

 

I'm unsure of what to do now. I am pulling about 18,000mW with wifi and 17,000mw without it at idle. :/ I have disabled all the same services on my R1 and pulled about 9,000. Is there anything I am missing? I have my TS settings, Processes, and such in the picture.

On another note I am OC'd to 166, have speedstep enabled and have the fx lights on with the process off. Would these last three things be the culprits for increasing the mW discharge by about 6-7,000? Just curious. I am about to travel and want to get the most out of my flight (which is overnight, so the lights would be nice).

 

I have my alien fx turned off through both windows and through the alienfx software. Yet I cannot get the keyboard lighting to turn off when I unplug my laptop. Any suggestions?

 

This is my battery at idle, with nothing at all enabled or going on. Im at about 13k with with turbo and OC. Seems lke I can NEVER get over 3:30 of battery life. Thats watching Standard Def movies and browsing. :/

 

See battery life improvements suggested at bottom of this post. Setting AHCI Link Power Management giving a nice improvement.

 

Weird, I don't have that option in the power saving options..

 

After editing those registry files, i can't find those options either.

 

This registry tweaks website tells us:

The same website has PowerSettings.reg to unhide 54 other power-related control panel settings.

 

Hmm just tried that registy file and it did unhide alot of settings but i dont see ahci. Maybe the m11x doesint support it.

 

Thanks nando4, worked for me but unfortunately my settings are already correct so no room for improvement (HIPM + DIPM and 100m, right?), wonder if it's worth downloading the .reg and looking at all the options?

@gordesky1: Worked perfectly for me just doing the three he posted, the AHCI option is in the hard disk section.