Just Increased my battery life on W3V

When I first got my W3V, on "email/office" mode on battery with just browsing the internet and typing, I would get 3 hours and 20 minutes.

I went into the bios "F2" (I didnt know this still later after some searching ), there is a "Speedstep option" which was set to disabled by Asus.

With this enabled, my battery life increased to 4 hours and 10 minutes!

On a side note, you guys should try this screen cleaner ( cleanDr), its great. The other screen cleaner I have leaves whitish residue which is greatly noticable on this glare type of screen, but CleanDr really makes the screen like new again.

 

How exactly do you get into the bios?

 

hit F2 during boot.

 

what did you set the speedstep option to? Automatic? Is there any way to configure this in Windows?

 

I set it to automatic.

 

Another note on battery life I noticed was the surface you place your notebook on.

Example: I had my notebook on my bed spread while I was lying down and typing. It showed as 3hrs 10min.

Example: I had my notebook on the wood coffee table and it showed at 4:20 minutes.

Must have a lot to do with how much effort is being placed into keep the computer's temperature down, and I guess the wood coffee table dissapaits the heat better then the bed spread.

 

also wouldnt the bed spread cover the fan intakes? but yeah makes sense...

 

or maybe your W3V don`t like your bedcover and gets doped with coffee, enlarging battery life...

// disabling joke-mode //

 

which part of the bios is it? i can't seem to find it on my W5A

 

any downside to this? just curious since asus thought it was better to disable it out of the box. I wonder if it conflicts with anything.

 

The only downside is that it lowers the speed of the processor a little bit (when it is not needed). Other than that...

I have it set to automatic (I have a Z63A and it was set at that by default), and I use Centrino Hardware Control (much better than Powergear imo) to control it in Windows.

 

I heard thier is some issues with CHC and running the second optical battery. As in some people were having thier laptops shut down when the optical battery died instead of switching to the main battery. Is that just random? or a problem with CHC and running two batteries?

 

hmm, I can't comment as I do not have the battery that goes in the optical bay, sorry.

 

Can you have powergear and CHC installed at the same time?

 

Yea, but I personally think it is useless.

I tried PG but found it pretty primitive compared to CHC.

But I don't think there are any problems with both installed.

 

I dont use CHC, I just use PowerGear and it works fine, it only gets warm on High-Super Performance.

And Intel Speed Step is set to Automatic in the bios, like I stated before.

 

Hi jus wondering if any W3V users can tell me the battery life when surfing wirelessly and under what power settings. Thanks!