Pleasantly surprised about W3V battery life

I just tested the battery life.

From a full charge down to the 3% or 5% point where it goes to standby, it lasted almost exactly 3h45m.

This is with the Power4Gear program set to office/email.

I downloaded about 150mb of stuff while testing, so hard drive was working too.

 

Not bad. Not bad at all.

 

That's about right for me too with only SpeedStep on [no Power4Gear needed].

[l]ikwid.[f]uzion

 

That's not bad, but not great either....... I can get about 3 hours running full out in high performance mode..........

Maybe if you weren't downloading at the time, you could have brought that up to 4:15 / 4:20 ........ was that a download over wifi? That could have affected it too.

Also, while we're talking about battery life....... realize on the W3 you have wifi and bluetooth.... and I'm pretty sure both are going to be on out of the box... but if you're not using bluetooth TURN IT OFF...... it's just a waste of battery.

Thanks,
Justin
PROPortable
www.proportable.com
[email protected]

 

I was connected with wifi, but bluetooth was turned off.

Even though I didnt download a huge file, it downloaded fairly slow, over about 1-2 hrs. So it did keep the hard drive active.

I didnt let it standby or hibernate either.

Speaking of which, once it goes to hibername, it never recovers; I have to hold power button for 5 seconds and reboot. It just locks on the black screen with the progress bar at the bottom. Any ideas what that could be about? I just turned of hibernate, nothing I'll miss.

Liqwid, you said that was just with speedstep. Speedstep is built into either Windows or BIOS or somewhere, but is automatic, correct? Or can it be turned on/off or adjusted anywhere in WinXP?

Does Power4Gear do anything other than deciding LCD brigtness, and when to standby/hibernate? Does it do anything to throttle the CPU speed, or it that solely speedstep?

 

Oh ok.... that's still good life for sure.

Hibernate is weird and I never really got into using it. From what I understand, there seems to be a dozen reasons why that would happen to you, 3/4 of them being issues with other software (and i have no idea why that would be)... someone who uses hibernate a lot would probably be able to crank out an answer pretty quick for that though.

Thanks,
Justin
PROPortable
www.proportable.com
[email protected]

 

i had problems using the hibernate function when i had alcohol 120% installed. i had to download a new build before i could even enable hibernate.

for me, i've trimmed down XP enough to where the bootscreen is less than 10 seconds long and on startup the only program that takes "long" to load is kaspersky but if i turn it off to not scan on startup, i've got a fairly good boot-start time and don't feel the need to use hibernate.

remember that hibernate does use some power and i'd rather just either have the computer powered down completely or just on standby if i'm having a little lunch break or something.

restore from hibernate just doesn't seem that fast enough to me and i think the hibernate sequence isn't as fast either. i can go from buttonpress to shutdown in less than 3 seconds but that's only because i've tweaked the shutdown process.

there's all types of registry tweaks out there to get a lean mean fighting XP machine. i'd look into that before messing with hibernate which to me isn't that much of a timesaver.

it might be useful if you're always on the run and never have time to properly save your work but unless you're a terrorist on the run, don't bother.

 

Rumor:
Is it true that if you continueously shut down the pc over a period of a year or 2, it will be slowed down compared to continueously hibernating the pc over a period of a year or 2?

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by RobotMule

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by JingYou

 

^
ya thats incorrect because you are powering down your system anyways.
Its the exact same procedure. All hibernate does is save everything that is in the ram onto a file on the hard disk and loads everything from there when you start instead of loading the bare OS and stuff.
I use hibernate every single day.
It works really well for me, but then again i have a desktop.
Booting from hibernate can get me to browsing in 10-15 seconds.