Pro50SR Battery Life

Hey all,
Ok well i bought the new ASUS Pro50SR yesterday (as my old Dell Inspiron 6400 HDD died for the 3rd time in a yr and was finally out of warranty) and overall im pretty happy with it.
The one pet peev that i have with the ASUS is the battery life. When i plug out the AC cord, it says im getting around 1 1/2 hours battery life using Power4 Gear Battery Saving profile, which is disappointing.
I'll be using this laptop for University the 3 yrs to follow +, and don't think 1 1/2 hrs will last my three 1 hour lectures in a row that i have on my first day at uni in a couple weeks.
The most i can see myself using is Word, OneNote in conjunction with my wacom tablet in lectures.
Can anyone suggest maybe Power4Gear settings or something to up the life of the battery. Specs link can be found at the end of this post.

Thanks in advance
Mark

Specs: http://www.jw.com.au/products_close...o=3472&index=Notebook+Computers&subindex=ASUS

 

Welcome to the forum!

That's probably about right for the N/M50 series' battery time, esp if you're running with lcd brightness at the higher settings.

Try to lower the brightness, turn off wireless and bluetooth, and use the Battery Save profile to keep the cpu locked at lowest multiplier. This will probably get you into the range of ~2hr or so. Not much more you can do - Asus isn't known for lengthy battery life, esp in their dedicated gpu models at 15 inches and up.

 

Battery life seems to mysteriously disappear :s.

 

You ought to be able to get around 3 hours. I managed to squeak out 3 hours with my G50 (and that has the power sucking 9800GS) by using Battery Saver mode, turning pretty much everything off and cutting the screen brightness to minimum. It was painfully dark (in a brightly lit room with a reflective screen) but for taking notes I didn't need to look at the screen.

 

Kay. Didnt know ASUS was the battery hog out of all of the laptop manufacturers...
What about Processor Power Management settings in Power4 Gear Extreme? would a max processor state of 20% and a min of 1% help with battery life while still maintaining me to use onenote/word productively?
can anyone share their settings on this?

BTW thanks to all who have contributed thus far

 

It's the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) coding that is causing the low battery life. In the last couple years, Asus has had some issues with poor battery life I believe your laptop is equivalent to the F5 series in the states - a 2 year old laptop.

As a side note, one of the most power consuming components in a laptop is the LCD screen, followed by the GPU and GPU. If you can try and set your screen to the minimum and keep your setting for P4G on power saving mode. Disable your wifi and/or BT if you don't need them.

 

yea on the laptop it says Asus F5 Entertainment System. i really don't understand, ive down processor states to 20%max and 1%min, using all power saving settings minus power saving desktop (confuses me how a white background can be "power saving" to light up & display) plus using Vista Battery Saver to turn off windows vista aero and the sidebar when running on battery. lowered brightness to 0% (min) and turned wireless off. still says battry life of 1h 42mins. am i missing something here...?

 

It could be the battery. Since the F5 has been out for a while, the laptop could have been sitting on the shelf for over a year. I'd perform a battery calibration and see if that helps. If not, I'd contact your local Asus service center for a replacement.

 

how do u perform battery calibration on the asus?

 

Check to see if your BIOS has the option to calibrate the battery. If not, follow the steps listed here.

 

I guess it depends on whether the resting state of the liquid crystals is a transparent or opaque state. But it makes some sense...if you read Vicious' review, he says that the power draw drops by a fair amount when surfing the net and the browser window is full screen vs partially filling the screen.

 

after calibrating the battery manually, i still have only 1h 48min of battery life at 99% charge to play with. This is really disappointing. i dont see how a laptop which has been designed to be portable, can have less that a 2hr battery life from full charge. Is there ANYTHING i have missed in regards to settings etc. to get the battery life up some more?

 

Some items:
a) check that the battery is not worn out (i.e., what is the ratio current max charge / designed max charge). Use RMClock or MobileMeter (latter XP only) to this end.
b) Check that the frequency of the CPU and GPU is actually decreased on power saving modes. Due to bugs in the ACPI drivers (for the GPU, also possibly in GPU drivers) they may be stuck on higher clocks.

 

You might want to measure the real battery life by running it down to the point that it automatically hibernates. Sometimes the calculated life and actual life are not the same.

 

good point, and with the 'coding problem' mentioned the battery is actually capable of lasting longer. Any solutions to this 'coding problem'? I just unplugged my computer, left the wireless on, and it says 1 h 43 minutes left.
i haven't actually try to run the battery down yet, i've shut it down before that happened thinking it may not be too good.

Model: x59sr-a1 (bought from newegg.com mid jan)
vid card: dedicated ati radeon hd3470
cpu: t5800
screen: wxga 15.4"
mobo: sis chipset

check out the screenshot

 

Battery use is controlled by BIOS and the ACPI interface, and Asus doesn't spend a lot of time trying to code great battery life into it. It's been that way for at least 18 months now, with their dedicated gpu models rarely topping 2.5 hours at stock configs (no user tweaking), and are usually in the range of 2. One of the main reasons I started looking elsewhere in '08 for the new 'book, actually, because I do still love that little W3 .

Asus has made the calculated decision that what the market wants is best performance for price (and there's evidence for this - the public doesn't rate battery life as high a factor in purchasing decisions), and has shifted their production and market strategy to meet that demand. Lenovo can get at least an hour more from similar components and screen size so it's obvious that battery life is possible, but Asus has changed their focus and show no current signs of going back.... they're chasing HP, Dell and Gateway in the race of performance for lowest price.

 

you're saying that hp dell and gateway have similar battery life span as the asus models?

Frankly i'd still by an asus for my purposes. i would like better battery life but Lenovo and apple make computers that are far more expensive

and the asus seems solidly built, + it has a great keyboard, at least my model. much better than the xps from dell or dv5 from hp. dell & hp notebooks aimed at the student/home user look like crap and feel like crap

that aside -

i just tested to see how much life i could get out of the 6 cell lithium ion battery in my asus x59sr
about 1 h 50 min

any recommendations? what about getting a 9 cell?

 

I don't see why they can't spend a little more time writing better code. From what's being posted here, it appears that power hungry hardware is not the problem.

 

I second that

but it would be surprising to me that this company would overlook this. Frankly there has to be an explanation. Perhaps it is that they deem it unnecessary. That a two hour battery life is just fine for a conventional laptop.
Nevertheless it still stands that they build good products for a low price.

 

Designed capacity: 47300mWh
Fully Charged Capacity: 47014mWh According to RMClock

Is this decent? According to when i had NHC installed on my last tests, the notebook was sucking ~ 25.90W (if i remember correctly).

In RMClock on my battery profile i throttle my CPU speed to 50% and still windows reports approx battery life at 1h 59m. In the pic below, what do these options do and would it increase battery life?



I love the asus laptop as a whole unit but i think the battery life problem will be the deciding factor for many, even though asus seem to think the opposite.

Because of this i might have to invest some more money into a new laptop for educational purposes (dreading to use the intel ATOM processor *shudders*). Any cheap suggestions? (one available in australia, Windows vista preferred, handwriting recognition in office 07 ftw AND DECENT BATTERY LIFE lol)

 

I understand why my G50 gets 2hrs, but your battery life is abnormally low for the components inside.

Besides a badly coded ACPI, maybe there is stuff that is always using a lot of CPU time. A processor that always runs at 50% probably uses more power than one that runs at 100% occasionally and mostly at 10%. If you are using stuff like a virus scanner, you might consider disabling it for the duration of the class (especially if wifi is also off). Also consider turning off disk indexing if you don't do a lot of searching. I'm aware there are other users with different experiences, but for me it always seems to hog CPU resources when everything else is idle, plus it results in a lot of HDD activity, both of which will cut into battery life.

Since you brought up RMClock, I'm guessing you've tried undervolting?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=235824

If you really like your current notebook, I'd suggest getting a spare battery if you have to spend the money, vs a netbook. A battery will be less money than the cheapest netbook.

 

My battery life is about 2 hours as well.
model x59sr-a1

when i have time ill see what i can do

 

currently in the process of undervolting as per the guide that Delta_CT has linked. Will post the voltages obtained and battery life from a 100% charge once im done

 

Unfortunately unless your CPU is not running at high clocks much of the time (which would usually be an abnormal situation and something that would need fixing), you are not going to gain much by undervolting Core Duo CPUs or latter -- because their lowest-multiplier voltage is locked.

The battery charge numbers quoted on the previous page are quite good (there is little wear on the battery).