U46 Battery Life?

Recently picked up the last U46e at the local best buy, which happened to be the display model. Lucky me it had only been out on display for a couple weeks max and was in pretty much brand new condition.

All that aside, I have noticed recently that battery life does not seem to be where it could/should be. I understand the battery life on the u46 models is advertised at somewhere around 7 hours? My u46 gets about 3 hours max runtime before having to recharge.

I know different programs running in the background and other services affect this, but I am only running microsoft office and browsing the internet, so shouldn't I be expecting a little more oomph out of the notebook? Battery wear via BatteryBar readings only says 2.9%.

 

Check which power management setting you are using. There are a number of profiles, controlled by the power4gear application.

Are your temperatures high? Is the fan constantly running at high speed?

 

I will say that you should definitely be getting more than that. I had the U46E from Best Buy a few months ago and kept it for 2 weeks before returning (but not because it was bad, I want to wait for the U46SV). The battery life was really great and I could get 5-6 hours on a single charge easily.

Check ALLurGroceries's suggestions, something is definitely causing a problem.

 

I don't think the fan is running at high speed, at least not that I can hear, and the bottom of the computer feels cool, not really warm at all. I am currently running the maximum battery saving mode in power4gear. I have maximum battery saving on as well as set the cpu to be a max of 60%. The display is also dimmed down to almost the lowest setting.

I'm feeling like it may just be because it was on display and maybe constant turning off and on, and general neglect or lack of care may be a possible factor, as I am sure the power cable was hooked up 100% of the time.

Last night I drained the battery down to 0% while at the BIOS screen, and let it shut off completely, then recharged it until the light switched to green. Upon booting the u46 back up, the battery icon on both BatteryBar and windows read 96%, so apparently the battery did not reach a full 100%. I figured it would have at least been up to 98%.

 

All ASUS machines have their EC limit the battery charge to 95% or so to prevent overcharging. So that's entirely normal. You should be using a utility like batterybar to read the wear level off of the battery itself, you said 2.9, which isn't that bad at all.

If it's not running hot, and there is nothing eating your CPU life (check in task manager)... batterybar should be reporting your discharge rate from the battery. Maybe you can get another owner to compare their average to yours. It will vary wildy based on your usage patterns, are you doing any highres video stuff, for example?

 

Glad its ok that the battery charge doesn't read more than 95%, I was getting worried about that.

Right now BatteryBar is reading battery wear at 2.1% now! So I'm glad it happened to go down, which I believe may be a result of letting it drop to near 0 and recharging it to full.

I'll have to find someone with a u46, which sadly I haven't seen a dedicated owners thread for it, but I will have to find the u46v info thread I saw a little while ago.

Currently discharge is at -12,610 mW on average.

I do what I consider normal computing, just moderate internet usage/browsing the web via wifi, as well as NO heavy/HD video streaming currently, nor heavy use of photoshop. I watch a youtube vid here and there, and use microsoft office moderately.

I did manage to forget, after installing my own firewall that windows defender was running in the background, which I switched off earlier, so maybe the next time I recharge the battery I will notice an increase of some sort.

 

There's an owners lounge/review here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-reviews-owners-lounges/617467-asus-u46sv-review.html

And there's a discussion thread here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus/605651-my-review-asus-u46sv.html

I would ask in the latter thread, since somebody already has asked about battery life in the owners lounge/review thread and gotten no reply. You could reply there with your numbers maybe, and then ask in the other thread.

 

For the moment I guess I will come to terms with the battery life

I have the 8 cell 5200 mah battery and currently on my recent full charge I just did, it went up to 73,000 mWh out of 74,962 mWh, so it is getting what should be close to full charge. Now it's back to about 2.6% battery wear and ultimately a reading of 5:35 min of "full lifetime" via BatteryBar.

Just don't understand why I am not getting a legit 6 hours on battery if my computing is only minimal to moderate usage. At least compared to what everyone else seems to be reporting as their battery life (I have seen most people saying 6-7 hours on battery is the norm)

 

For what its worth if anyone actually reads this because they have a similar problem, here is what I did to boost my battery to a good 5-6 hour life before needing to be plugged in. To set things straight, I found most people reported only realistically getting 5 hours avg on other models in the U-series. Some users did seem to get 6-7 hours easy by what was reported.

I initially ran my battery to as low to 0% as possible to get the battery initially situated, then charged until the indicator turned green and let is sit on green for another 15 min. Wether this actually affected battery span I am not sure, but in BatteryBar the reported wear on the battery went down from originally 4.1% to an average of 2.3%.

To at least get this 5-6 hour life I have my screen turned down to only where it is needed, i.e. since it is dark my screen is down on practically the lowest setting. Aside from this I have my windows power setting set to "Power Saver" most settings set as low as possible or in other settings set to "max. battery savings"

Aside from this I have turned all unneeded programs off in my startup options, as well turned off any programs that like to run in the background, so that they only run when I need them.

Finally I DID delete "Power4Gear". As SOON as I did this the battery stats that windows is reporting, jumped a full hour. Now as I type the battery is at 89% with a reported 5hr 53min left. It fluctuates of course as i open or close programs and as the HDD turns on as needed.

If this helps anyone that is on their last straw like me, great, as hardly ANY info is really available on this ASUS model.