M1530 battery drain while on sleep

I've got an M1530 with vista home premium 32 bit, 8600m gt, T7500, the 200 gig 7200rpm drive, and 4 gigs of ram. When I put it on power saver mode, I've edited the power profile so that shutting the lid puts the computer to sleep, and that hybrid sleep mode is disabled. However, the battery seems to drain during sleep far more than I expected. For instance, I just left the computer sleeping for an hour immediately after charging it fully, and I just reopened it to find the battery meter down to 87%. I've read that a normal laptop should lose about 2-3% of its charge every hour while sleeping, so 13% is way too much, my dad's macbook pro is left sleeping all day and the battery never fully drains while if I leave mine asleep for 6 or 7 hours it is completely dead. Can anyone give me any tips or things to check to ensure that it is actually sleeping, or do a similar test on a similar M1530 to see what their battery life is after an hour of sleep? I could just put it in hibernate, but that takes nearly as long to come out of as rebooting.

 

Any ideas? Should I close programs like AIM and rocket dock before I close the lid for sleep? I closed my laptop after that last post and came back 2 hours later to find it down from 85% to 65%, so it's losing about 10% or so an hour while sleeping...

 

One thing I just tried was restoring all the power plans to default settings, I screwed around with them and maybe in my tinkering I changed a setting that keeps the computer from fully going to sleep, so I'll see how long it lasts under sleep with the defaults and post again.

 

Do you understand what sleep is? When a computer sleeps it suspends the running programs in ram. Ram is volatile meaning that it needs continuous power sent to it else it loses its information. Where is this power coming from? Your battery.

Hibernate saves your running programs to the hard drive which is non volitile meaning it does not require continuous power to keep the data.

Basically if you will be gone from your computer for more than a few hours either shut it off or put it on hibernate, else use standby.

edit: reading your additional posts while i was typing this it seems that the laptop might be waking up during the sleep. This is likely from a bad driver you installed or a bad program.

 

Think it might be a video driver? I don't think it's a program, there's nothing suspicious in my list of running programs in task manager ... I'll try running the default dell video drivers instead of the one I got from laptopvideo2go and see if that helps.

 

Can anyone that has the dell-approved drivers do a battery drain test with their 1530 sleeping before I switch drivers? Changing the plan settings to default and closing all running programs and turning off the wireless didn't change anything, it still runs the battery down abnormally fast.

 

sleep = bad mojo

either leave it on or shut it off.