Poor battery life on XPS M1330 - help!

Hey,

It's only since I started reading these forums to try and fix my fans being on all the time that I realised my XPS's battery life was way worse than most people's on here.

I have a six cell battery and out of a full charge I get maybe 1:35. this wouldn't be so bad except, when my warranty ran out 3 months ago, I made dell replace my current six cell battery which got around 1:17 full charge.

This current battery is only 3 months old, initially it did an two hours and a half but now i'm lucky to get an hour and a half out of it.

Can anyone suggest why my computer is eating my batteries? Other people talk about battery life of 3 hours plus

Cheers

jonny

 

This is about to be swallowed by the second page. Sorry to bump.

 

download batterybar and check the batteries life . Post the results back here

 

On BatteryBar v.3.1 my capacity is 43,346 mWh

My discharge rate is -22,999 mW

Full lifetime is 1:35

Battery wear is 24.9% of 57,720 mWh

How is it already 25% worn down and three months old? This is a warranty replacement Dell sent me, not a dodgy Hong Kong battery

Any advice?

Cheers

jonny

 

aaaaanyone?

 

The battery will cycle while on A/C and the battery is in..

When the battery is not going to be used, (Laptop is acting as desktop) give the battery a 2/3 charge and place it in a ziplock bag and put it in your freezer.

 

I have a Studio XPS 13 and the battery has 17% wear after roughly 3 months, so similar to you. The battery is meant to be used, so wear is to be expected. But this does seem pretty high. How rigorous do you use your laptop on battery? You said you have 25% wear, yet the time you get from the battery is a whole hour less.

 

My batt is 2 years old. ~35.1% wear

 

I very rarely do anything other than web browsing and using Microsoft Word. My brightness is at 60 or 70% so i'm not exactly slamming it. Not many programs open, either.

I dunno why but my computer just chews through batteries

 

That is an extremely high discharge rate... What's your CPU usage?

 

According to task manager it's sitting around 12 % - is that abnormal?

 

What are the specs of the laptop (CPU, RAM, HDD) and what OS are you running?

 

I'm running Windows Seven Ultimate (RC 7100).

The Hard Drive has 160GB capacity, currently 72GB free space. The CPU is an Intel CoreDuo2 2.00GHz and it has 2.00GB of Ram.

Looking at my CPU usage on RightMark CPU Clock Utility, it says I almost always have 30% load. This is with only Google Chrome and Microsoft Word open. That doesn't seem right to me.

 

Do you have a lot of Flash videos/advertisments/etc open?

When I'm idling, my CPU sits at about 0-5% load.

 

I've got this website and microsoft word open and I've got 30 % load still. The only programs running in the background are 3RVX volume control and RightMark CPU Clock Utility

 

30% is high for your activity. Check your task manager process window to see if you can find the process using up all of the CPU time. Be sure to show all processes; not just yours.

My M1330 is 18 months old and runs for about 5 hours on the battery - this with the Intel integrated. It has the 2.0 Ghz Merom processor.

 

The program that uses the highest ammount of memory is desktop window manager and i can't close that. This actually makes no sense - I've undervolted too so that should help.

Can anyone help get my discharge rate down?

 

What is using the highest amount of CPU time?

 

svchost.exe appears to be, i'm note sure what that does

 

Jesus, I've got 14 instances of svchost.exe running. What the hell is it?

 

Processes that run services. Unfortunately it's not obvious what they are doing.

 

Soooo... can anybody help me out? I still haven't actually learned anything that could stop my computer munching batteries

 

Aaaanyone?

 

Do you have browser windows open while using your laptop? That'll do it as the flash ads will be using your CPU. Also, what about Anti-Virus? Maybe it's constantly scanning.

 

I've uninstalled Avast! and it hasn't had any effect. My discharge rate never drops below -22,000mw.

Basically, what I want to know is - a) is this normal for an XPSM1330 running Windows 7 32bit and b) if it's not, is there anything i can do to fix it

Cheers,

Jonny

 

You mentioned that you exchanged your battery.
How exactly did you do this?

 

How good is this battery?
1. do a full system antivirus scan IN DOS OR SAFE MODE.
2. disable all startup programs you do not need running at startup.
3. adjust your power settings.
4. if you have many icon's on desktop or in taskbar this uses system resource as you know,
5.defreg your hard drive.
6. BIOS try updating/down grading your bios and video drivers.
7. do system diagnostics

FREEEWARE TO TRY
CCleaner & Spybot
Spybot you can disable startup go into Tools.

 

The M1330 has never been known for it's good battery life. I have owned my M1330 for a few years now and have never made it over 3hrs (certainly no where near the 5hrs quoted above !! - although the Intel onboard graphics option will help towards that). I normally get a couple of hours use although if I am really hammering it then this can reduce to about 1.5hrs.

The reason for my battery useage is that it never switch off the power hungry devices such as bluetooth, wi-fi and I have the nVidia graphics card, which can be quite greedy. I have just replaced my hard disc with an SSD but this has done little to improve battery life. If you have the nVidia graphics card and the latest bios (A15) then your heat sink fan will be on quite a bit to help reduce the chances of the graphics chip going crispy so that is another factor. Having a large processor will never help (mine is the 2.2Ghz) or large amounts of memory (4gb).

As such if you have a similar spec to me then 1-2 hrs of normal - heavy use sounds about right and as such I wouldn't worry too much. If you need your laptop to last longer then either buy a bigger (9cell) or spare battery or invest in one of the newer lower power laptops that has a ULV processor and chipset that are not made for performance but battery life.

 

I get 5+ hours on mine for just web browsing or word processing.

About 2:45 watching a movie.

This is with a low-spec CPU and Intel Integrated video.

 

Cheers guys, that helped a lot. Got CCleaner and Spybot and I've changed my power settings to get me another 15 of battery life, I'm at about 2:15 now which is okay. I've got similar specs to smjohns so I guess that's as good as it gets

Cheers again

Jonny

 

The only way you are going to get more than that is to really switch off all non-essentials when not in use and turn down that brightness on your screen to 30-40% (if you click on the battery indicator it will tell you if your screen brightness is too high). With all your wireless devices switched off and screen turned down I can get another couple of hours out of the battery but problem is I use all that stuff regularly so happy with 2hrs of normal useage.

 

Also try enabling power management in the Sigmatel control panel. It turns off the audio device when not in use (muted).