Windows 8 Shattered bettery life l521x

I upgraded to windows 8 and it has reduced my batter life significantly. Has anyone else had the same problem?

 

probably has to do with the dedicated graphics card.

 

I also switched to win8 on my llano vostro 3555, no significant change in battery life.
Which is actually kind of disappointing because MS and the tech sites made all this noise about how win 8 was supposed to improve battery life.

 

Makes me wonder if Optimus is running properly.

Try disabling the NVidia drivers altogether to force it to only use the Intel HD4000?

 

I was wondering the same thing, how exactly can i do this?

 

My Computer -> right click -> Manage -> Device Manager -> Display adapters

Right click on the NVidia driver and select Disable

Then reboot.

You could also uninstall all of the NVidia components to ensure that nothing is doing something wacky - I would if I were trying that - they have a *ton* of components, some of which you can't disable or de-select form installation. *boo*

 

Mine came with Windows 8 pre-installed and the battery life is also terrible. Goes down about 25% an hour. Tried to disable the Nividia card but that didn't do anything.

 

I upgraded to Win8 over the weekend, it's too early to tell and I haven't done a big deal of battery testing, but I used it for a bit over 60 minutes on battery yesterday (various loads, software installs from usb drive, internet downloads, reading sites, etc.) and was down to about 85% remaining power. The meter was telling me that I had about 4.5 hours remaining, which seems reasonable.

I did take the time to go through all the power settings for the on-batter policy, and all the advanced power settings, for both graphics and system.

I am also running the dell component which makes sure to switch the machine to power-conservation profile from high-perf profile, when on battery.

My system started as the stock i7/8Gb/32Gb mSATA/750Gb HDD in July, and I have upgraded ram to 16 Gb and the mSATA to 120Gb. I am running the OS on the mSATA now.

Just another data point, and more things to check.

 

Wow! I want that battery life. Where are these battery settings you changed?

 

Realize that what you have running on your system will affect things too, background processes, services, etc. I tend to be aggressive about minimizing these kinds of things. You must be careful disabling background processes as if you do the wrong ones you can break system functionality, sometimes badly.

BUT, as for power configuration.

- Do this on battery power to make it easier to get the right settings

- Go to the desktop

- Mouse-over the power icon on the tray and click it once to get the popup



- click the More Power Options



- click Change Plan Settings



- set display dim, off, brightness, and sleep values as desired

- then click Change Advanced Power Settings



- Make sure you're set for Power Save profile then click Change settings that are currently unavailable to get the full list in the list box

- go through the rest of the settings and configure as desired.

I'm not an expert on what each and every one of them means (the CPU controls are particularly voodoo-like to me) but here's the settings I've tuned



















- lastly, make sure the intel display adapter is set appropriate for battery power



good luck.

 

Thank you so much! That was by far the most helpful response I have ever received when it comes to battery life. You are awesome

 

if it helps you then it's worth it. ;^)