Dell Batteries

So im about to buy a dell studio 15 next month and im still a little concerned with the quality of the battery. My current dell inspiron 9200 battery lost its charge a year and half in. Same thing w/ my brothers Dell. Do Dell laptops still lose their ability to hold a charge that rapidly or Has Dell improved the battery?

 

That's just the nature of lithium ion batteries. There's really not much you can do about it, unfortunately. Li-ion batteries begin to degrade the moment they are manufactured.

 

My first 9 cell battery for my 1530 lasted exactly a year...wouldn't hold a charge..Dell replaced it (now not all batt's have these problems)

My 6 cell battery is still holding strong at well over a year now for my 1530, and gets over 3.5 hours yet!

So, yes I would say the batt' life has improved.

I think alot has to do with usage/consumption/settings you have your battery set on, too.

Cin

 

I still have a 3 year old Inspiron E1505, and it's battery still holds its charge. Used to get 3 now gets about 1.5 hours. So it isn't that bad.

 

Care to share how you get 3 and a half hours out of a 6-cell? I imagine your M1530 has similar power draw to my Studio 1535...same PM965 chipset, T-series processor, midrange dedicated graphics, etc. I can never seem to squeeze more than 2 and a half hours out of my 6 cell, and that's with Power Saver mode on in Windows, the processor undervolted significantly and locked to the minimum multiplier, the display on minimum brightness, keyboard backlights off, and every possible power saving setting tweak that I can think of. Even with my 9-cell, I can rarely hit 4 hours. How do you do it!?

 

Turn off the wifi catcher via BIOS - a tip from Ice Cold here in the forums, not sure if it helps much. I was gonna try it and compare the power draw with RMClock. I'm also trying to find a way to cut power to the DVD drive - disabling the device in Device Manager does not do this.

For some reason, upgrading to an SSD significantly reduced my power draw. RMClock was showing my 1535 drawing 33-35W of power with a WD Scorpio Blue, but with the SSD the power draw dropped to 20-25W power draw.

I think something is wrong here, but if you're willing to spend that kind of money...

 

Anyone know the best and cheapest place to buy 9 Cell batteries for the 1555?

 

I have the WiFi/Bluetooth switch off. And upgrading to an SSD would definitely make your battery life longer. SSD's do not have any moving parts, unlike platter-based hard drives, which means much less power needed, since there's no motor to spin.

 

Yeah...but a 10W improvement seems sort of unbelievable.

 

Not to mention the extra heat they generate, which causes the Fans to spin up, therefore using up more power still.

 

My 9-cell with my Studio 1537 appears to be losing capacity quicker than I would like, although Dell keeps telling me not to worry about it. (Of course they'd say that, ha ha). I'm closely monitoring it with BatteryMon and trying to take as good of care of it as I can so it'll last.

I have integrated Intel graphics in my 1537, so I'm sure that helps a lot with how long my battery lasts... In Win 7, I can generally get 5 to 6 hours doing light tasks like browsing chatting e-mailing etc.

~Aryq~

 

What I would like to know is how Asus can cram a 63Whr six cell battery into the eee 1005HA while Dell's six cell batteries for their Studio and SXPS laptops are packing smaller 56Whr batteries.

 

Asus uses newer cells with increased capacity. 56 to 63Whr is not a huge difference.

 

12.5% is a fairly large increase in reality; heck I'd love to see that sort of increase on my pay cheque. Dell may eventually get round to upgrading theirs - they just take longer than some other manufacturers.