Does this battery life make sense? (d620)

I have a D620 with and intel T2400, 2 gigs ram, the dedicaded graphic option and while playing music on Windows media player (using headphones) and typing stuff up in Word 2000 I a getting less than 2 hours of battery life. I am keeping the brightness down pretty far. I generally have my wifi connected during this. Does this make sense or is there something wrong with my battery. BTW I got my computer in August, and will upgrading my processor to the new intel ones make much of a difference?

 

that is unusally low even if you do have a 6 cell

one reasons could be the age of the battery as lithium ion battery's life starts to shorten the moment it was manufactured

a battery life does shorten as much as 25% or more depending on what temperature it was kept at

though i seriously doubt you should be getting so little.

try checking that you have power step on (it lowers your cpu clock setting when running non cpu intensive apps like word) and also check the health of your battery. you can do both by going into bios.

good luck

 

Yeah, sadly the battery life does make sense. If you have a 4 cell, that is around the same amount according to some reviews.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2846&laptop=Dell+Latitude+D620+Review

A 6 cell gives you about 4 hours.

 

The wi-fi will not be helping... unless you are using the network card?

John

 

If that's a 4 cell, your doing quite well to get ~2hrs with wi-fi on. If that's a 6 cell, something just isn't right... Upgrading to a Core 2 Duo will make little to no difference. In some benchamrks I saw, the Core 2 Duo got ~10 mins more battery life then a Core Duo.

 

Even if I'm not doing anything on my system, and I'm on battery power, when I right-click on My Computer and click Properties; it nearly always states its running at 1.83GHz, very rarely (but occasionally) do I see it running at 987MHz. I checked in the BIOS and the PowerStep thing is enabled.

With Wi-Fi on, screen at notch 4 and just typing this, I get an estimated battery life of 2:50 hours - 97% remaining. Of course that's very optimistic. I have the 6-cell battery.

John

 

well I have a 6 cell battery and now I'm getting sub 2 hours battery life with wifi turned off just using it in lectures to take notes with nothing running but word. how do I check if power step is on?
thanks,
eric

 

What power scheme are you using? Speed step is always on, if you disable it in the bios you will run at the lower speed full time.

How long have you had the battery? read this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=91846