How much battery life do you get?

Post your model, specs, type of battery and the estimated battery life at full charge with wireless off and the brightness turned all the way down.

Eg.

i9300 / 1.86 GHz Pentium M (Sonoma) / WUXGA/ 512 MB RAM / 80 Gig 7200RPM HDD / NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Go / 9 - cell Lithium Ion battery

4 hours

 

Dell Inspiron 8600

Brightness All the way up
Wireless Enabled

Specs: 1.4Ghz, 40GB HD, 512MB, Go FX5200 Graphics Card

+6 Hours

 

Type of battery?

Wow, the Sonomas ARE power hungry...

 

i6000d sonoma 512 ram , x300 128mb 6cell, undervolted, GPU underclocked.

4 hours

 

How is that possible? The reviews of the 8600 only have it getting 3.5-4.0 hours at most.

 

Just rec'd my Inspriron 9300 on Friday the 16th. In fact, my purchase was based on suggestions from this very forum. I must say THANKS to all of the knowledgeable members and I look forward to being a regular at this bar .

My specs (will add to my sig later).

9300
1.73 Ghz
512 mb ddr2 4200 (removed 1 stick of 256, added a mushkin 1gb from newegg)
wXga 17"
80 gb 5400
Geforce Go 6800
dvd +/- RW @ 8x
upgraded wireless and bluetooth (internal)
XP Media Center 05
6 cell battery

My battery life, thus far, is around 2 - 3 hours. My plans involve purchasing another charger and battery (9 cell) from a third party. The upgrade costs from dell seemed unreasonable. The upgrade from a 6 cell to a 9 cell cost $119. After checking ebay, getting a factory replacement (new) was around $60-$70 pre-shipping costs.
Seems that's the better deal since I'll not only save money, but I'll have the 6 cell as a backup.
With doing the upgrade, I'd only have the 1 battery and no backup replacement. This way, I'll have both and it will cost less.

Well, onto the next thread.

 

6 Cell battery

Wirless: On
Brightness: Lowest
QuickSet: Maximum Performance
X300 64MB Battery setting: Maximum battery life
Fan: Off
Battery Indicator showing: 4:03 hrs at 98%

 

Thats what is was when i last tested it which was quite a while ago. Ill test it again and see now after my battery life has started dying down. But i can garuntee you its over 4.5 hours.

 

specs in sig

6 cel = 4 hrs

9 cel = 6 hrs

(wifi off and screen at about half)

 

Just got one of the low-end Dells, a B130 with the small 4 cell battery. Using it with the wireless on, screen brightness at battery default, and just using for web browsing I got 1 hour 55 minutes. It looked at times as if it was losing 1% of charge per minute. I'd upgrade now to a longer life battery (would like to get an average DVD's worth of time out of it) but Dell doesn't have batteries for this model available as far as I can find. I guess 2 hours isn't too bad, but when outside the screen brightness was way too dim for use, and I'd have needed to crank it up to full brightness to even see it, and that would have eaten up battery life even more.

I guess you get what you pay for. Now, I'll wait to see when (or worse, if) Dell comes out with longer life batteries for the B130.

 

i think i get like 2 hrs or less. I dont know for sure yet cause i haven't really tested it yet, I played Need For Speed Most Wanted for about 30 mins last night and I was at 60% charge, so I don't know really. I know it's bad tho.

 

If you had 60% charge after playing games for 30 minutes, then I think that is pretty good.

The main reason the B130 gets subpar battery life is because, in addition to the small 4-cell battery, the Celeron M processor cannot regulate it's clockspeed and voltage on the fly in order to save power. It runs at full clockspeed the entire time.

 

I9300, specs in sig, on full brightness without running anything taxing - 2 hours (6 cell)

 

XPS Gen2 w/ 7800 Go GTX

Roughly 2 1/2 hours with brightness set at 5 and normal usage (non-gaming).

 

System in sig, about 2 hours at 5 brightness.

 

Specs in sig,

Thanks to this forum, I finally broke the 4hr mark with 4h 10min

9-cell
Brightness: 4/8
Wireless: enabled

and I run my fans quite a bit, since I use it on my lap, and shoot to maintain sub 42*C CPU temp

 

how are you getting 4 hours on the 9300? .. are you using Notebook Hardward Control? ..

can anyone suggest battery saving tips? ..

 

With your brightness as low as possible and wireless off using a 9 cell battery, 4 hours is pretty common... How he did it, i do not know.

 

I am getting just a little above six hours on my Dell 6000 .. and about 3.5/4 hours on my DV1000 .. with wi-fi on, and screen brightness set to the lowest setting .. and the the battery thingy set to "Max Battery" ..

 

Yes, that's exactly what I'm using.

However, that measurement is taken from the battery indicator and Notebook Hardware Controll.. I've read the battery indicator is not necessarily accurate, and have had no information on the accuracy of the NHC annalysis. I haven't confirmed it yet, so take that for what it's worth..

I managed to break the 4hr mark by:
Going to Nvidia controls, and optimizing the graphics card for battery life,
Reducing the brightness to 4/8
Using Notebook Hardware Control to Underclock/volt to ~800MHz (x6 @ 0.738v idle... I'm going off memory here, since I'm at work and don't have my notebook, I can verify these numbers later if needed.)

found NHC here

 

recently recieved my 9300 so my battery tests are not too extensive, however i have a pentium M 750, 1GB RAM, 256 MB Geforce Go 6800, 60GB 7200RPM drive, intel wireless 2200, dell bluetooth 350, and both a 6 cell and 9 cell battery. So far i have not used the 6 cell at all, and have mostly played games like hl2 and fear, getting about 1.5 hours of life on maximum performance settings (brightness 100%, wireless on, loud volume), which i think is decent considering how extremely well this thing plays such demanding games. considering i dont plan on using it much outside my apartment i dont mind the short battery life for games ( i expected it to be shorter), but ill be glad i got the extra battery.

 

9300, nine cell, but a 7200 rpm hard drive-- comes out to just under 4 hours.

 

how did you figure out what settings are safe for the under-volting thing? .. or was it just trial and error .. I suppose they'd be different for different laptops, running at different processor speeds ..

 

Going by the information I found on the 'net, I basically experimented.. I dropped the processor speed to minimum first, then dropped the voltage by increments, until my pc locked up, then I rebooted and raised it 2 levels, and ran prime95 to ensure stability.. it didn't crash under load, and seemed to perform normally, so I've left it there.

Doing this alone, I was still just missing the 4hr mark, which is when I found the graphic card setting.. as soon as I changed that, it was smooth sailing.

[edit]as mentioned earlier, previous NHC numbers were from memory.. and I was off by a bit, should have been listed as:
800MHz 0.732V, multiplier= 6

 

I get 3 hours with maximum battery... Sometimes 4, it all depends on the mood of the indicator...

 

9300, 256 6600GO, 1 gig ram... wordprocessing with max brightness, wireless off and sound on i get about 1.5 hours with a 6 cell

 

My I8600 w/ 1.4GHz P-M, 60GB,wifi enabled, 1GB, radeon mobility 9600 pro turbo w/ 126MB only lasted an hour and a half tops. This was with light usage consisting of only web browsing. More usually, I'd get around an hour with video playing from HDD or other HDD/CPU intensive tasks.

My new I9300 w/ 2.13GHz, 2gigs, 60MB HDD, wifi, go7800GTX lasts about 3.5 hours tops w/ around 2-3/4 hours being a more realistic battery life under normal usage. (9-cell battery).

Gotta love new technology!!!

 

My household computers:

Dell 9100- P4 2.8, 512 Ram, 60 (7200RPM) 64 ATI (2 hours)

Inspiron 600m- PM 1.5, 512 Ram, 30 (5400RPM) 32 ATI (3 1/2 hours)

Inspiron 700m- PM 1.6, 512 Ram, 40GB (5400RPM) Intel GMA 900 =( (2 1/2 hours)

And soon to have a....

Dell XPS M140- PM 1.73, 1GB DDR II, 60 (5400), Intel GMA 900 =( (7 hours - 9 cell)

 

hmm,

Screen mid brightness, wireless on, 9 cell, 6000d,
I seem to be only getting around 3 hours lately. . ..

 

I9300 w/Nvidia 6800, wireless on, bluetooth off, max battery (quickset and powermizer), 9-cell battery and only surfing/browsing/office applications and I get 3h and 20 min. I don't dare to do much tweaking (reducing voltage with NHC).

 

really? .. that's IT? .. how long have you had your laptop? .. I suppose, over time, the battery time is bound to drop ..

Bilal

 

7 hours?! .. is that a typo? ..

Bilal

 

i dont think so.. the xps m140 with the larger battery have impressive battery life

 

wow! .. that's quite remarkable .. I just read up Notebookreview.com's review on the XPS M140 .. and they're saying 4 hours of battery life with the 6 cell .. and 7 hours with the 9 cell .. my Dell 6000 averages about 5.5 hours with the 9 cell battery .. goes up to 6 hours, sometimes .. with the XPS, I'm sure the 14 inch screen consumes lesser power .. and then the "brightview" screen .. I wonder if those consume lesser power than the regular matte screens ..

Bilal