Studio 15 poor battery?

On my new studio 1536 the battery seems a little messed up.

By this I mean that my laptop will be put into sleep mode over night (by me) with 80 or 90% battery, and when I wake up (6 hours later or so) it will be at 8-15%.

Note that this is a NEW battery and has been charged and depleted several times since getting it on may 22nd.

Any Ideas?

 

Sleep mode still uses battery power to store data in RAM. It will deplete over time. Not nearly as rapidly as when the system is on and running, but that seems like a reasonable amount of charge to lose overnight. Why don't you just leave the thing plugged in?

 

with my nc8230 I could leave it for 2 or 3 days in sleep mode and it would lose a max of 10%.

 

What operating system were you running on your nc8230? I assume you were using windows XP?

Windows XP and Windows Vista work in different ways when it comes to sleep. What Windows XP referred to as sleep mode was actually hibernation (edit: unless you told it not to hibernate, then it works just like standby). Windows Vista does not go into hibernation (unless you specifically enable the hybrid sleep mode). Instead, it goes into standby.

Standby is exactly what Mastershroom said, your work gets chucked into RAM everything powers down except minimal items, such to keep the power running to the RAM etc.

Hibernation is different in that it saves your data to the HDD and then can power completely down.

Therefore, your XP machine that used to be in sleep mode for several days was actually just turned off essentially. Leaving a Vista laptop in standby will not last anywhere near as long.

Regards

 

My 1535 goes on for about 2 days in sleep mode (the max amount of time i left my laptop in sleep mode).

I use Win 7 build 7100.

 

And how long does it take to come back alive after you've told it to? If it's more than a couple of seconds then it is going into hybrid sleep rather than standby and that is the most likely explanation I would think.

 

Actually, on the NC8230 I was running Windows Vista Ultimate with High Performance (eddited to give minimal possible power savings).

Also the battery on this notebook takes hours to charge (over 5 hours) should I contact dell about this?

 

And was hybrid sleep turned on or off?

What about that same setting on the Studio?

 

I have all the settings configured exactly as they were on my nc8230.

I turned off any and all power saving features, and disabled all hibernate and hybrid sleep options, even the power button and lid close actions are set to "Do Nothing".

I used tune-up utilities about a week or two ago to disable the Hibernation feature in windows (and free up 3GB) so that is definatley not the problem.

 

Dspr_02 my battery works the same way,
I don't know about charge time but it is about 2-3 hours.
and the charger sometimes gets really hot I dunno why; oh and I gets about 2 hours on battery High Performance




But very often my firefox is full with websites so I guess it really loads the CPU and the RAM

 

Do you still have the NC to test? Sit them side by side, do the same thing on both and send to sleep. 1 hour later open wake them both up and have a look at the battery levels.

Oh but by the way, you mentioned in your first post

Actually, that means absolutely nothing. Li-on batteries don't work based on memory or anything, so charging and discharging doesn't help contribute to the batteries health at all. In fact I believe that li-on batteries work better if not totally discharged.

Also, the fact that the battery is new means nothing. The battery could have been manufactured a while ago and with Li-on batteries they degrade as soon as they are manufactured.

Finally, one other thing. The NC8230 was an 8cell standard battery? I assume you have a 6 cell in your studio, unless you bought it retail then you may in fact have a 4 cell.

 

Here are my power settings and pro MS Paint skillz!



Yea, I am considering getting an 8 or 9 cell (whatever dell has) for my laptop now...this is REDiculos(the Red is for my team in TF2).

 

My studio has a 6 cell battery:

The info below is from Dell Quickset> Battery Meter > Primary (the only battery)

Battery Name: Dell WU9608
Battery Identifier: 5109Sanyou Dell WU9608
Manufacturer: Sanyo
Battery Chemistry: LION

Here is the Link to the Dell outlet store page for my battery:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...etail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dfh&cs=22&sku=312-0701

 

Dunno then, I am stumped. Your previous machine used an 84Whr battery, vs this, a 56 Whr; so you'd notice some difference.

Especially as I just read this here and the general consensus was that battery usage on standby was about 1W per hour; you'd expect a bit more than 6 hours.....

I wonder what could be eating up the power?

How long does your battery last when you are running from battery (but actually with the laptop on rather than standby)?

 

Gaming on TF2:

45 min to 1hr on highest brighhtness with WiFi on and connected.

Doing random stuff like complaining about the battery of the laptop on NBR and browsing sites :

1hr 10 min to 1hr 45 min.

 

Wow, that's not very much. Oh mind you, accounting for the fact that you have set all your power settings to performance it might be about right.

OK, then I guess I remain stumped! Might be worth checking in with Dell; because 6 hours and then that much battery drain seems too much, and your battery, whilst not lasting ages, probably lasts about right for your settings.

 

I agree with the lasting part but I too am worried (as previously stated) that my recharge time is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar to long for the use....my nc8230 would charge within 1 hr and stay working for 1.5 or so.....

 

Yup sure, but straight away one culprit is the processor; your old one used 27W whereas your new one uses 31W. Bet there are lots more like this too. Add that to the fact that you've got a smaller battery and the running time doesn't overly concern me.

I do still think something is not right in relation to the standby time though; it really should be much longer than it is. You went from (let's say worst case scenario) 80% to 8% in 7 hours (ok the 7 is optimistic). Considering you've got a 56Whr battery, that's 5.76Whr used in standby; that's more like a typical usage with the screen and HDD powered down. That just doesn't seem right.

Something is amiss, and I'm sure it's like really really simple and we'll both feel really daft when it's figured out.

 

After chatting with Dell tech support on the Instant Live Chat thing, I managed to accomplish three things:

1) Get a replacement battery (6 cell) and a new one at that....

2) Get a 64bit OS Disk seeing as it is stupid to have 4gb of ram with a 32bit os..

3) Get a new touch sensitive controll board/hunge cover!

So within 30 days of ordering....I have to replace half of my laptop (Free of charge though)


My dell experience is nothing short of Pleasant <----that was sarcasm btw....

 

I know, mine was the same; a month in and the DVD/Blu-ray drive wont read anything other than the odd sporadic DVD and CDs, but there is nothing wrong with the media because I have external drive that reads them fine. Meh, at least with Dell I know I can get it replaced for free and pretty quick after talking to a million incompetent script reading techies. Bad experiences with some other brands.

 

Kinda sad that one month since ordering I have to replace so much....the most I did on my nc8230 was buy a wireless card for it as the place where I bought it from did not include one.....I just hope to have it done before the weekend....