P7805u Stability on battery power with Vista

I've had this laptop for a week now.

Tests I've performed on my refurbished unit:
-Ran Furmark for 30+ minutes with gpu temp max at 73°C.
-Ran Prime95 last night for 6 hours, no errors, HWMonitor stated a max temp of about sub 60°C (don't remember the number but definitely never hit 60).
-consistently get 3dmark06 score of approx 9300

Yet, this machine crashes/freezes on battery power while browsing the web. What the heck? Is anyones 7805u stable while browsing the web while running on battery power?

It usually crashes/freezes while running full screen video (youtube specifically) and also when I tried to play "price is right" yesterday (hey, I was curious...haha).

I have installed the latest drivers from nvidia website. Also my laptop "breathes" while browsing the net, regardless if it is on battery or plugged it. The breathing is coming from the gpu fan, cycles between normal speed to full speed in 2 second increments.

Help me solve this mystery and make my machine stable on battery power. Otherwise I'll have to limit my web browsing to text only when on battery

Thanks.

 

so it only does this on battery power? so when the battery is plugged in and the ac line is plugged in you dont experience this issue? if so i think something might be wrong with the battery. maybe an instability with the gpu drivers. was it a fresh install of vista? if so did you make sure to install the chipset drivers before anything else.

 

Yes only have issues when on battery power. All the test I ran have been stable while plugged in. Full screen video not an issue when plugged in. I haven't played many games with it, only GTR for about 20 minutes total and no issues when plugged in.

I read somewhere about editing the registry and turning off powermizer, but I don't even have powermizer in my registry.

I suspect it has something to do with vista and power management. Don't think its hardware since it past all the tests when plugged in.

Does anyone else have the same issues I do? Everything is stock on my laptop, no overclocking, no hacked drivers, only the latest nvidia drivers.

Any ideas?

 

So is it when windows throws up the low battery warning? Does it crash when it goes to sleep or lid is closed? Does it Freeze after idling? How much time do you have before it crashes? What programs? Try just the battery in safe mode and surfing the net. Have you tried it on another operating system?

 

No, no low battery warning just before freeze. When it freezes, sometimes I see artifacts on the screen sometimes it just freezes. If it freezes in the middle of a video, the sound holds at the note it was at. It never shows BSOD, just freezes.

No, read my original post, freezes during full screen video or crappy games in full screen while on the battery. Haven't freezed on me when plugged in. Mostly freezes during full screen video.

I have no idea how much battery is left when it freezes but if I was guessing it would be more than an hour since I usually plug it in before it reaches 1 hour left.

I just got this laptop a week ago. I don't have another operating system to install on it.

 

That really sounds like a battery problem to me. But if you think it isn't, then you could try re-installing the OS. Since you got it a week ago, I'm guessing that won't cause to many problems. If that doesn't work, it's probably the battery, or another problem that would probably be really annoying to fix yourself.

And don't mind the breathing. All 78xxs do that. Although I really like how you described it as breathing.

 

I disabled hardware acceleration on adobe (the program used to run youtube videos) and it seems to have fixed the crashes so far. I'll need to play with it some more to verify but so far on the district 9 trailer in HD, it has not crashed or displayed anomolies on the lcd (before it did with this trailer).

 

UPDATE: turning off the hardware acceleration did not really fix the freezing problems I had. Luckily though, the new driver 186.42 (July 23, 2009) has fixed it with hardware acceleration turned on or off.

You can get the driver from here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=410917

 

Spoke too soon, crashed again on full screen video while on battery power.