Battery Life of NC8230

NC8230 Owners

I posted a question which contains the following but decided to bring it to your attention in this new thread. I would appreciate your input.

My configuration is as follows:
CPU: 2Ghz
RAM: 512 MG
Screen & Video: WSXGA & 128 MG
HD: 60 Ghz 5,400
DVD Writer Built in
No Bluetooth

I have battery life issue (This is critical for I bought this laptop mainly for its battery lif).

For 1: Fully charged battery runs of its gas in 3 hours and 30 - 35 minutes under minimum load of work such as websurfing and type writing. DVD watching is about 2 hours and 20 minutes. What is your average runtime for minimum load work and DVD watching? I called HP tech service about this and they said the machine could run up to 4 and half hours under an ideal condition. According to them "ideal condition" is the condition where you are not runing any program on the coumputer! So, it means the battery is fully charged and let it drain until it comletely runs out. They said if I get 3 hours and 30 minites with websurfing and Word work, it is goo enough. I don't belive this. Can anyone help me prove my point? I have seen reviews on PC Magazine and PC World, they posted 5 hours 11 minutes and 4 hours 50 minutes or so. How do they do that???

 

Battery life mainly depends on what you're doing on the unit and what you have active. If you're running a DVD from the DVD drive, then that will cut your runtime drastically. If you have wireless on, this too will effect your runtime.

Getting 3.5hrs is a good runtime to be getting, especially with your wifi on (I'm assuming you're using the wifi), but you'll get battery drain with LAN as well.

When running my tests for the review I did on my nx8220, everything was set to default (LCD Brightness, which was at the lowest setting, CPU at Notebook/Laptop setting) and I got 114mins with the battery at 88% full.

For the Idle test, it was setup with the same settings, but I had the LAN connect for 50% of the test and then switched to wifi for the other 50%. With this test, I got 251mins (4h 11m) from a full charge.

So any strain on the CPU during the idle test would have decreased battery life as the CPU would draw more power, not to mention the cooling system being active more often. Add wireless to the equation and 3.5hrs is pretty good.

Also, what is your LCD brightness set to during min load and dvd watching? If it's any higher than the lowest setting, that that will drop overall runtimes even more.

The "tests" that some of these sites run seem to get higher than normal results for the battery tests. I have never achieved or seen runtimes that these sites produce on non-idle tests.

If you want even better battery runtimes, you can try underclocking your system using the Centrino Hardware Control software or SpeedSwitchXP, but that requires a bit if experience to get 100% right. You can also try reloading the OS from scratch and install all the latest drivers from each manufacturers site (Chipset & Wifi from Intel site, video from ATI site, etc...). This will give you better battery runtimes vs the original OS load that came with the system from HP.

Here's a link to my n8220 review. It has a small chart of the battery runtimes and with a brief description of the config.

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=2397

If you want the extra battery life, you can also add a travel battery to up your runtime to over 8hrs. Otherwise, I think your runtimes are fine.

-Vb-

 

Hi Venombite

Thank you for your reply.
I did idle test today and I got just about 4 hours. It was a bit of surprise to me since I got about 3 and half hours on light load work such as typing and websurfing. Or maybe I did something wrong. In power management under Control Panel, I set all the settings to "Never" on battery. Is this worng? I also had ambiance control on too.
When I watch DVD, I tend to have the screen brightness set pretty high. Say 80% of full brightness. I am not really a DVD watcher and the runtime on DVD doesn't really bother me. But when I read PC Mag review of 4 hours and 50 minutes or so runtime and PC World's 5 hours and 11 minutes runtime and watching my machine running out of its gas in 3 hours and 30 minutes makes me really wonder what's going on. Do you think those magazines are doing "Idle test"? I kind of doubt it.

With all best wishes,
Michaelmorio

 

Michael,

It's possible they're running idle tests, but it's also possible they have full power management enabled (HDD shut down & LCD shut down) which could explain the increase in battery life. Running the unit with the LCD off and playing video files from the HDD (outputting to a TV via SVideo) gave me approx 4hrs. Imaging if it was idle, not playing video through the SVideo connector and the HDD were to power down. So, it generally comes down to reproducing their setups exactly and also using the same s/w they used to test the units. But from your values, it looks proper to me.

Also, when you're surfing, having WiFi enabled will kill approx 30-45mins from your runtimes. Also, if you also have the Bluetooth enabled as well (enabled, but nothing connected to it), that'll drop another 25-35mins (approx) of runtime.

-Vb-