Battery life went to Hell - Envy 14

So I've had my E14 since day 1, and never had crazy battery problems. Now all of a sudden I'm getting like 110-140 minute battery lives, when my battery should be running for 240+ minutes.

I reinstalled windows once using my recovery disks, and it isn't as "cleaned up" as it originally was, however it had perfectly fine battery life 2-3 weeks ago. The battery is still only around 6% worn, so that's not it either. BatteryBar just says my system is consuming absurd ammounts of energy; like 17-28watt hours when it should only be 14 or 15 tops.

I'm wondering if something is preventing my CPU from throttling properly(it sits on x10, aka 1330 mhz most of the time, not sure what's normal), but really I'm clueless about what's going on.


Help me brainstorm!

 

See if (in the BIOS) speedstep is disabled?

 

I have never bothered to enter the BIOS on this system, so I think it's fair to assume that isn't the case.

Ill check that later on just to be sure. I'll be out for a while though so if anyone wants to throw out some other ideas that would be cool.

 

Did you change power plans?

 

I'd look in task manager or whatever app you use to monitor CPU utilization and see if an app is running the processor excessively. I noticed once that the battery on my E14 BE was being sucked down and a Firefox tab had a Flash plugin running that was killing the processor. I killed and things went back to normal.

But, yes, could also be a change to the power profile or such.

 

well balanced profile should be fine.


make sure something isn't using up a processor or something.

 

It seems to be running between 1 and 5% constantly. I think it was originally between 0% and 2%. I've got some tabs open now, so this is all from memory.

There are definitely no massive programs running that shouldn't be.

 

hmmmm...

weird. and your batteries wear % hasn't magically jumped up a lot, right?

have you physically timed how long it lasts. I know batterybar can screw up sometimes.