Better Batteries

Are there any 3rd party, or extra-powerful batteries that could be used in the Envy 14?
I heard of the new Lenovo getting 23hrs of life on battery. I know its nothing to compare, because of the lower performance levels of the Lenovo, but they must be using a pretty dense battery to get that much juice.

And if there isn't a super-battery for the Envy; how (aside from the slice) can i increase the battery life of my Envy?
I know of wifi off
brightness down
power-saver profile
But is there any way to overall reduce the performance of the Envy to get more battery life?
I'm finding need for 4+ hrs of life for classes; and I'm just getting 3.5 hrs.

 

Take the processor speed down when on battery.

search for "Power Options">Change Plan Settings>Change Advanced Power Settings>Processor Power Management:

Set min processor speed on battery to 1%, and max to 10%

Using those settings, coupled with what you are already doing, you should get well north of 4 hours, up to around 5 on the standard battery.

 

Just to bring a little hope... you all realize they (not HP, but inventors)are working on paper thin batteries! So...not sure when we'll see it mass produced for the public, especially in laptops, but once in laptops...wow, its gonna be awesome. Super light notebooks.....hopefully long lasting paper batteries.. hope we live long enough to see it happen.

KJ

 

Battery technology has been stuck at a stand still for years now. But yeah, 3.5 hours kinda blows. I'd try setting the CPU at 50% and see how long that lasts before dropping it down to 10%. heh.

 

Getting an SSD should improve battery life. Did for me.

 

By how much? Curious to see if it would be worth switching.

 

Hard to say. The better SSDs are still IMO too expensive to justify the price premium just for a battery life enhancement.

For me, post-installation, I recall getting 6-hours with wifi turned off, screen dimmed to super low levels, and my activity being limited to switching between Microsoft Word and OneNote. Before that, I was clocking about roughly 4-5 hours. The SSD I have is an Intel G2 120gb. Power consumption was at battery-saving mode of course.


I'd say get the SSD if you want the raw speed and want the battery life boost as a plus.

Otherwise, get a Mac or some PC with long battery life.

 

Zeth, what are your read/write speeds with that Intel X25? I have the same drive and I feel like its underperforming...

 

Don't know, benchmarked but forgot a month back. It's "underperforming" because the Envy 14's chipset is supposedly buggy. My drive is also "kind of" fast, but not that fast.

Plus it's been a month since I got 6 hours. Battery degrades slowly...

 

I'm getting horrible battery life compared to you guys. I'm looking at a little short of 4 hours. Min brightness, Wifi and backlit keyboard on, processor at 10%. I'm pretty disappointed hearing people pulling in 5 hours.

 

Your mileage can and will vary.

Then again, I cheated by disabling most of the programs I normally have running in the background. No trillian, no tuneup utilites, just antivirus.

 

called hp support, no help, they said they will not replace or recondition my batteries. i have two 8-cell both hitting 2.5 hours max. average/usual time is around 2hours. this is word processing about two or three files open, wifi using firefox surfing. no video or music.. i have my processor set at 15% max. still no help.. i called hp support and they gave me a bull answer on how the 5/6 hours claim is only on bios mode..

 

I have two brand new, used only once (to test) Envy 14 stock batteries (came with my Envy 14 Jan 27 - now in HP graveyard due to dead radiance, but they let me keep the original box, power supply and the two batteries I ordered for it. PM me if interested.

 

To my knowledge, both tomshardware and andtech have proven this claim to be false for gen 1 and 2 ssd drives. Intel currently has gen 3 drives out the door I haven't seen any strong benchmarks on them yet.

 

I normally pull about 4 hours, depending how heavily I use wifi. I just got my slice battery along with my second envy (for the wife) so I'll see how that works out. The 6 hours claim is widely bogus, perfect battery conditions, cold air, wifi off, brightness min, and cpu min usage and you might hit it, but whats the point?

I think for a fair amount of usage, from the battery threads, average people see 4 hours, and 2.5-3 on video playback (which is above average for a notebook).

But if that isn't going to cut it, I recommend the slice battery, should net you 10+ hours. If that still isn't good enough, I would recommend looking into the Acer timeline series, or the new samsung 9 series.

 

yeah I get like 3.5-4 hours of web browsing.


sometimes more like 3 hours, depends on how things go (and chrome apparently sucks a bit more battery life than other web browsers. Oh well, need to check out firefox 4 anyway)

 

Microsoft has an interesting article out comparing firefox 4, chrome 10, ie9, and opera's supposed energy usage. But I swear they are leaving out a key important piece of information. They have some charts related to webpage browsing but do not tell us if the browsers are flipping through pages, or just loading the page then staying there for minutes.

Most speed tests I've read lately, put Chrome at the top, especially chrome 11 (which isn't a stable release yet). If Chrome loads websites faster, and is circulating through them, it would stand to reason that Chrome would use more power, but in a real life scenario it just means you get more system Idle time.

More simply, you get stuff done faster, which is a far greater power savings.

 

Chrome and opera both use much less CPU than Firefox and IE.

A good test is to try em on older PCs. Chrome and Opera load fine on a Celeron 700, whereas Firefox and IE cripple it (which means more CPU usage). For me that sealed Firefox and IE's fate for a laptop.

I still use Firefox on my desktop tho.

 

According to Microsoft their IE9 is the most battery efficient browser available. See IE9 is the most energy-efficient modern browser, according to Microsoft's own testing -- Engadget for the results of their tests. Looks like Chrome is a real pig. The GPU acceleration seems to help FF4 and IE9, while Chrome is lagging behind in features since they only offer unofficial GPU acceleration (like all google products its in beta for the next 100 years).

 

No it's not...

 

Source? Or are you quoting some user over a official study by Microsoft?

 

well he's being skeptical since microsoft's study says their browser is the best.


anyway all I know is that chrome seems to drain battery a bit faster (though since I haven't done a "ok let's just sit here and browse the web for 4 hours" test to see if it lasts 4 hours...yeah.

kinda lack that free time

 

Yeah i started using chrome because at first everyone said it was the best for saving battery but now i'm not so sure. I get 3 1/2 hours, brightness 100%, and just surfing the net. If you figure out a better browser please let me know.

 

The SSD Diaries: Crucial's RealSSD C300 - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Seems like you'll save power by moving to an SSD...

 

Where in that chart is a traditional hdd?
To give you a comparison:
Benchmark Results: Power And Efficiency : Three 7200 RPM Notebook Hard Drives For 2011

Notice the idle, and maximum write for most of these drives fall between 1 and 3 watts. Same as the SSD's excluding the Corsair and Vertex 2.

Note, none of the HDD's cost 200+

So, I'll concede, if you are spending the big bucks on an SSD, yes you will see a savings, mostly marginal when looking at total system power. .5 watts? at idle, up to 1 watt under heavy load.

But for the most part, price per performance is still in favor of HDD's, as is storage space.

Why Upgrade to SSD's? Because 1, they are cool (I use one), 2 they are crazy fast. I installed windows 7 in 9 minutes, can't do that with an HDD.

Edit: I should mention, with some of the higher quality gen 2 ssd's, and with all of the gen 3 ssd's. If you are a user that moves around a lot of files (big files) or reads a lot of big files, you will see very good gains on battery life because of the speed of the ssd. This would include things like, High pixel photo editing, compiling large programs, moving large files, design programs (3dstudio, cad, etc). But would likely not extend to things like, listening to music or watching videos, where performance speed is irrelevant because you are limited to how fast a human can perceive said thing.
If you are person that spends most of their time in a browser or document processor, not so much. Your biggest battery gain here would likely be moving to a different OS.

 

This is both true and not true. Chrome is heavily optimized for slow computers and netbooks. I don't know much about Opera so I can't state an opinion on it, but I would imagine they too are optimized for low performance systems. This is likely due to Chrome's development as a cloud based OS for ppu based systems. (parallel processing units, like today's smartphones).

But Chrome will eat up more cpu on a fast machine, which is why chrome right now is the speed king for most tests. Chrome is also the fastest (in recent tests) at opening multiple webpages from a cold start in multiple tabs.

 

I've had an Envy 14 for about 6 months now. Average battery life for me has been 2.5 hours ever since I got it; using switchable graphics, brightness 30-40%, loads of Chrome tabs, bits of work (Photoshop, CAD), music, IM, Skype.

I just got a 120GB G2 Intel X25-M SSD and reinstalled Windows 7 on it. A combination of these two things means I now get 3.5 hours battery life on average. Running really nicely.

 

I think a clean install really helps. I have 2 envy's. One with a 640g 7200 and one intel x25-m 160g ssd. The envy with the ssd gets about an hour more but i think its mainly due to much less programs running and installed and less to do with the ssd itself.

 

So no batteries then......

 

There's still slice nad it is pretty darn good.

 

But its much too heavy. About twice the weight of a standard battery.

Are laptop batteries interchangeable?

Dell has a 95mWH batter for the XPS series (before at least), ...can we use those if they fit?
Or is there danger from using other non-envy 14 batteries?

 

IT is heavy because it has a metal frame.

No.

The will not fit. Even if they did the laptop would refuse to use them.

Danger of frying the computer.

Just buy a spare internal battery.