Envy 14 Battery Life (Refresh with 6630)

I'm considering selling my Envy 15 for the new Envy 14 mainly for the portability.

Envy 15's quite a beastly machine, but battery life is nonexistent and it's quite large.

I'm debating between the Envy 14 and the Sony VAIO SA (13" with a 6630, but double the price).

What is the battery life on the new Envy 14 refresh? I know it has switchable graphics but I haven't been able to find any solid numbers for battery life yet.

 

I'm interested in the same--I've read too many stories about the 1h battery debacle. That's just ridiculous.

 

1 hour?

That's a glitch found in the original non-SB envy, where Windows would report 1hr but the actual life was much longer. I don't know if it still exists in the new SB one.

SB procs + switchable graphics should get higher battery life.

The 6630 is based on the old 5000 series and is pretty much the same as the 5650, so you're looking at the sameish consumption (within 2-3 watts of the 5650).

The main part is the switchable graphics and the SB procs. SB will be between 10-15% more battery efficient

 

so.... what's the realistic battery life of the new envy 14?

anyone have numbers for the following:

on board gpu + wifi
on board gpu
dgpu + wifi
dgpu

?

 

The few people who've received theirs said 5 hours.

So I'm guessing with integrated graphics and normal internet surfing you can easily get 5 hours.
If you lower the screen brightness, probably you can squeeze 6 hours.
That's my estimate.

The Envy 14's battery has a higher capacity than the Vaio SA. (built in) I think the Envy has about 60 Whr while the Vaio has about 48 Whr. So find out the SA's battery life and tack on about 0.5-1 hour.

 

the vaio s seems to have a fairly consistent battery life of 5.5 hrs in stamina mode (onboard, bluray drive off, wifi on).

 

oh, that sounds good. i'm really wishing for 6+ hours for just classwork and a little bit of browsing, music, videos, etc. so i'm guessing that's a little bit much, but it's not too bad. i'm not sure if i want to invest in a second battery though; any opinions on that?

 

from what i've seen if you want 6 hrs of batt life you're going to need a macbook.

 

6 hours has been reached with a little tweaking of the old i5. New one should be even better, especially with the slice if you want it.

 

so basically its safe to say envy 14 refresh should get around 5 hrs w/ onboard?

 

yep, I just got my SB today, amazing, srsly loving it, I Had a 5-6 hour time left w/o the backlit keyboard though, with it, it dropped to like 4 hours

OH! and this is with the i7 2630qm

 

6 hours is possible (5.5 was more realistic) with my old e14 doing very light browsing and mostly notes with 60% brightness.

 

Do you guys have a slice battery? I'm really considering getting an extra battery--just to take advantage of it, seeing as to how that's not possible with the MBP. I'm torn between getting a conventional internal battery and the really cool slice battery. The slice is really cool in that it is used in conjunction with the internal, so at night, I can just attach the slice and hook it up to the power adapter, and both batteries would be charged. But having the slice on all the time does apparently make the laptop significantly heavier, thicker, and uglier.

My plan that I sorta came up with a while ago is to carry my slice with me--being flat, it should just slide into a laptop bag or something (would the hinges get damaged if I were to do this?)--and just attaching it when my internal battery starts to run low. It will keep the awesome form factor of the Envy for as long as I can, and I need more battery life, I just attach the slice. How do you guys use your slice?

 

How...I'm dying to hear this right now.

 

Lowered brightness, limited CPU speed, integrated, wifi power settings tweaked.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6493133-post41.html

This guy got 7 hours with 16% left with wifi mostly off. So 6 hours total with wifi on should be reasonable. However, you won't get 6 hours web browsing if that's what you want.

edit: Oh, he has an SSD. That would explain a lot.

 

However, I heard power savings from SSD's are almost neglegible.

I've done ALL of that (clean install, tweaked ...etc.) but still only get about 4 hours .

Wifi off. Everything tweaked. Just onenote to take notes (no audio recording)...etc.

I'm wondering if the newer bios versions will help (I'm on F.12 and .13 says that it has "power saving " benefits)