Envy 14 Battery Life Log

I am currently getting just over 4hours battery life (4:15 at best). My brightness is about 60%, writing stuff on word and light web browsing-light as in one tab open in google chrome reading stuff for school on the net. And whenever I'm not on the internet I turn the wireless off but I would say it is on for 75% of the time. Bluetooth was also off, sound on mute, power saving option, Intel GPU and I even turned down the wireless cards Transmit Power and Roaming Aggressiveness down in Device Manager. I have cut down on the processes running (the ones I felt comfortable turning off) and now have about 50-60 max running. I even turn 2 cores off when on battery (completely) in msconfig. So when on battery the CPU is using 2% average (2 cores) and 1.2GB RAM is in use.

Specs: Intel i5-450m CPU, 4GB RAM, single 8-cell battery and 1600x900 Radiance Infinity Screen. And this is after a clean install by the way.

Is there any way I can improve my battery life? I really need to squeeze every minute out for school. I was hoping something closer to 5 hours.

 

I've had my base Envy 14 with an upgrade to an i5-450 processor for more than a month now.

My two friends with the same laptop and I have gotten around 4:05 of battery life in power saver, on-board graphics, and 50% brightness.

Recently, I've been getting at most 2:30 under the same settings. I've been reading around this thread and it seems to be a motherboard problem. I have definitely gone over the RMA period, so does this mean I'm basically screwed? I started classes now and really don't have the opportunity to send in my laptop to wait for a new one. Are there any other possible reasons for my short battery life? Background programs, etc. that I can fix myself

 

Ditto! It's so annoying.

 

Minimum brightness is one thing you can do for a tiny boost, but with your usage, and by that I'm assuming that you're pretty consistently using Word or Chrome or both, 4:15 is quite good. You start getting into the 4:45's and 5:00's when you've got a good battery, good power-saving techniques, and a lot of idle time...

 

A word to the wise on BatteryBar's Full Lifetime rating:

Full Lifetime is affected by your actual usage on battery. It is an amalgamation of past and current results, and as such, is only of limited use to most people.

For example, if, like me, you typically run your E14 on the slice battery at work, and use good power-saving measures with low-power productivity usage, then BatteryBar will give you high marks in the Full Lifetime category, as long as you don't have one of the dreaded duds.

However, if, also like me, you start using your E14 on battery in other situations, where power management is not so important (example: practicing Skritter on the couch at full brightness with music playing), it's going to reduce your BatteryBar's Full Lifetime estimate. In my case, my work behavior was getting 8+ hours and often finishing the day with 25-30% remaining (with the Slice in), though BatteryBar was only reporting about 8:30 full lifetime. Once I started adding in higher-drain activity outside of work, the estimate dropped to 8:00, and will probably consider to drop as I continue to use the battery for more than just Word and Chrome.

So, two pieces of advice:

1) Don't trust BatteryBar to tell you how long your battery is lasting or will last in the future. It gives some good information, but its Full Lifetime estimate is sketchy at best, and it doesn't report how long your actual session lasted, so you need to get your battery lifetime numbers from some other source, such as a clock.

2) Don't change what you do to appease BatteryBar. This might be a no-brainer to most people, but some people, myself included, have a bad habit of overvaluing a computer-generated number, and will strive to make that number look more favorable, even at the expense of the things that number is supposed to represent. You might end up with a higher estimate in BatteryBar, but even if you get it up to 20 hours somehow, it does you no good unless you're actually using the computer during that time.

 

AMEN Brother, AMEN! It's a tool so use it and when it's not up to snuff anymore, replace it.

Battery Bar is a nice app for determining your battery Draw, but those time estimates are no better than an individual randomly looking at a clock every so often.

 

I know battery bar is just an estimate but I'm getting like 2 1/2 hours at lowest lowest settings just surfing web using Microsoft and listening to music!?

i5 520m, radiance, 500gb HDD

 

Yeah as I said above I am too, and I have no idea how these people are getting so much more life out of theirs... we must be doing something incredibly wrong...

 

It sounds like you have the motherboard problem that results in excessive battery drain. You might also want to go and start disabling as many startup processes as possible using msconfig or ccleaner and then testing you battery life.

 

My draw spikes considerably when I listen to music. First off, make sure you're timing it yourself, and not just trusting BatteryBar's estimate. Second, try a session with no music and see how it affects your battery life.

 

Wrong. Benchmarks show the new MBP regularly gets 8hrs or more out of the reported 10.

 

Would changing the settings in msconfig so that only 1 core is being used save any battery life? Has anyone tried this?

 

Macworld’s 13″ MacBook Pro Review: The 10-Hour Battery Lasts Four Hours | Cult of Mac
Review Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch i7 2010-04 Notebook - Notebookcheck Reviews

Sure, +10 hours on idle.

 

Ok. Let's go down the line.


1. Good source. I love notebook check. I consider them a trusted name among notebook/hardware websites.

2. Good article. Well organized.


Problem:

I was talking about the Macbook Pro 13. Sorry, I guess I should've clarified.

But now that you bring that up, let's talk! The 10-hour battery life is for the Macbook Pro 13. Apple advertises 8-9 hrs for the Macbook Pro 15.


But let's discuss the article's findings.



I regularly get 3-4 hours of battery life on my Envy 14 when I'm just typing and flipping around OneNote/Microsoft Word and occasionally reading e-mails with the brightness tuned down 2-3 notches. Though the article lists a number of battery test results conducted using certain tasks, it regretfully doesn't include any figures for long hours of Microsoft Word/OneNote usage. Unless a Macbook Pro 15 owner(s) can provide us some numbers, all we can do for comparative purposes is make guesstimates as to how many hours of battery life a typical student such as myself would get with the brightness turned down a couple of notches.

From the article:

NOTE: Their WLAN test doesn't just consist of light activities like opening Gmail every 20 minutes. It consists of streaming Youtube vids which can use up battery life in a hurry. Your 5-6 hour mention is probably a reference to DVD playback or youtube-surfing. I'm going to have to conclude from the higher point of 11:24 for idle usage and 6:38 during DVD playback that the Macbook Pro 15 would probably still outdo my Envy 14 by a wide margin. My personal estimate for how much battery life the MBP 15 would get with the brightness turned down moderately low, wifi turned off, and Microsoft Word running is placed at about 7-8 hours--if not even higher. Hopefully someone can give me an actual test that utilizes these conditions.

Conclusion

My past comments were concerned primarily with squeezing as much battery life out of the Envy with few active applications running like Microsoft Word/OneNote and wifi turned off. I think it's only fair that if we're going to make Macbook Pro 13 vs. Envy 14 or Macbook Pro 15 vs. Envy 14 comparisons, we may as well hold the MBPs to the same tests which in this would mean gauging battery life under the same conditions that I hold my Envy 14. It's in light of all this I'm compelled to conclude that we may have to look to a potential open-source OS in the future that allows OEMs to create customized battery life management software.


I'm no Apple fanboy or hater, it's just the fact of life.


But do I regret my purchase? Not at all! Reasons in short:

1. Price. After my "first" BCB and $70 money back from CSR, my notebook was priced at roughly $900-950. This, of course, excludes the additional $382.50 that Microsoft accidentally donated to me. Sorry Apple fanboys, but there isn't and probably won't ever be a Macbook Pro deal that meets or beats what I got

2. Screen. There's something gratifying about seeing more than half your class have Macbook/Pros out with screens that are inferior to yours. I'll give them a point for having a glass screen, but everything just comes out looking better on the Radiance display. Tack on the fact that the resolution and screen size are THE perfect portability combo, and this is one of the deal sealers that ends any Envy v. Macbook Pro debate.

3. Power. For $900-950, I got an i5-520M that blazes through everything. No crashes and certainly no idiotic kernel panics.

4. Windows. I tried OSX...and it just wasn't for me. I guess I've always been a Windows kid at heart.

 

Ehh... we can argue about the exact battery life of the Macbook Pro all day, but atleast we all can agree that the Macbook Pro does have better battery life mainly because of its huge battery and OSX...
I honestly think if you're going to be using a laptop for 5+ hours, you should be near a AC outlet. 3-4 hours is more than enough for me so I'm pretty happy with my Envy.

 

Amen - I'm in the same "I don't like OSX, so deal with it" crowd. I could see how XP, which wasn't nearly as slick as OSX was by the end of its run, or early, bugged-to-hell Vista would have made a lot of converts to OSX, since people wanted pretty baubles and they didn't want to deal with the bugs, crashes, and numerous driver issues users of those versions of Windows were getting, but Windows 7 is an excellent OS, so there's no need of an alternative. Particularly not an alternative that requires an overpriced, proprietary piece of hardware to run it. Sure, Macs may have better battery life, but I have better battery life with the slice. Sure, Macs may have a better touchpad, but as an external mouse user, the current Synaptics line with a few driver tweaks (and Reil's nice little app) will do for me when I need it. In the end, I got more computer for significantly less money, and that's the most significant reason why I have no plans of ever buying from Apple.

 

Oh, a bit more evidence of the inadequacy of BatteryBar's Full Lifetime estimate - mine dropped from about 8:05 to 7:24 (with the slice) overnight without using the battery at all. It's currently reading 92.6% charged, 8:25 remaining, and 7:24 full lifetime.

So once again, it's a nice little tool, but relying on it will do you little good.

 

13hrs with slice.
Finally got a replacement computer (old one had approx 7hrs w/slice). Settings: Power saver, brightness at second to lowest notch, wifi off, bluetooth off, integrated graphics, idle only.

i5 - 520, 1x4gb ddr3, 500gb hdd, infinity radiance

 

wow after a clean install on 40% brightness, light browsing/word processing, bluetooth i'm getting about 5 - 5.5 hours now

 

You also might want to go into system config. Once in, check the boot settings advanced options. At the top of the window, you will find a section that asks how many processors. The options are 1 or 2 (unless you have a quad core). Though most of us have 2 processors, for some reason, leaving it on 2 reduces battery life by about 1/2. I don't know if HP has done their battery life tests with 1 processor in the dropdown box or 2. But if yours says 2, try changing it to 1. If it is already at 1, you probably have a dud, like I did. HP built me a new system, and I am getting about 13hrs on idle with slice (I was getting about 7 on the one I sent back).

 

Is that with slice?

 

nope, just regular eight cell

 

No battery bar but from what I did I think it's a pretty good measure of what I got during a 90 min lecture + 30ish mins before and after the lecture

Brightness: min - 3 clicks above min, depending on whether lights were on or off in lecture hall.

wifi: I lowered the power of my wifi to medium since UBC has wifi everywhere and it's a consistently strong signal everywhere.

At the time of this post it says 50% so around 4 hours of life total

Use: I downloaded and installed left for dead 2, TF2, CS:S and alien swarm off of steam in that time in addition to viewing a few pdfs for class, word for notetaking and msning with a friend.

Not bad at all, I plan to get battery bar and test it properly but I think changing the wifi strength and brightness makes a huge difference in battery life.

 

Is this a dud battery or a bad build overall? D:

 

If you are asking about my original, it was not the battery, but a problem with the screen (at least that's what they told me). With respect to any other system not achieving the advertised battery life, you'd have to try a new battery first. But, I would look at the discharge rate. If it is over 10,000, it's probably something with the system rather than the battery. At least that was my experience.

 

It doubled my battery life.

 

In the first post of the envyt 14 owners lounge it says not to touch the msconfig CPU settings. does it really double battery life? Everyone is saying not to touch it

 

ummm...no clue about it really doubling battery life.

it does make windows think you only have 1 processor instead of 2 cores and/or 4 threads (and the temp reading on hwmonitor goes way up)

 

Check your settings. It might already be set to 1 core. Mine actually came that way. I changed it to 2 and immediately noticed that the battery life was reduced by half. When I changed it back to the original setting (1 core) it returned to the original battery life (over 6hrs on standard and 13+ w/slice)

 

I havn't got my envy yet, its said to "ship" 9/22, hopefully it's sooner.
I was hoping to get 4+ hours with 2 cores/4threads running.

Have you noticed any more heat while just having 1 core? I hear it's hotter with 1 core instead of 2. Also, you said you have 1 core, do you notice a big decrease in performace? how are you getting 6 hours.. like what are you doing/running to makeit last 6 hours? or is it just idle?

Sorry for all the question.

 

is there a way to quickly switch between 1/2 core in windows to save battery life??

 

From what I've heard, the core-switching thing doesn't actually work properly, quoting from the first page of the owners lounge:

This discovery was prompted (if I recall correctly) by some people noticing that msconfig had one processor checked, and tried bumping to two. It could be that it's actually asking about physical processor chips, rather than cores , and that's the issue. Considering that my CPU meter reads four threads and all of them are active from time to time with msconfig set to 1 processor, I would keep this option at 1.

Besides, if it were meant to read the amount of cores or threads, you'd think the option would be higher, as there are 6-core processors out there, and 8 cores either available or on the verge of availability, while I believe the heaviest motherboards support a maximum of four physical processors.

 

So I'm quite certain I have the mobo problem which kills my battery life. Do you think HP will still replace mine after my RMA date? And if they do, would they send me a new one before I send mine back? I sort of need a computer every day since I'm in school

 

A) Yes, they should repair it outside of the RMA date, though you might have to bother them more without that bargaining chip on the table.

B) No, they're not going to send you a loaner computer in the meantime. This just isn't something that would make sense for a computer company; it would cost tens of millions a year in equipment, shipping, and maintenance costs for HP to have loaners available for people receiving warranty service. I'm sure a premium manufacturer could (and maybe one day will) offer this kind of service, but it'll be built into your warranty price, if not the price of the computer itself.

 

Processor: i5-430m
HDD: 640gb 5400rpm
Standard battery
Default windows power saver profile

I got 3.5 hours light usage with about 1 hour left on the battery. This is using the discreet ATI 5650 gfx, NOT the integrated Intel gfx.

When I say light usage I mean on wifi at school, browsing the web, writing notes for class in office and playing games when I get bored. To note as well I played civilization 5 today for about 15 mins while on battery so that kind of skews my battery run time. Tomorrow I ought to have a better chance to gauge the battery life.

 

I've noticed that on my E14, BatteryBar simply does not yet provide any sort of accurate idea of total life. It seems to be accurate in terms of draw, but I got 3.5 hours the other night with 25% remaining, and BatteryBar was still "estimating" 3 hours.

I installed on my Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC, and it immediately estimated a reasonable total time. So, at least on my system, I'm not getting accurate results out of BatteryBar for some reason.

I should note that I'm drawing 10K-13K mW on my Dell with its ULV processor and 12.1" screen on very low brightness, compared to 12K-14K on my E14. I'd say that's pretty impressive for the E14, and not so impressive for the Dell.

 

When I get my envy on the 28th, I will only use battery meter to see how much my battery is drawing MW. For actual time, I will do a few tests each with a stop watch next to my machine. Those battery meters are not accurate enough.

 

FWIW Ive found IE9 to be easier on the battery (According to Battery Bar drain calcs) than Chrome which was peviously found to be better than Firefox.

 

That actually sounds pretty good, considering most people (myself included) seem to only get slightly better than 3.5 hours on the integrated gfx.

 

So... after having my Envy for about a month now, I can manage to get around 4:40 with my battery during school with WiFi on and integrated graphics and doing some basic searching (only when the class requires it) and taking notes and reading Adobe PDF documents. (My specs are in the signature).

One thing that I notice (using BatteryBar) is that my battery wear is already at 2.6% . Is this normal??? Because this seems to be very high (to me at least) when I'm letting the battery discharge almost fully (I normally plug it in once it gets down to about 4% and let it charge for about 2 hours since that's the time it takes for the battery to hit 100% when it's shutdown). I really do not want my battery to have a maximum life of 30 minutes at the end of my school year...

 

your battery is fine. mine came with 3%.

it's normal unless your battery has like 10% wear initially or something.

 

From what I understand about lithium ion batteries, you don't want to do full discharges like that more often than you have to. They prefer to be kept topped off. So, you could very well be wearing out your battery more by this habit than if you topped off whenever you get a chance.

 

Hmmmm. Odd, I always thought that it was the opposite way

 

Here's some info: How to prolong lithium-based batteries.

The pertinent part:

Some additional sites that concur:

The care and feeding of Li-Ion batteries | User Support | TechRepublic.com
Lithium Batteries -- Proper Care & Use
Proper Care Extends Li-Ion Battery Life Page of

 

I have a vagabond for my photograhy lights, and it is said to keep it topped off, always plugged in when not using it. Not sure if I am supposed to drain it 100% then charge it back up, but since it says keep it topped off, I assume not.

 

There is actually a great wright up on Notebook batteries on this forum, see: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...et-upgrades/91846-notebook-battery-guide.html

I charged my Envy battery 5 times now. I'm getting 5 hours of life out of it before it almost goes critical (normal use on Intel GPU). Now I just plug in the charger around 20%. I think keeping the battery topped of isn't that good and will make this batteries lazy. Once in a while the whole chemical process of charging/discharging should take place.

 

Got my Envy 14 today:

i5-450
HDD 320GB
Standard battery

- Restarted my computer 4 times
- Watched 4 youtube videos
- Deleted almost all the bloatware (took a while)
- Installed: photoshop, McAfee, Virtual PC 2007, Itunes, Quicktime, MS Office - 2007, Windows updates, McAfee updates (15 minutes for McAfee updates alone).
- Wireless mouse
- Light browsing
- Had my external HD hooked up for like 10 minutes
- Wifi On
- Bluetooth Off
- Screen brightness 2 down from brightest
- Intel GPU of course
- HP recommended

Runtime: 4:02
Not bad, for all the deleteing and installing I did, I think at least.


*edit- My battery was at 12% I didn;t want to run it down all the way.
I like how when you plug in the charger, the light is red, instead of blinking white

 

I've got a DM4, and I got at least 4hrs and some before I fell asleep. Think it was at 20% remaining if I'm not mistaken...or something. But something like that.

The entire time it was running in balanced mode with intel GPU playing a full-screen torrent movie (was on repeat)...screen at abt 60 or 70%, wireless on, bt off. Is that good?

 

Does everyone use BatteryBar? I've been contemplating installing it because I like to see estimates in terms of time, of how long my battery has left. On the other hand, I have a mild case of OCD and don't like programs (other than the essentials) load automatically during startup :S (I can't be the only person that is like this...right? )

 

Bluetooth: OFF
Wireless: OFF
Screen: MINIMUM or 0%
GPU: INTEL
Backlit keyboard: OFF
Running 57 processes on clean instal.
Watching (2) DVD's in the dvd slot load drive

Runtime: 3:20 with 12% left.

I'm sure watching a Movie from the HDD instead of the Slot load DVD drive will last longer.

I will try again tomorrow with the screen full and report back.