Envy 14 Battery Life Log

Does it take a few uses until you reach optimal power output from your battery? I have used my envy on battery a few times and so far I am not too impressed. I can def squeeze 3 hours or so with power saving tweaks but I feel like I should be getting 4 or more.

also, is this the batterybar program I keep hearing about?
Osiris Development - BatteryBar, the most accurate battery meter for Windows

I might want to install it to see how my numbers match up against other peoples'...

 

Just got my Envy 14 in last week, definately have questions about battery life
Specs Are:
:

* Intel Core i7-720QM Quad Core processor (1.6GHz)
* 4GB DDR3
* 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
* 14.5" LED Display (1600x900)
o Webcam and Dual Microphones
* 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphics
o HDMI
* SuperMulti 8X DL DVD+/-R/RW
* Intel Wireless-N Card + Bluetooth
* Backlit Keyboard
* 8 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
* Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

I just got it in a few days ago so I have only gotten about 2 full charges. But so far Windows is showing under 1 hour each time I fully charge it. It seems like im getting between 1-1.5 hours of battery life, so I definately have some issues. Heres my questions.

- What tweaks and setting changes did the i7 owners do to improve their battery life?
- What should my discharge rate look like after maybe 5 uses? right now I just installed the battery bar before the battery died and it was say -50,000. Most of the answers I am seeing in this thread are from i5 owners, would like to get some responses from i7 owners.
- For those that returned their i7's and get i5's instead. What did you tell HP tech support? I would like to keep the i7 but if the battery life doesnt improve this 1-1.5 battery life wont cut it and I will need to return it. Just want to know how you approached the situation with HP support.
-After how many charges should I be worried about having a bad battery?

This thread has been really useful, has alot of great info, thanks again in advance.

 

It would make sense that it would save battery life but i haven't messed with anything since i got it and i get 4 hours on power saving, 0% brightness, Blue tooth off

 

Basically, I decided to tweak this setup by setting "Maximum battery life" under the PCI express and wireless adapter power management settings under the High Performance power plan. I have also set my Synaptics TouchPad to turn off when a USB mouse is inserted.

With wifi on, I now get ~16000 mW discharge rate = ~ 3.5 hours. Not bad for Radiance at full blast. I suspect that I'd break the four hour barrier with wifi off + Radiance at Max.

Radiance is a beautiful screen....it should NOT be perverted by lowering it's brightness I'll edit this post once I test the settings the wifi off.

 

Oh and how do we clear our batterybar history?

 

i swear i've read your post 5 times and just now figured out what you are saying ha. I'm going to try this sounds awesome especially w/ slice.

 

I made a backup of swsetup folder and installed, but it's still asking me for my serial .
I registered for adobe but it has not seemed to do anything.

 

Just got my Envy with radiance and the battery is horrible, only lasts an hour on intel graphics. Thought it was the battery, so I put in my battery from my old Envy and I get the same results..I get over 4 hours on my old Envy with the same battery...I did a minimal recovery also to remove the bloatware. is something wrong with my motherboard? Or does the radiance display suck 3 hours of my battery?
I have i5 580, HDD, and brightness set to half.

 

I dont think there is anyway of telling without sending it in. Try the battery test at start up and check your battery. Also get battery bar and see what your discharge rate is. (it may take bat bar a few cycles to be fairly accurate)

 

battery bar gives me -51,000, and I get -14,000 in my old Envy. Both are the same specs except this has radiance..I dont understand why theres such a big difference with the same battery except that its defective..battery test says the battery is OK

 

I'm in the exact same situation, I'm going to let it run a few cycles before I take any action, it my just be because these are new machines and the results aren't yet accurate.

 

True, batterybar may not be accurate, and the battery might need a few charge cycles, but im using my old battery and checking the time on my own..im gonna try and update the bios and things and see how it goes. This never happened with my old Envy, it went 4 hours right out the box after my first charge..let me know how it is after a few days, hopefully we won't have to send it back

 

a few charges down the road, i still get -51060 but I last 4h or more...
So I think battery bar has a problem with that generation of envy's (the i7 I had before was showing a lower discharge rate)

Regardless, the time estimations are pretty close.

 

It seems that everyone that got an envy around the coupon radiance date is showing 51,000. I'm guessing they changed something since my old envy (dec 1st) that isn't allowing bat bar to read right.

 

could be..but are you guys actually getting 4 hours? @lammah, were you always getting 4 hours or did it increase over time? I dont care what batterybar says as long as I can actually make it past 4 hours

EDIT: just noticed that the new battery which came with my radiance Envy has 3760 mah labeled, while the older battery has 3800mah. wont make much difference but just saying..the HP part numbers are the same (RM08) but the other part numbers are different

 

I have
windows 7 x64 ultimate
services cleaned up from startup
msconfig to only let a total about 65 processes on startup.
clean install
tweaked power settings
lowest brightness
wifi OFF
bluetooth OFF
everything on battery saving tweaks

BUT yet still getting 12 - 14 k draws.
14k - 16k is when I have wifi on

How are you guys getting 9- 11k draws?

 

You forgot to list the processor. How much time are you getting w/ power saving and low brightness?

 

Ive only tested my battery while playing videos, but ive managed to get 3 Hrs off of it.

Do you guys think without videos it'd probably be 4 hrs and more?

 

I just got my Envy a week ago, and have managed to read through this entire battery life thread, so I just thought I could put in my 2 cents.

After reading through all the issues, drawing on my past experiences, and doing some tests on my own Envy 14, I've came to the conclusion that the envy 14's mobo is probably one of the worst designed mobo(in term of optimizing power consumption) EVER.

Here's why:
I've owned around 6 laptops in the past 3 years (what can I say, I'm a sucker for laptops), and have been very keen on battery life for all of them as it is an very important feature for me, so I'll list their power consumption characteristics here for comparison.

Disclaimer: I will talk about power consumption in term of watts quite a bit, as I believe this is a more empirical estimate on how long your battery would last. The main culprit of power consumption (in absence of a discreet GPU) will be the CPU, which is a pretty good predictor of what kind of battery life you can expect on your machine.

Asus R1E tablet. This was a great tablet that I had for about a year. It had a core 2 duo T7700 2.4Ghz CPU and was considered pretty decent back in the days of the old conroe architecture. Unfortunately that generation of processor was not very power efficient, as a result my power consumption hovered around 16W even at idle with minimum screen brightness, making the 55WHr stock battery only lasting 3:30 at best.

Asus UL50vt. Asus claimed a battery life of 12 hours with this 15.6 “thin and light”, which I thought was quite fantastical until I bought it and tested it out myself. The SU7300 CPU of the newer Penryn family really made great strides at controlling idle power consumption. Even with medium brightness and wifi on, the whole system can idle as low as 6-7W. With the stock 82Whr, it CAN actually hit 12 hours if all you’re doing is typing in word. Of course if you’re doing more cpu intensive stuff, the battery life will drop accordingly. But in real life usage scenarios with lots of heavy web browing, I’ve never had less than 7 hours of usage.

Acer 4820T. This was the first time that I experienced the newest Core i series processor. I have to say, intel really outdid themselves when it came to efficiency. Even though the core i5 450M that I had was a standard voltage processor, it had the same idling characteristics of the old CULVs! With my 14in Acer, I can idle at 7-8W while typing in word and surfing flash-less websites. Which meant my 48Whr battery can last around 6 hours if I was frugal enough.

Now enter the much hyped Envy 14 and HP’s claim of “up to 6 hours of battery life”. First and foremost, trying to get a reading of power consumption is a pain the butt with this machine. With all my previous computers, batterybar worked flawlessly at retrieving the discharge rate. It updates once every 5 secs or so, so you can see the impact of your action (opening a file, clicking a website, watching a video) on power consumption immediately. For example, say that I was idling with 50% brightness with my acer, batterybar would indicate a discharge rate of 8W. I would turn the brightness all the way to 100%, one refresh cycle of 5 secs later, batterybar would then indicates a power draw of 10W. So I immediately knew how much power my LCD can consume.

However, as many of you already know, this is not the case with the Envy. You have to wait a good 5-10 min before batterybar refreshes and tell you the current discharge rate, and it would still only say “(estimated)”. My guess is that the mobo does not have a sensor for power draw, so batterybar has to calculate it after a certain percentage of battery has been drained, and then divide the amount drained by the time lapsed, which means there’s no way of knowing the actual power draw right at this moment.

My second complaint with the Envy, is that a huge number of users are reporting 12-17W of power draw on IDLE. And these are the lucky ones, since there are users who are seeing power draw as high as 20W while doing nothing more than web surfing. This level of power draw is unacceptable when you compare it to my old acer 4820t, which has identical CPU, GPU (when on intel) screen size, as well as HDD. The CPU cannot be the culprit here, as intel designed it to be very power efficient while idling and I feel no heat coming out of the vents (in fact the fans aren’t even running half the time on my acer, that’s how cool and efficient these i5 chips can run!). Screen cannot be a power hog, as people who are idling use minimum brightness.

So what’s contributing to this 5-10W of power consumption discrepancy between my envy and acer? My best guess is the mobo, which is why I believe envy’s mobo is not handling efficiency very well and is sucking valuable battery juice while doing nothing. Remember even 5W is a lot, with a 58Whr battery, idling at 7W gives you 8 hours of battery life, while idling at 12W only gives you 4 and half.

So to everyone who thinks 4 hours of battery life is a good run, I’m telling you that the engineers of envy could have done a lot better. As of right now, I’m typing this post in word with a chat client and chrome open, with no cpu intensive tasks open, brightness on full, keyboard backlight now, power saver, I’m seeing a power draw of 14W. With my sold-but-not-yet-shipped- acer, just for comparison’s sake, I opened up word and chrome, turned on screen brightness and backlit keyboard, measured with batterybar, and got a power draw of 9.5W (see pics). If only we could have the mobo from my trusty acer, we would all be basking in the glory of 6-8 hours of battery life right now. But sadly, we have a stunningly beautiful chassis containing a piece of sh*t mobo that HP whipped up as an afterthought.




Sorry for the long rant, I realize that this is quite a long post. But I hope this will make people realize that the Envy 14 had the potential of great battery life given its choice of components. We as consumers who paid a premium for this premium product should expect premium quality as well, and should not make any compromise just cuz HP got lazy when designing their mobo.

 

i5
And its about 3 hours and 45 minutes.

Everything has been tweaked (up to the best of my knowledge) and I've read through this thread a few times already.

But feel free to point out some other stuff I can do.

 

if you check hp's website now it says 3:45 mins for battery so if it doesn't get any better you may sol.

 

i have two batterys both running at about 2 hours max. i5 560m, 6gb ram, doing web browser and email only.. if i do the entire hassle with hp to exchange batteries, will it be the same crappy batteries that last two hours.. its a brand new envy btw just one week old.. clean install and everything..

 

I was in the same boat (ordered my envy around the time of the $500 coupon), just changed my power settings DRASTICALLY and it seemed to fix it.

i5 580m
6gb ram
Wifi ON
Bluetooth OFF
Integrated gpu on
Full Brightness (Radiance)
Wireless Mouse Connected
Touchpad off

In power settings, I set everything to low, wifi speed included, and I changed synaptics to automatically stop when a mouse is connected. Minimal programs running (chrome with six tabs), cleaned up processes. Got about 8.8k power draws and 3:30 run time. I'm sure it'd be better with radiance display on low, but like a previous poster said, it'd almost be a waste turning that down =)

I'll post some times with the slice battery as well at some point.

 

The first 1-1 1/2 weeks i had the same problem and by week 2 1/2 i was getting 4 hours. wait it out man.

 

In my power struggle to with HP to get my new Envy set up the way I would like, I may have run across a reason that some many people are suffering poor battery life out of the box. I won't bore you with the details but I was having issues getting Photoshop Elements 8 re-installed on my Envy after having run an MIR. As a result, for the first few days of ownership, I did not have it installed. I was averaging around 4 hours of battery life, sometimes a bit more, sometimes shortly less. I finally got PSE 8 re-installed and I immediately noticed a big drop in battery time, down to about 2:30 hours and it sounded like the fan was kicking in on regular basis.

Upon looking in the task manager under processes, I found a process running called "ElementsAutoAnalyzer" the was using well above 100,000k of memory consistently, even with Elements not running. I immediately uninstalled PSE 8 and battery life returned to normal. I then re-installed it to see if the same problem returned. It did but not as severe. Now, the process seemed to peak at 65,000k of memory and the CPU usage was more normal for idle but it was also running on startup, despite the fact that I didn't have PSE 8 running on startup. I dug through the startup manager and found something called CAHeadless that is associated with PSE 8 and disabled it.

Problem solved... mostly. The ElementsAutoAnalyzer process still starts when you start PSE 8 and does not go away when you close the program but, for whatever reason, it has never managed to go off the charts in memory usage since the re-install of PSE 8. I guess if it really annoys you that it is running in the background, you can always manually end the process. Not sure if this is relevant to any of the problems that other folks were having but it seems to have made a big difference for me.

Update:
As it turns out, that did not solve the issue and ElementsAutoAnalyzer did eventually run away again and start using gobs of memory and CPU. I did some more digging and found the solution. Apparently, this Auto Analyzer is a new feature that Adobe added to PSE 8. Fortunately, there is a function to turn it off w/i the program. Here's how:

1. Open PSE 8
2. Open the Organizer
3. Go the Edit tab and scroll to Preferences
4. Click on Auto-Analyzer Options
5. Here you will have the power control whether to disable the Auto-Analyzer from start-up or to disable it all together. I disabled it all together because I don't want to have to deal with discontinuing the process in the task manager if I use and then close PSE 8.

This solution has worked. Seems to me that this was a bad software programming decision by Adobe. It is completely ridiculous to have a program that is constantly running in the background and using up more CPU and memory than active programs.

 

Since I hadn't done it for a long time, ran a check last night for battery time. Starting with a full charge, battery bar showed 3:47, though it used to show over 4:00 when I first got my Envy.

i5 450m
4gb ram
320HD @ 7200
Wifi ON
Bluetooth OFF
Integrated gpu on
appx. 30% brightness (Radiance)
Fan settings: always on & passive

Running in Power Saver mode, I changed the HD to shut off after 3 minutes, screen dim to never, sleep to never, and proceeded to surf away, mainly on various forums, though I downloaded a couple of things, so typical couch usage stuff for me. I ended up getting 4:23, and then it shut off, still showing I had about 12 minutes left and about 8% battery left. So I'm happy. Anything over 4 hours I consider good, and I think I can get a little more by changing the wi-fi card settings and maybe the igpu settings as people have mentioned. Btw, my discharge rates typically ranged from upper 11K to mid 12K, though towards the end it got down into the mid 10K range.

 

So I installed Battery Bar and its showing lifetime as 1:58...

Now thats with Full Brightness, High Performance, Wi-Fi On, and the High Performance GPU.

Is there a way to get it to check after dimming the screen and turning off Wi-Fi/putting it on Power-Saving GPU?

 

There should be a battery bar sticky that says it takes 2 weeks to become somewhat accurate.

 

That's a good idea, though I still don't think that battery bar is very accurate when it comes to "guestimating" battery time, but I like the discharge rate feature as maybe a more useful "tool".

 

Mine is pretty dead on considering its just an average of all your lifetimes.

 

And are there any higher capacity batteries?
I got a new envy 14 and the battery is only 56000 whereas my current older envy 14 started with 59000 mah.

 

yea I noticed that too, but it won't really make much difference. You could get a slice battery but thats about it

 

I guess the new batteries have a bit less capacity or something.

mine's still going strong at roughly 4 hours and 56758 mWH (out of 59200) and I had it at launch.

 

Anyone who has got their Envy 14's in the last 2-3 weeks who had the Discharge rate of -51,060 mW see any changes?

I get great battery life, however its so annoying that Windows 7 still thinks I only have 1 hr of battery life at a full charge. Thank goodness I have BatteryBar that allows me to see a somewhat better estimation but I would like to see if this can be fixed!

 

i still get he 51,060 discharge rate, it's been more than a week.
I think it's probably batterybar that needs to be updated

 

same discharge rate here on my new envy. Only lasting about 3:25 on full charge, fully tweaked with minimal install.

 

I think it's something with the battery otherwise windows 7 wouldn't always say 1 hr total runtime on a full charge.

 

it's the motherboard, it has a lot of bugs which is why you can never accurately measure the battery

 

Waleed, but others have accurate discharge rates.. No idea why it would be like this

 

because they have the older models, the recent batch (starting January I think) is when they changed something in the motherboard, that's why everyone who recently ordered has this problem..my old Envy from December does not have this problem, and when I opened it the motherboard looked significantly different

 

So they possibly changed the design of the mobo, and the current drivers are not allowing it to estimate time correctly.. could be a possibility

 

i5-520
640GB HD 5400rpm
Standard Battery
Factory image de-crapified
Bluetooth off
Web surfing, Youtube, 3/4 brightness

managed 3:27 tonight

 

i5-520
500 gb 7200 rpm
Standard battery
Bluetooth off
Screen minimum
Wifi off
Typing notes and recording in onenote

4.5 hours.

 

All you guys with the incorrect battery estimation problem who just took delivery on your Envy's within the last month.. Please make HP aware of this problem so it gets resolved.

Submit an email to them: HP Warranty Check for Email Support HP ENVY 14t-1200 CTO Notebook PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

 

check the battery's capacity with hw monitor to make sure that's not causing the issues.

also, youtube does like to kill battery life (flash either 100% cpu usage or hardware gpu acceleration. pick your poison)

 

Is the incorrect estimate of battery time left, something that can be solved with a driver update? Or is it a permanent hardware issue?

 

may be a permanent hardware issue. May just be a bios issue

batterybar may say "screw it" and work anyway (some 3rd party thing that you can try out for a month. It reports drain but also tries to guesstimate the battery life over how long it actually lasted in real time.)

 

I downloaded hwmonitor but it didn't have anything about battery.

 

maybe they took it out/the sensors were changed in later envy14s.


I'm using HWMonitor version 1.16.



edit: *checks the newest version* yeah. battery capacity info disappears in version 1.17.

this link to 1.16 should work: http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.16-setup.exe

 

Sweet! it works! I wish it had discharge rates since nothing can tell me what my battery discharges.