Envy 14 Battery Life Log

i5 580m
Brightness all the way down
Intel Integrated Graphics
Wifi off
Very, very light use
Regular battery (no slice)
Processor state max set to 10%
close to 8:00!

 

How are you changing your max processor state? I might give this a go? Have you been able to watch 480p video on 10% cpu?

 

10% CPU? wow that is very aggressive. If that can lead to 8 hour run time, then there's something seriously wrong with envy's internal power management, as in my past experience, setting the max cpu to 40% made no difference than 100% for the core i5 chips.

Btw for future reference, let's get all the electrical units straight:

Discharge Rate should be in either Watts (W) or miliwatts(mW), and there's no such thing as "14k", as that that would be implying 14 kilo miliwatts, which is very redundant.
The discharge rate should be anywhere from 8-20W or 8,000 to 20,000 miliwatts depending on usage. As you can see writing "8W" is a lot easier than "8,000 mW".
Battery capacity should be in units of miliwatt hour (mWHr) or watt hour(WHr). Our Envy has a battery capacity of 59WHr, which means it will last around 5 hours at discharge rate of 11W, or 3 hours for discharge rate of 20W. Basic E&M here folks, don't get it wrong.

 

i5 520
radiance
backlit keyboard on
wifi on, bluetooth off
screen full brightness
regular batt
power save, cpu max 10%

zackb15's method worked! I used to hit 17W in discharge rate while idling when CPU max was set to 40%, now I'm seeing 14W. This should result in 50min increase in battery life.

I will play around with the settings a bit more tomorrow and post the results.

 

I gave my i5 580M a spin with the integrated graphics and I barely make ti to 3 hours.

Thats with dimming the brightness and only using browsing and Microsoft Word.

Not sure if theres anything else I can do.

 

Try lowering your max cpu level to 10%, and min to 1%. I'm seeing a couple of watts reduction in power usage while browsing and stuff, and even more while idling. So you should see about a 20min-1hour increase.

 

i was wondering i read several post saying how the battery has evolved and better tech. it doesnt lose "memory" in its charge. so is it healthy/safe to constantly charge and discharge. i use my laptop for 10-30 mintues and then charge it. i never discharge the whole way. i do this about three times a day..

 

Wouldn't that really affect performance though?


I have been testing mine on the High Performance. You think that makes a difference?

 

I'm thinking of getting the slice (if/when it comes back in stock) because I ended up getting stuck with an i7 envy instead of the i5-580m like I had purchased originally. Is this a good idea (worth the $200ish), or is it possible to get 2 1/2 hours with the standard battery on the i7-720qm?

 

I'm getting between 12-15W with average usage.

Turning the brightness down, disabling Windows Aero transparency, using Intel GMA on full battery savings, and disabling the WiFi adapter drops it to as low as 8W. At that level it squeezes out well over 6 hours, but it's not of any practical use when that many features have been crippled, unless you're just taking notes at a conference or lecture...

 

Been using the slice for a month now and I have to say it is a bliss!!!

I was worried it would make the laptop much too heavy but it is still manageable and I am loving it.

I am getting around 5.5 hours but that is mostly based on watching video with 80% brightness so normal usage would be a bit longer for sure.

 

i just got 4:30 to 5 hour battery life with an i5 processor set to 25% on battery and no bluetooth or backlighting, and brightness set to 40%

 

Go to the start, type power options in the search, then click power options, click on your power saver plans change plan settings, then change advanced power settings, a popup will show up, then scroll down to processor power management and change the "maximum processor state".

Yes I have. I've noticed no slow downs at all. I can watch youtube videos and multi-task perfectly fine.

 

Nope. I'm running 5%min-10%max on battery and then full 100% plugged in and I've noticed no performance difference, although my battery life has increased tremendously.

 

Long time lurker, first time poster but my Envy14 w/ Slice is hitting 6 hours 35 minutes according to BatteryBar Pro.

This is in Power Saver on a clean install of Win 7 Enterprise on a 80GB intel SSD... oh and Bluetooth is off but WiFi is on.

Now mind you all I am really doing is taking notes on OneNote and browsing the web. I've never had it force shut off on me or anything, so I don't know for sure how long it actually will go.

Other specs: i7-720qm, 6gb RAM, HD5650, Radiance screen

Edit: I got my slice from HP Parts Store it was 127 USD and ~156 USD after taxes and shipping to Louisiana!

 

that i720qm must be killing that slice.

Has anyone noticed a difference in performance and battery life lowering the intelgraphics to max power savings?

 

I downloaded the update to BatteryBar the other day, and this version doesn't show the discharge rate. Anyone know how to get it back, or how I can revert back to the old version of BatteryBar?

 

That's weird i downloaded the same update and mine still shows discharge rate. (even though it's 51,060 at all times. @#$@!)

 

LOL, not sure what's worse, not having this feature, or having it and it showing 51,060 all of the time . I'll try uninstall/reinstall and see what happens. Not getting my hopes up though. I'm pretty sure I read a post on the BatteryBar forums that mentioned that the discharge feature was not supposed to be in the earlier free versions, and that it is for the Pro (paid) version only, but somehow it inadvertently got added to the free version. Looks like maybe they fixed their error? BTW, mine shows the discharge rate, but it alwas reads 0 now.

 

Oh ok well i'm sorry we had a misunderstanding. I have the pro (paid) version. Its worth the 2 bucks.

 

i received my envy 14 recently, got the i5 processor (the highest one).

fully charged the battery and then the metre said i was at 100% with 1 hour 6 minutes. wifi was turned off.

is this normal for new batteries, or is something seriously wrong?

 

Are you on the discrete(high performance) graphics or integrated(power saving) graphics. You can switch by right clicking on the desktop and clicking "Configure Switchable Graphics"

 

the default windows battery estimation is wrong.

Download batterybar, do a couple charge/ discharge cycles, it'll then give you a much better estimation.

I ended up hiding the windows battery icon as it is always wrong (always showing 1 h or so)

 

Get an SSD. Even after web-surfing for an hour before turning off wifi and lowering brightness so I could just type my notes and flip between documents, I still got 6 hours.

My belief is the Envy's battery life will improve gradually with each refresh. HP just needs to do some serious battery engineering and find other weak points to improve.

 

hi, the graphics is set to power saver, so its the intel.

i downloaded battery bar, it's telling me 62% or 1:51 - still not great.

the weird part is 2 days ago the stock meter on the same setting pegged me at about 6 hours with a full charge. now that meter is saying 62% with 40 minutes. i don't really get why the stock meter is all over the place.

my screen is on 50%, power is on power saving, nothing by firefox is running, am i only going to get 2.5 to 3 hours like this? i also ran hp support test on the battery and it said it was fine.

disappointing if that is all the time i get out of this thing.

 

time it out.

Assuming you're on an i5 you should get 4 hours abouts.

 

hi, yes i am on an i5.

seems that some here were getting more than 4 hours with everything turned down. i was hoping to get more than 4.

i'm surprised at how bad the stock battery meter is - it never seemed to be so bad in my previous computers. and i still don't get why 3 days ago the stock meter was giving me 6 hours...

 

Its because the stock program if nuts, mind says all kind of things. Battery bar takes a month to get pretty accurate and mine is still thirty mins off. Lots of gold have had the same problem and posted in this very thread.

 

Despite a few early reports, most of the actual test of "real" models release to the public, the battery life improvement seems to be 30-45 mins at best, though to my knowledge the only machines in commercial circulation are the second gen quad cpus, so how much improvement will be seen on the dual core i5 and i7 models is unknown. Though, it must be said that the optimistic article I read, was using the quad core SB, and it claimed a battery life of 5:45 hrs, and the best I've seen on commercially released quad core second gens were a little over 3 hrs - still better than the 1-2 hrs on previous Core i7-720qms, so perhaps the 3:30 times on the core i5s might do the same and be 2-3 times better, or an extremely impressive 6-8 hrs. Ami I just speaking in circles, with nothing new to add, or does my last statement seem to hold water with the limited data?

Last point: HP, Lenovo and SONY all have battery tech to get 8 hrs on a 6-8 cell LI battery on a Core i5 cpu, much less the outrageous 18-24 hr times with 9-18 cell variations. Why not make these standard fare? They aren't outrageously expensive????

 

You're spot on. All the other core i5 laptops I've used can get 6-8 hours on a standard 6-8 cell battery. Even HP's own Elitebook 8440w can get about 6 hours on a 52Whr battery with a core i5 and integrated graphics. Something is seriously wrong with the power management of the Envy 14, what a shame.

 

thanks guys, i have a spare battery so if i guess i just have to live with 3-4 hours per battery. i have battery bar now and it seems pretty accurate - i hope the battery improves with a few charges, but i doubt it will

what about the DVD player? when i insert a disk there is a noticeable clicking sound as the disk is sucked in - it's kinda loud actually. does anyone else's do that?

 

yea. That's just the dvd drive.

 

I have been using the silce battery with battery bar pro for some time now and today received a notification that there was an upgrade for battery bar.I installed the upgrade and not bb pro does not show both bateries, only the one currently in use.

 

well, i have battery bar and the ATI card switched off, display down to 50%, wifi off, and it's telling me 2 hours now. i had 3 hours a few weeks back but now 2. how can that be on an 8 cell battery?

is there anything i can do?

also, does the free version of battery bar give you the discharge rate or do you have to get the pro version?

thanks.

 

It's an average of all your battery cycles so if you were on ati most of the time for the past two weeks that will drop it down a good bit.

 

i don't think i was but i'll reset everything and stay on INTEL to see where i end up in a few weeks.

i had the wrong battery bar installed, just found the right one. it's telling me my discharge rate is 51W and i have 60 processes running (i removed some bloatware and shut off a lot in startup). this ready of 51W is something to do with the latest version of battery bar or something like that, right?

do you know what BIOS version i should go with? someone a few pages back talked about downloading an older version (F.12). not sure if i should change mine. latest one on hp.com is F.23.

anything else i can do to bring this discharge rate down (i'm on power save now with 50% brightness)

thanks.

 

The motherboard on the newer envys (starting around January) were changed and battery bar does not display a correct discharge rate. Mine has said 51060 since january as well as a host of other people(read this thread a few months back and you'll see every other post is about this). Also, battery bar takes about 2 weeks to get kind of accurate and about a month till its pretty accurate. So time it yourself and see. I haven't heard of a bios that fixes this or there would a storm of posts about it because many people are suffering the same problem.

 

I'm selling my slice battery if anyone's interested for $165 shipped.
PM me.

 

thanks. i'll see how it goes.

regarding the BIOS, should i update to the latest on the HP site?

my new problem now is the glaryutilities is deleting something in the registry of ATI CCC. after i run it i lose access to the switchable graphics in my notification area.

the fun never stops!

 

I don't know what the new bios is going to do for you? I'm on whatever it came with in jan.

 

yeah, maybe you're right. i can't run glary without it taking something away from my switchable graphics. it still works but the icon in the notification area stops working. i did a minimal recoverey last night and i'll have to reinstall all my goodies. if i get it right after that then i think i'll stop playing around for a while - with my luck upgrading the BIOS will mess up something else.

thanks.

 

are there any alternatives to BatteryBar? i've been noticing my batterybar in the taskbar won't stop moving left, making my taskbar ridiculously ugly...

 

Using my Envy in class today I was set to get 6-6.5 hours at my calculated pace. I usually average 3.5-4.5 with internet browsing and streaming shows.

Brightness at 65-70% for most of the time, dimmed for small portions
Word document
Wifi Off mostly
Keyboard light off
HD off after 1 minutes (SSD)
65% max CPU

 

I'd like to know what it really ends up being. Battery bar can sometimes goof up.

 

Yeah, I had it show me 22 hour battery life times and 20 hour charge times.. lol.

What's really annoying, is that with word-processing, no bluetooth, wifi is off, intel HD graphics, i5 (the lowest one), power-saving settings, minimum brightness...I was still getting under 3 hours.

I called up tech support, and they suggested reinstallng the battery drivers and letting the battery run down to minimum on BIOS. Fat lot o help that was.

They were also saying that the battery life I was achieving was 'normal' and so they wouldn't give me a replacement battery or anything.

Right now, a month after I made contact, my maximum battery life is at 2:06 hours from a full charge, and it's really peeving me off. With my specs, I should be having as log a battery life as everyone else here, but I'm not. I keep trying to max it out, but it doesn't seem to work no matter what.

2:06 hours, btw, from a webpage, word document and adobe reader...
Kinda dissapointing. 22k mW discharge rate estimated by batterybar. And the same minimal power settings as mentioned above, though wifi's on.

Any suggestions on what I should do?

 

Call hp until you get a rep that agrees to fix your computer or send a new one.

I've had wifi and bluetooth on, radiance on blast, i5-580, and got 3:40 every time veiwing word documents, chrome and whatever else so i'd not take no for an answer and keep trying till you get what you want .

 

Ive been doing it a few more times and it comes out to be about 6 hours in class based on time used and percent down. This i my calculations, no batterybar.

 

Could you tell us what programs you were using and what you did to your pc? that would be helpful

 

• Brightness at 65-70% for most of the time, dimmed for small portions
• Intel Graphics (Max Battery)
• Word document
• Wifi Off (Using button) mostly
• Keyboard light off
• HD off after 1 minutes (SSD)
• 65% max CPU
• Clean install originally done
• Minimal background processes in my computer

That netted me 6-6.5 hours. Probably closer to 6 we'll say after doing this 3times.
______
Today in class I had same settings as before except Wifi On and using the internet quickly to just update RSS feeds in Windows Live Mail and look up quick things on the internet once in a while.
This gave my 5.5 hours, so not a major difference noted.

My conclusion is that it's not the WiFi being on, but browsing the internet that is a battery hog as its constantly using the processor and hard drive.

 

. . .my BatteryBar displays a discharge rate of -51,060 which is over 3 times the amount most of you are reporting. . .

It reports a full lifetime of 3:30 (which is correct for the most part)

I have the Beats Edition, 'Power Saver' power plan, default settings (except I've turned off Bluetooth) . . .and the Windows Battery bar is not even close to BatteryBar's estimates. . .it shows 18 min (27% remaining) vs. BatteryBar's 1:02 (27% remaining). . .should I try to get my battery replaced? My new laptop is a week old today.

I'm mostly concerned with the -51,000 discharge rate (capacity shows 59,629 mWh so this discharge rate can't be correct right?), and this is while only browsing the Web, nothing else. . .