Envy 14 Battery Life Log

the -51,060 discharge is normal on the last build of Envy 14.
Mine does that as well and I still get well over 4h30.

Something in the BIOS causes it to report the wrong discharge rate to windows/battery bar.
However battery bar will give you good estimations after a week or 2 of use (except the discharge rate of course).

 

so yeah.

you have the bugged motherboard and/or bios several of the later envy 14s have where it reports 4 times the regular discharge rate.

somehow.

 

. . .thank you guys.

 

Hey,

I've been reading this thread because I'm looking at getting a HP Envy 14 Beats Edition Laptop and wanted to know about the battery life. I've noticed you're all using BatteryBar and just thought I'd add that it is pretty accurate on my Sony Vaio in comparison to the windows status:



I'm interested in the Envy particularly because of the Slim Battery "Slice" that you can buy but I was hoping for at least 8 hours battery life which might not be possible reading this thread (that's with the slice).

If it makes any of you feel better, my Vaio is abysmal I get just over 2 hours on a charge and that's with brightness at it's lowest, Core 2 Duo processor and 4gb Ram.

 

how old's the vaio?

also the i5 can have better power saving than a core 2 duo (though apparently HP did a crappy job with it on the envy 14)


me: roughly 4 hours is more than enough for my unplugged uses. I'm still in love with this computer

 

No idea, it's still supported with accessories and stuff though. Definately not a problem with the battery or anything, my mate has another Vaio bought new from PC World with the i7,8gb Ram and gets about the same amount of battery life (and so does someone else with a Vaio I know).

4 Hours would be fine for me in some circumstances, but sometimes I would want 8. I'd like to think the Envy I'm going for would give me 8 with the slim battery slice but this topic seems to show varying results.

Here's the Envy I'm going for btw:
HP ENVY 14 *BEATS EDITION* NOTEBOOK! i5-460M--8GB-640GB | eBay UK

We don't have the Beats Edition anymore in the UK (only all Envy Laptops with Beats Audio) and I love the black look and red keyboard.

 

you could push 8 hours if you set stuff up properly (did some cpu max % lowering, lowered brightness some, lowered wifi power a bit, didn't do much at all with flash/video watching on websites)


otherwise yeah..slice will probably get you 7ish hours on an i5.

I think the slice battery was 62 kwhrs.

the regular battery was initially 59.2 kwhrs (until the 1200 series where it's now 56.8 kwhrs)

my battery's wear is at 0% again. hurray! (..yeah, bios f.23 changes the designed capacity/expected capacity that the motherboard tells windows)

 

See, I don't watch videos much when unplugged and I even have the FlashBlock extension installed.

My time would be used generally surfing the web in Chrome and taking notes in OneNote. The most power insensitive thing I'd be doing however, is Programming in several IDEs so I guess that makes up for a lack of flash/dvds/other power hungry things

Eitherway, sounds better than my 2 hour Vaio.

Thanks for all the help aswell

 

Hey Guys,

I just got my laptop, is there any way to fix this incorrect showing of battery remaining? Like do I need to upgrade the bios or something?

Any help would be great. Thanks.

Steve.

 

Battery Bar is the answer and it has been mentioned a million times in here.

 

holy damn!

thank you so much for what you wrote.

I just got the envy 14 and it has an i7 and the stock battery meter was saying 1 hour battery life just got battery bar and 2:30 makes more sense.


So you are saying its some bios issue? well if its that, I hope its fixable so the correct number can be displayed.

Im getting used to battery bar now, but my OCD is killing me a bit to stay on stock

 

I bet this is on every page of this thread "windows battery bar says 1 hour"

 

well 92 pages lol

 

Hey guys.

I realized that 3.75 - 4 hours isn't enough for classes and was wondering what my options were. Comments are appreciated. I am taking classes now and would like to solve this problem ASAP.


For one,the slice is too heavy!

The only ones I know:

1) Bring your charger (not convenient)
2) Buy another battery (the standard one, not the slice). I hear it is only 1 pound which makes it seem like the best option so far?

But with regards to this battery, how can I ensure that it is of good quality? I hear that new batteries differ in the amount of charge they can hold.

Also, is the envy 14 refresh having a better battery? I can't seem to find much info on it.

Thanks very much! This is very important for me as I'm taking classes everyday right now!

 

They should all have the same capacity, the refresh most likely will have better battery life.

 

So I tried calibrating my battery like 20 times and used it for about 2 months now. And it still says 2:30 for battery bar - for any battery power plan I use. It's never accurate and my laptop windows battery bar says i only have like 15 minutes on 30%ish battery. I don't know what to do to get an accurate reading. It obviously lasts more than 2:30 but how do i get the accurate read?

 

I see. I believe I am using the F.12 BIOS (the one released before .23 I think). However, my discharge rates are "normal", meaning on my super slim, tweaked, clean install and doing nothing more than webbrowsing will make my discharge rate above 14 - 16k on batterybar.

How are you getting over 4 hours and 30 minutes? I would LOVE to have that so I can actually get through all my classes.

Also, I have 6.6% of battery wear ....If I could get back to 0% wear like you that would be great....is it just a matter of flashing the bios?

On my clean instal envy, everything I open up the bios flashing software from HP my pc freezes...

 

Hi there! I'm a long time reader that just decided to register to share some numbers

As, many people, my first impression about battery life was disappointing. HP support recommended a full calibration of the battery (total drain using BIOS screen and full load for almost 16 hours). Then I did a test to evaluate the duration. My specs:

* Envy 14 1095la: i5-520M 2,4 GHz - Radiance Display - Broadcomm Wifi - 57.000 mWh battery
* BIOS f.23: Fan always on: off (cycling constantly on/off) - Turbo mode off
* Windows Home Premium 64 - minimal recovery install, some crap removed - 54 processes - CPU: 0-4% idle - aero glass disabled
* Custom power settings based on HP recommended - min cpu 1% max 65% - max power saving for video + wireless - hard disk off after 5 minutes
* Wifi on - bluetooth off (using HP assistant) - brightness 30% (no dim, no off) - internal GPU.
* Battery: 2010/04/07 3840 mAh (56.773 mWh)

I left the pc running task manager (minimized), one instance of IE9 and one of Firefox5, side by side on this page: Clarín.com that autorefreshes every minute or so. Using this I get ~10% constant CPU utilization, with spikes of 20% or 30%.

Runtime: 4:15 aprox

Batterybar shows about ~12W using this scenario, which is consistent to the battery runtime. Idle the system seems to eat ~9W.

Thats not bad but somehow I feel the system can behave better when idle. I miss something like powertop on linux, to check the cpu c-states realtime.
Also, the fan cycling is plain annoying, HP keeps saying it is normal, but I hope they can change the algorithm on future bios releases.

EDIT: I'm updating discharge rates since BatteryBar is getting more accurate.
EDIT: Reverting updates, original ones where correct.

 

BTW, original Envy 14 specs on HP's store states "Up to 6.0 hours of battery life (8 cell)", and below you can read

I'm curious about this software and how the battery life was measured.

 

Why Your Laptop's Batteries Die So Fast - Newsweek

Apparently tests were done with 7.5% max CPU and WiFi off.

 

Thanks eafd, that's just what I was looking for.

I like the idea but since this article is from 2009, seems like they have a lot of inertia changing things, and anyway, the way of advertise battery life kinda work: even knowing that runtimes are inflated, I was hoping to get at least 4:30 hours without any tweak.
And even further, I'm not sure if my 8 cell 56Wh battery is capable to reach 6 hours using this test.

 

Oh, well HP used to do the test while idling with WiFi off in HP QuickWeb, not even windows.

They are using MobileMark '07, which might be outdated. Any which way, you can try turning down the transmit power and roaming aggressiveness of the wifi card. It can help a lot sometimes

 

Here they say MobileMark '07 (that last version on their site) HP ENVY 14 series | HP Official Store but can be a legal thing, and anyway, due to the price of this thing its unlikely any particular would try to reach the same calculation himself

BTW: already tweaked the transmit and roaming settings. I'm sure now that what I miss are the extra ~20min of the old 59Wh battery

 

I am looking at getting a ENVY 14 with a i5. Am I correct that it appears most people are getting 3-4 hours of battery life?

 

I do.
I got the 1000 CTO.

I can push 4.75 hours occasionally with:

win 7 64
clean install
just onenote taking notes
wifi off
display 40%
all settings tweaked to the max.

 

It is possible to get 6 hours using a very aggressive power plan (screen to the min, Wifi off). Surfing the internet you usually get ~4 hours, and using the dedicated ATI card, between 2 and 3 hours.
You can also buy a slim 6 cells battery that fits under the notebook to get twice that time.

 

Be warned that it is heavy though. 2 pounds I believe (I have the slice and do not like carrying it)

 

Envy 14 beaats edition
Core i7 - 8 cores

2 hours

 

I dont think there are 8 cores i7 on the envy 14 ... 8 threads yes, not 8 cores.

 

Specs as stated below with a clean installation and I'm getting ~3.75 hours with screen 60% and wifi on with just internet browsing.

I also figured I'd mention here first that I'm selling my extra battery. It has maybe 10% wear on it and I use it as my spare. Message me if you're interested.

 

how much did the battery life improve with the sandybridge refresh?

 

core i5
750hd 7200rpm
8-cell
high performance
100% brightness
ati graphics
playing games or watching videos(one or the other on full charge not both)

i only manage around 1:20-1:30 is this normal? because i find it very dissapointing. someone please help

 

You're playing games. Don't expect good battery life then...

 

The AMD card is really power hungry. The other day I was messing with the new services and stopped the one that turns off the dedicated video card. Even using the integrated one, the power used by the AMD by just "being there" was enough to eat 2 hours of battery life.

BTW, I've found that the HP Wireless Assistant has a very annoying bug that "spikes" CPU usage from time to time. HP sent me the last version with the same bug, so I returned a report to them.
Meantime I suggest uninstall it completly. This can improve battery life, and also I think that relaxes a bit the fan cycling.

 

So what are the battery specs of the 12** envy series?

My battery has about 7% drain so its total capacity is only about 54 mwh....I'm really hoping that:
1) the new batteries have more capacity
2) are interchangable with the 1st gen envies.


Anybody know anything about this ? THANKS!

 

Both 1000-1200 and 2000 Envies use the same battery but the 2000 has a slightly revised Samsung battery with 59WHr.

 

the 1000 series had a 59.2 whr battery

but eventually they updated the bios to only report a 56.4 whr battery or something.

 

Just as a heads up for you folks, I had my Envy 14 since last year, and since the start of the summer I had a shortened battery life (everything turned to a minimum without the slice battery used to give me 6.5hrs, but now I can only max on 4hrs)

I can't think of anything except leaving my battery in and plugged in all the time (since I don't roam much during the summer).

 

I haven't really had that issue.

though I do sometimes make use of my battery (at least halfway drained).

I can still get roughly 4 hours no slice (no screwing with settings either, just windows default balanced profile, max brightness) and 2 hours if I'm watching streaming video or well any video I guess

 

See that's really sad. I do a lot of document editing so I keep everything on low (brightness, nothing in background, cpu speed) and even used granola. I got that 6.5hrs on editing stuff in Word...

Once when I was at the office I used the slice, it even brought me up to 11hrs on Word alone..

 

That happen to you? Because my battery says 3840 mAh and 14.7V. If I remember correct A*V = 56.448 mWh. Seems accurate

 

Yeah my battery (in hwmonitor) went from 59200 to 56448 with Bios F.23


as for battery life my laptop has always gotten roughly 4 hours. so *shrugs* improvement over my 2-3 hours (to less than 1 hour at the end of its life) old laptop

 

Just checking with the real thing in front of me. It says 14.8V / 3760mAh on the right, but on the left you can read: 14.8V 59Wh. The symbol means pulsating DC, so, seems that the battery *can* deliver up to 59Wh. Perhaps que Bios is now actively limiting the use to avoid a total drain of the battery?

 

maybe. Not sure. I know my battery used to have a max of 59.2 but a wear of 3%ish (nearly 4%, sometimes it fluctuated down to that) which made it close to 56.4


so..now it just is 56.4.

so who knows.

 

battery life is 2:30 now since purchase in may where battery life was 3:30. full brightness, wifi surfing non stop, first gen i5, 4gbramssdblabla

 

wow.

maybe I've just been lucky and have a good battery. I'm on one I bought over a year ago. No real change in battery life (maybe a half hour. Don't remember if that one time I timed it was 4:15 or 4:30/4:45. Been awhile and I did it just by looking at the cable box clock so...*shrugs*

 

There are three DIFFERENT types of RM08 battery circulating for the ENVY14:
59WHr 3800mah from taiwan company (for first few batches of ENVY14 1st gen)
56WHr 3760mah from the same Taiwan company (from Jan 2011 to May 2011 ENVY14 1st gen)
59WHr 3800mah from Samsung (Last few batches of ENVY14 1st gen and the current 2nd gen ENVY14)

 

Thanks @yknyong1. Mine seems to be from the second batch then.
Edit: offtopic. BTW, how about the Elitebook in comparison to the Envy? Battery life, keyboard, touchpad, etc?

 

Sooooo disappointed with this battery life... Smh

i7-720qm
500GB 7200rpm
Standard Battery
Backlit Keyboard off
Power Saver Mode
Brightness hovers around 50-70%

According to BatteryBar I get 2:24...but it honestly feels like roughly an hour and a half...This is the first day using Batterybar...and also I'm gonna turn off bluetooth starting today...

 

Sooooo disappointed with this battery life... Smh

i7-720qm
500GB 7200rpm
Standard Battery
Backlit Keyboard off
Power Saver Mode
Brightness hovers around 50-70%

According to BatteryBar I get 2:24...but it honestly feels like roughly an hour and a half...This is the first day using Batterybar...and also I'm gonna turn off bluetooth starting today...