Envy 14 Battery Life Log

Yep, I did. Even if I turned bluetooth off, some people in this forums still managed to get 4 hours of battery life with that turned on. What I can't understand is why is my discharge rate so high? My envy is at idle for about 30 minutes and the discharge rate is at 13297mW (lowest brightness, intel GMA)

 

It could be your room temperature.

 

barring that you may have a bad battery

 

life is about 3:22 and discharge rate is 13,898

 

I played the Fantastic 4 DVD this evening.

i3 370
500GB
HP Recommended except for following changes

Screen one notch below brightest using kb quick keys
Volume set 10 clicks below full using kb quick keys
Wireless and Bluetooth OFF

Run time from 4:21pm until 6:01 pm. Skipped some previews and part of credits ran.

DVD finished with 52% battery remaining. Have a birthday party Im late for or i would see if it makes it through a 2nd time. More later when i can.

 

What kind of battery life do you get and with what settings? clean install or HP windows 7? do you also know your discharge rate?

 

haven't checked but mine seems to last about 4 hours full brightness, wifi on, bluetooth off

 

I'm sure this is obvious, but did you make sure the power profile is on Power Saver and not HP recommended? You could also try to limit the processor maximum and see if you can weasel another hour out of it.

 

Something is seriously wrong... One of my friend's battery discharge rate is 12000mW but why is mine always above 16000mW?

EDIT: OK, let me try power saver... but based on what others posted, they didn't do power saver. My friend had it balanced and got 4:30 from it...

 

What/how many processes are you running? I didn't do a clean install and still get 4:40 after deleting alot of stuff.

 

I have 68 processes. I'm going to give this laptop one more battery run...

@ Happyxix, did you set your settings on "power saver" to get 4:40? What about brightness? What did you do?

EDIT: I ran a quick test and here's what I got:

ATI GPU:
Idle, max brightness: 20000 mW
Idle, min brightness: 16300mW?

Intel GPU:
Idle, Max brightness: 16000mW
Idle, Min brightness 12300 mW

Anyone know what's up?

 

Let me plug my batteries back in and get back to you.

 

Ok after letting my laptop run for a bit while watching some HD videos on it it was running at 20mW~ and this is with HP Recommended settings.

Now while just browsing the internet for jobs (oh the woes of a new college graduate), it is stead at around 10mW and I am running Firefox with 5 tabs and 3 Microsoft Word files. According to battery bar estimate, I have over 4 hours remaining with batteries at 82% charged.

49 Total processes running



Both wireless and bluetooth on.

 

OK, I switched to "power saver" mode and now my discharge rate dropped to around 12000 mW. It certainly improved but I stil think it's faily high and this is on 40% brightness and NO aero.... ugh...

@happyxix, I still don't understand why mine won't go to 10000 mW discharge rate.... I'm considering reinstalling W7 and see what I might with just default drivers installed.

What is your discharge rate under IDLE??

 

Under Idle? I have never tested it. But I assume less than 10 because coming back from idle would give me almost 2 hours more than what my supposed time let would be.

Can you take a screenshot of your current processes? Maybe you are running something that is cpu intensive and draining batteries?

 

im chilling at 14, with all the power save stuff done.

 

here are my pics of tskmgr

BTW, my drainage is still around 12000 mW, and when my screen was turned off it was around 10,000mW

 

My config:
HP Envy 14: i5-450M, 4GB, 300gb, HD 5650, Windows 7 Ultimate

I dont know why your complaining, 3 hrs is alot! I have a full life time of 2:24, with lowest brightness with about 15,000mWh discharge rate...

edit: on idle, BT off, wireless on, 55 processes, fresh install

 

Well it's strange how others are getting 4-5 hours battery life, and my friend got a realistic battery life of 4:30. Isn't it?

 

What the heck. 2:24? Thats horrible battery life with the e14.

@GivingHope: You have alot of random processes running. Have you considered to disable some of those? Also use microsoft security systems over AVG. Its very light compared to the other antivirus. Also alot of logitech stuff. The small stuff can add up to drain alot more battery then normal.

I still have 2 hours of battery life left and that is on the same charge as before. I also changed to the 5650 graphics for about 15 minutes to test bad company 2.

Clean out some stuff on our processes and then see if that made a difference.

 

well the 520 does run less power then the 450, maybe thats the problem? it is also dependent alot on the OS. OSX and linux gets almost double compared to win7, from what ive heard.

 

Does anyone know if the i7-840qm has better battery life/power management compared to the i7-720qm? I'm looking to upgrade while I still can if it makes enough of a power management/processing power difference.

Also would I gain FPS gaming with the slightly more powerful processor?

 

Well, take a look at this.... another person has near identical specs except the HDD... both HDDs are 7200 RPM so the power consumption should be approximately equal... and I'm sure we're all running Windows 7 here lol

 

cool, manage to get 10,781mw after shuttin down EVERY application.... it seems ventrilo takes about 600mw

 

Remember Aero disabled or not doesn't change anything for your battery life, if 2 minutes... You can keep aero enabled by tweaking the power saving profile, it doesn't hurt.

 

I goofed up my post on the DVD btw. Runtime for the movie is 105.xx minutes. I should have said the movie started at 4:21 and not 4:41. Hope it didn't cause any confusion. Sorry ! Time to get rdy for work. This site is addicting. hehe

 

i3 370m
160GB SSD
1 x 4GB DDR3
50% brightness
Out of the box Windows 7 Pro install
Websurfing with Opera and on average 11 tabs open
Some Youtube videos

3:16 reported max lifetime without slice
5:30 reported max lifetime with slice

~16mW discharge rate consistently

How do I improve this time like what you guys have reported? My numbers are way low in comparison. I would like to try and not do a reinstall if possible.

 

Power saving profile (click the battery)
Close unused useless processes in background (ventrillo, teamspeak, torrents).

Tweaking the wifi power management to low in device manager if you're close to a router (report to the screenshot i posted earlier in the topic).
^ speaking of which, has anyone accurately measured the battery life time gain by tweaking the wifi slider to low from the default high ? also did you do internet maxspeed tests to see if there's a limitation ?

 

I'm curious to know this as well, actually.

I'd gladly run my WiFi on low power if it made a significant battery difference, but didn't kill performance.

 

for some reason battery bar doesnt show my discharge rate! Has anyone else experienced this or have I missed a setting for it?

 

Gotta wait a while before it shows.

 

State your system specs:

i5-450m
HDD
Standard battery

Then state what you were doing, Wifi and/or bluetooth on, screen brightness.

Surfing the web, installing Starcraft II, and watching Matsiyahu music videos at 100% brightness for 2.5 hrs. Surfing the web for 2 hrs at 0% brightness (lowest setting)

Also state the window's power profile they used, I believe there are 4 :
- HP recommended
- Normal
- High performance
- Energy saving

Then state your runtime.
4:23
However, battery bar now says that my estimated runtime is 3:55 after that first drain.

 

That's an excellent battery run for what you were doing.

 

well, whats the average runtime when doing tasks like that.

Also, does anyone have specs as to what the w/hr draw is for the backlight on the keyboard?

 

i5-450m
500gb hard drive
hp recommended
standard battery
intel gma
max brightness (im outside)
BT off, wifi on
-web surfing, occasional youtube, facebook, some tabs, word, etc, nothing big

5:12 (-13 mW discharge rate average)

Also, my batteryBar is telling me I have 10.4% battery wear? and only charges up to 53mWh instead of 59...
When I plug it in, it wont go past 98% charge. Any ideas?

 

OK I clean installed W7 on a separate partition and getting a much more respectable battery life, but my discharge rate is around low 11000s and using firefox 12000mW. I only installed the drivers from Swsetup and firefox + battery bar, nothing else. Could you tell me what you have uninstalled? What else can I uninstall? Are those Intel things even needed like Intel rapid storage...

Here's my current installed programs and task manager:

 

10.4% battery wear? I don't think Battery Bar is as accurate as we thought. Either that or it can't read the E14's battery properly.

 

That what I was thinking.
This is on my 2nd run through on it (previously used though by MrDisturbed so its not fresh and fragile) so assuming it would be close... I'll wait a bit more, take the battery out when its down low, plug it back in, charge, see if its worn or not..
If so, Calling HP ha

 

my battery bar is never accurate... been using laptop for 1 week

 

That's why I only trust window's battery bar, at least it tells you how much time you have left if you keep doing what you're currently doing.

 

About the 5th charge through:

i5-450
6gb ram
160gb ssd
stock install/removed bloatware

seen about 4 hours with approximately 25% remaining. I expect to easily hit 5 as I have on all my charges

What i'm doing:
Surfing the Internet for research for my thesis, have about 6 word documents open, about 6 excel documents open.

wifi on/bluetooth off
brightness at lowest
backlit keyboard periodically on a off if in a dark lecture hall



The screen is so bright that it hurts my eyes so I typically keep the brightness about halfway.

 

How do I get windows battery bar to switch from just percentage to percent and time remaining?

 

You realize that the 4 Hours that your Battery Bar shows as the Full Lifetime is an estimate for the full lifetime. It isn't how long your computer has been running on battery.

 

i dont know if my batterybar was messing with me or not... but it sometimes jumps around. 6-7 hours maybe?
music + light browsing
I received my Envy yesterday

 

Just watched a movie (not really a movie, more like the finale to Battlestar Galactica) and it was just over 1 and a half hours. The file was played in VLC on Power Saver settings, 90% brightness, wi-fi on, bluetooth off. It took about 41% of my battery. Quite pleased.

And the laptop is pretty cool temperature wise as well. If you wondering, the movie was DVD quality, not Blu-ray, HD or anything. Played off HDD.

 

Right, i know that. It clearly says that on the read out. I'm telling you I get close to five hours. The picture is to show other numbers like discharge rate, etc. Battery bar doesn't give the greatest estimate of battery life. I just go by what Time i started using the computer....which my class started at 1pm.

 

Call me crazy, but after burning through the battery a second time. I used it for 4:56 min before critical battery levels (2%) No blue tooth, and doing all the same things I was doing before. I did put it to sleep for 15-20 min while I ate dinner, however.
Is my battery life abnormally high?

 

Envy 14
i7-720m
4gb ram
320gb hdd
wlan on
bluetooth off
screen brightness 50%
internet surfing, MS Word and Photoshop running
stock win7 home premium

I'm only getting barely 2 hours on a full charge!!!?! My discharge rate on BatteryBar is hovering around -31,000 mW!!

 

Its because of the i7 core proc, and the video card. The i7 (except the 600 series) dont have switchable graphics. Understandably, your discharge rate is going to be very high, because of the more powerful processor, and high-performance GPU always on.
2 hrs is a little low cnsidering those specs, however, I would try going in depth to the power saving settings. Adjusting things like, turning off AERO and slideshow desktop, when it is unplugged, and possibly explore the option of using the power saving wireless features, and optimizing the poweraving properties of multimedia apps.
If you really needed more juice, you could look at slowing down the RPM speed of the HDD (if thats even possible)

 

I've been reading this thread as I am thinking about getting an Envy 14.. I've been waiting for this to come out since the rumors firstt appeard... anyway, I read through the service manual today and noticed that the envy can come with a 8 cell or 6 cell battery.. interestingly enough the 6 cell supposedly packs more MwH's...

but what strikes me is surely the owners on the mac forum are not striving for an extra few minutes here and there..

Is it just me???