Envy 14 Battery Life Log

Can we see whats taking the most mWh on batterybar?
I don't know how, but I'm averaging 16500mWh now and its killing my battery. I'm down to 3:30 estimated doing light browsing.

 

450= 2.4 with turbo boost to 2.66 (to me, barely anything) when compared to the 520 which is 2.4 with boost to 2.9. I suspect that the 520 would eat up the battery if it decided to turbo boost all the way up to 2.9

 

On integrated I seem to be getting 2 hours 45 min, with only web browsing and a few monitoring apps on. I have the 450m, and screen brightness is not all the way up. I haven't had it for that long though, so perhaps the battery needs some more cycles?

 

Bit concerned.... I apear to only be getting barely two hours....

Only websurfing and listening to music. HP Recommended Settings.

This is only my second cycle discharge but this still seems REALLY low...

compared to what seems to be the average 4 hours.

Do you think I have a bad battery? Also windows is not giving me an ETA on my battery. Only percentage... whats up with that?

 

It comes with an 8 cell built in AFAIK. The 6 cell is the slic battery which attaches at the bottom.

OS X/Mac users have very good power management already on their computers which Windows and its OEM's need to work on IMO. Thats a main reason why you dont see them working for longer battery life.

 

As far as I know, Windows 7 doesn't give an ETA on the battery. Many of us downloaded "Battery Bar" from Osiris Development to give us an estimate. Its a pretty good utility which is very detailed. It also shows you your power draw as well. It isn't entirely accurate, but its a good reference.

 

Guys... I'm suspecting... could it be that the F.02 BIOS has a problem with power management? IM just curious what version of BIOS you guys have, especially for those of you who have 4-5 hour battery life.

 

Can everyone please post the power draw of their laptop. I don't know why but my average power draw is really high.

Doing light websufing... display brightness at 0.
HP recommended power settings.
20k mW

Doing light web surfing... display brightness at 100.
HP recommended power settings.
Also Zune, Trillian, Mail, and Skype open.
30k mW

I have the new F.05 BIOS.

 

I posted earlier -- my i7-720 is drawing 38-41k mW on full brightness and doing moderate web surfing, bluetooth off. It looks like the i5-520's are hovering around 14-16k mW. Even at the lowest brightness setting, the power draw is 28-31k mW......

My battery life according to BatteryBar is a disappointing 1:45?!? I've done one rundown cycle, full brightness, wi-fi and bluetooth on and got about 2 hours. I know the i7 consumes a lot of power but this is pretty sad for a mobile computer.... ?

 

I just updated my firmware from F.02 to F.05A and my battery life shows a full 6 hours rather than 3 hrs 30 mins



Haha ... this is most definitely a false reading, but one can hope right?

But, I do recommend for those who have been getting bad battery life readings to update their firmware to F.05A. Before, I was getting discharge rates of over -16,000 mW with light browsing on F.02, but so far on F.05A I'm getting around -11,000 mW.

 

I think I am going to reflash my BIOS...

UPDATE: The BIOS update made no change...

 

i7 720qm (will upgrade to 840 if it actually has better power management/worth the extra clock speed)
8gb ram
500gb hdd
stock install/removed some bloatware
hp mobile broadband

10mins 720p video
brightness @ 20% (@ night in dark room)
Everything on
"HP Recommended" power plan
"105 processes" (wayy too many)
web surfing, some youtube [5 min] never more than 8 tabs
4.4% battery wear (3rd run)
using external hard drive dock for 3.5' internal drives via usb port
(the e-sata port on the envy 14 doesn't seem to support port multiplier function to read both hard drives It could be the dock itself I have no way of testing this)
wwan on (mobile broadband - I am currently activating this feature otherwise it would be wlan or wwan)

2hrs 10mins [Terrible, of course because of the i7, I'm gonna need the slice ]

 

Could someone please run a battery test with WiFi turned off and report your battery discharge rate from BatteryBar? My discharge rate is unusually high (16000mW) but when I disable WLAN, my discharge rate dropped to 10000mW. I have no idea why my WiFi is using so much power, when I was only doing light browsing.

 

Interesting.... I installed the latest BIOS (F.05) and my BatteryBar discharge rate dropped from 28-31k mW with light web browsing to 21-24k mW.... Still not getting great battery on the i7 (<2 hours) doing some pretty light activities :-(

 

Hmm... The only way for me to achieve a sub 16k mW rating is to turn brightness to 0, Wireless and Bluetooth off...

something is wrong.

 

Is that on a clean install of W7? you might have alot of crap running in task manager.. kill anything like autoupdater, etc.

 

No it's not a clean install...
and don't feel like doing one at this point... installed too much stuff already. ha.

How many processes do you have running?

Also I ran Windows in Diagnostic mode... so only 15 core processes, low screen brightness, no wifi...
its still sucking down 22k mW...

 

How do i update my firmware?

 

Hows this for some battery life

After clean install at on power saver mode



Continuing like this for a good 1.5 hours already.

 

What BIOS do you have happyxix?

 

I already posted on page 2 or 3 how to put the wifi to a lower power consumption mode. Putting in windows power manager the wifi at maximum power saving actually doesn't change AT ALL the power saving of the intel card, it must be changed through the device manager manually.

 

I cant find that tab anywhere! I only have the 6200 drivers installed, do I need some software too?
In my device manager I did manage to lower the signal strength but not sure how much difference that has made

 

Go on intel website and update to the lastest wifi drivers ?

 

already done that I am just downloading the intel software for it in case its needed for the advanced power management. Its 40mb.

I am getting poor battery life and I think this could be the culprit

 

I am at a bit of a lose...

I love this laptop, but I am a student and need good battery life... (4 hours with normal use would be fine.)

I can't seem to fix this power consumption issue despite updating my BIOS, Updating Drivers, Shutting down processes, cycling the battery, etc.

Only getting about 2 hours. =/

Don't want to RMA it or anything for this issue. Any help guys?

 

That's strange, doing something like web browsing should get you three hours at least. I used a Vostro 3400 for a solid week, and it had a Core i3 and integrated graphics, with a battery that was the exact same (if I am not mistaken) watt hours as the Envy 14's. I could get over 3 hours doing most browsing tasks, unless I was watching HD YouTube videos for the majority of the time.

Stupid question, but are you sure the integrated GPU is enabled?

 

Yea its enabled. I also updated the video drivers.

 

Turned off keyboard backlight?

 

Keyboard back light is on, but ive had 6 other laptops with backlight keyboards and it should not make a differance.

Especially not a 2-3 hour differance!

 

Yeah, that should make little to no difference, it's a couple LEDs.

I'm curious, have you done a clean install? It really sounds like the discrete GPU is turned on, but if you can confirm that it's off, I guess that rules it out.

 

BatteryBar says ~-12 to -13mW with wifi on, backlight off, screen lowest, bluetooth off, integrated graphics (power save). F.05 bios

450M SSD

 

I'm really disappointed in the Envy 14 i7's battery life. I tested the battery on another Envy 14 i7 and getting the same results so I don't think my experience is uncommon. You would think with all the technology out there that someone at HP would of designed a longer lasting battery! Just ordered a Envy 14 i5-520 to see if I can eek out at least 3-4 hours --- probably going to return these i7 versions. Also thinking of getting a MacBook Pro 15 i7 now (gasp)...

 

I have not done a clean install.

I prefer not to as I do use a lot of the included HP software and I have already transfered a lot of my data and applications.

I have updated drivers though and tested Windows in diagnostic mode (which only has 15 processes running) and I recieved the same result.

 

Something is definitely wrong here... It's hard to diagnose it without being there in person.

What did you expect? Everyone knew the Core i7 Envy 14s would get around half the battery life of the Core i5 versions...

By the way, HP has nothing to do with batteries, they don't design or manufacture them. The most they do as far as the actual battery goes is maybe designing what case the cells go into. HP engineers merely see how much room they can free up to stick a battery in. Same thing at a Apple-- only Apple's engineers are apparently better than most companies in the regard that they're able to free up a lot of room for a battery to fit in.

Just so you know, the i7s in the MacBook Pros are not quad core. It's marketing, and essentially a higher clocked Core i5. There is no MacBook Pro offering that has a quad core processor at the moment.

 

Yea it's a higher clocked core i5 that consumes around 30% more than regular i5 on load if I remember the anandtech bench graph http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Intel-Core-i3-i5-i7-Processors-Arrandale.25085.0.html. The only gain with it is that you enable integrated graphics and save power on the graphic part of the iddle consumption.

Anyway most people believe i7>i5 in everyday tasks, but it's not the case, a higher clocked dual core processor like the i5 already has 4 threads, which is the actual maximum of multithreading that nearly all apps use (most common is 2 thread, but then you often run two apps with two thread each).
Four cores at lower clock (8 threads) perform better in 8 thread bench of course, but most of the i5 beat the crap out of i7 quad processors for any task that is 4 threaded or less. A quad core with turbo boost on two cores hardly reaches the clock of a turbo boosted i5 on two cores, even if it can, because turbo boost get limited by the termal power design.
Unless you extensively use an app that supports as much as 6 or 8 threads, a quad core is a plain waste of money/battery/heat.

Just as an example :
840QM frequencies (turbo boosted) : 2,00 (4 cores) - 2,00 (3) - 2,80 (2) - 3,06 ghz (1)
720QM frequencies :______________ 1,86 (4 cores) - 1,86 (3) - 2,66 (2) - 2,80 ghz (1)
i520m frequencies :______________________________________ 2,66 (2) - 2.96 ghz (1)
i450m frequencies :_______________________________________2,66 (2) - 2,66 ghz (1)
Future 580m, end of this year or i7 - 620m :___________________2,96 (2) - 3,33 ghz (1)

Pro/con of a i7 quad :
+ Stronger than a i5 in any >4 threaded task.
- No integrated graphics untill sandybridge next year => Heat issues & Battery life sliced by two.

Clearly to me, i7 quad arn't meant to be put into laptops except in very rare cases of usage (movie encoding, research, advanced calculus). That is until we get IGP enabled quad cores next year.

 

The original F02A

 

I installed Battery Bar but all it says is calculating.....It's been like this for like 15 minutes.

 

You have to go through at least one cycle before you get a somewhat reliable reading. Then with each cycle or partial cycle it becomes much more accurate.

 

Anyone might think my issue is the battery itself and that I should RMA a new one?

More Info: HP Assistant says the battery is healthy.

 

I'd ask for a new battery definitely. That one is definitely faulty.

 

i5-520
500GB HDD 7200 RPM
Standard Battery
"Minimized Image Recovery" with a bit of optimization
Power Saving mode with screen, hard drive always on, standby off.
Bluetooth off
Wifi on (4/5 bars)
40% Brightness
Constantly playing music at loud from Grooveshark or Pandora, task manager and resource manager running ( 15-35% cpu usage)

Time: 2:44 according to BatteryBar

I think (hope) this time was so bad b/c of a few things
1. I was always on pandora which averaged 20% cpu!
2. I was playing music - so speakers going and EQ running
3. I was constantly connected - streaming music
4. Resource and task manager take up a decent amount of CPU themselves...

I was thinking before that this would be a good way to imitate use without actually being there, but with my cpu load so high constantly I think it was more a high load test

 

How exactly does BatteryBar calculate drain rate? Is the drain rate directly reported from the battery or is it calculated ( total charge loss / elapsed time)?

 

I'm happy with my results:

i5 520M
320 GB HDD
Standard Battery
Power Saving Mode
Lowest Brightness (which is hardly low IMO)

What I did:

I lightly web browsed for about 1.5-2 hours out of the total time. Also downloaded GPU Z installed 1 or 2 updates, chatted a bit, ran CPUID for about 30 minutes while web browsing. Rest of the time it sat there with display sleep disabled. During this whole time Vuze was downloading in the background.

Critical Battery level was at 4 percent and hibernated at that point.

Battery runtime?

5:08

Note: This isn't with a clean install, just bloatware removed, I have 57 processes when on idle. I'm so tempted to do a clean install for even more battery life.

 

Yup the e14 battery was alot better than what it was originally predicted. I am quite happy with the results.

 

wow thats amazing! I cant get near that time. I just ran 4hrs downloading SC2, most of that time the screen was off and cpu was at 0-3% usage. This is powersaver with ethernet. Blutooth and wifi off and I am down to 13%.

Not sure why people are getting such a difference in results!

 

Is the 3nvy i4.s a special system only purchasable by morons?

Sorry, couldn't resist. Haven't seen that much leet speak in one place since I played the original counter-strike.

 

As promised... (haha, to myself) first page has been updated with times for i3/i5 and i7 separately.

 

So after freaking out only getting 2:45 battery, I decided to run an idle test

i5-520
500GB HDD 7200 RPM
Standard Battery
"Minimized Image Recovery" with some optimization
Power Saving mode with screen always on, standby off.
Bluetooth off
Wifi on (4/5 bars)
0% Brightness

5:55

That number is from unplugged to 3% (hibernation)
If anyone is interested, I didn't trust battery bar, so I looked in Event Viewer, and filtered for the sources "Power-Troubleshooter," "Kernel-Power," "Kernel-General"
I hope I can do better with wifi off.
Derickso probably got a better time because of his SSD

 

Thats more like it! Wondering if HP will go Apple with the rumored refresh of the 15 and pop a huge battery under the hood to begin with, and then actual be able to get to that 7 or 8 hour dream place. We'll see, anyways great job with that one man!

 

Is Intel PRO/Wireless client application something i need to install? I just reformatted and did a clean install of windows 7 ultimate and downloaded all the required drivers recommended in "E14 driver discussion" thread. But under device manager, the wireless adapter shown is "Intel Centrino Advance-N 6200 AGN". When I check the properties/Advance tab there is no option for adjusting power settings.