Help..Terrible battery life on V2410

I need help or suggestions on extending my battery life. I just got a new compaq v2410US. It has the Mobil AMD turion 64 processor, 1.6mhz, brightview 14 in wide screen.

My problem is I cannot even watch a DVD movie on the plane without running out of battery. I am getting around 1 hour and 15 minutes using a 6cell battery and Intervideo WinDVD.

I am very disappointed because this is the main reason I use battery power.....to watch DVD's on the plane.

Any suggestions besides buying a 12 cell battery?

 

Dimming the screen and setting it to low power operation will help. Also ripping the DVD to your hard drive will help as hard drives consume less power than optical drives. If you are already doing those, it may be defective as one hour and 15 minutes is too low.

 

I think most likely you have problem with AMD driver, causing the Processor to run at full speed. Install old version or use RMClock.

Not only that WinDVD has some kind problem on this laptop( some bug) and it is taking too much CPU. It should not take more than 30% cpu when CPU is running at 800Mhz.

Try powerDVD.

 

Ok..how do I operate on lower power and how do I know if my processor is running full speed?

 

If you right click on my computer and hit properties it will say what your clock speed. You can set the power options in control panel under power options. Set it to max battery then you'll run at lowest speed and you don't need more for DVD viewing.

 

MobileMeter will tell you.

Also try VideoLAN for playing DVDs, see if that's more efficient.

 

Set your CPU to run at "Automatic" or "Adjustable" depending upon your CPU to make it dynamically able to adjust to what work load it has.

 

sorry for this question...but how do I change my cpu options?

 

It should be in your power options in the control pannel. Although depending upon which CPU you have, you may not be able to control the power schemes of the CPU itself.

 

Since you have a Turion it will best for you to undervolt it. Get RMclock, Prime95 and mobilemeter, and look at http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=20249 (it is for L2000, which is exactly the same computer as v2000z)

You'll be all set in 20 min. I think you should have the ML-30 Turion, so for 4x (first P-step) you will do alright with 0.925v or even 0.9v.

 

Another thing to look at.
Try to use mobile meter or cpuz or RMClock to see the frequency you ran and CPU utilization percentage, when you play dvd.
I have problem with the included win DVD. It always use too much CPU (hence, use too much battery). I change my player to Video LAN (free, open source) and the CPU utilization went down considebly and it hardly run above 800MHz to 1GHz.
Try to see if that's the problem.

 

I downloaded video LAN and it does seem to use less cpu. I hope that at least gets me through a movie.

Now I have another problem. It seems the DVD locks up and does not play as smoothly. Is this a problem with video LAN?

 

I had the exact same problem, mine got resolved, please browse:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=32726

This is not the first time seeing this problem. I am guessing all these newer V2000z are coming with the latest "bugged" processor driver. The needed processor driver is no longer on the support page. However, you may download mine here:
http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=4195

 

To extend the laptop battery working time, please read http://ebuybatteries.com/battery_knowledge/battery_faq.asp#prolong-battery.

 

In my linked thread, changing the power options does not understep the processor. Only the older processor I linked to will fix this specific problem on the V2000Zs.

 

Problem fixed

Cpu was running at full speed all the time. got the cpu fix. got the bios to fix the fan

battery life should improve dramatically i hope

Thanks everyone

 

Hope it works out.
Tell us what u can get now, it'd be great to know.

 

Glad to hear the CPU fixed the throttling . Why is HP/Compaq releasing notebooks with bad CPU drivers? Do they even know they are?

 

With my configuration (below), I am getting six hours internet time.

 

what the heck? 6 hours??
oh..a 12 cell bettery. still crazy good no matter how u cut it.

 

This is the benefit of battery priming and undervolting. Please note that this is from a 35-watt ML-30 Turion processor, NOT a Pentium M.

 

hm..i'm completely new to the P-M vs. Turion 64 thing. I do know that the ML series uses 35 watts, while a P-M can use 27 watts (Turion MT uses 25watts?). So I assume that undervolting a P-M would give greater gains in battery time versus a Turion?

I was also considering between a ML-30 and a ML-32(getting faster processor would mean downgrading from 80 gig 4200rmp to 60 gig 4200 rmp for the V2000). the ML-30 is 1.6Ghz, but 1 MB cache, whereas the ML-32 is 1.8 but only 512KB cache. I read somewhere that if undervolting you would want something with larger cache. is this true?

are there any good credible resources I could read up on? there are lots of knowledgable people here, but i just hate to keep on asking an endless supply of questions.

thanks

 

AMD's power consumption ratings are a lot more conservative than Intel's, so the real difference isn't all that great. Intel's main power consumption advantage appears to be from their chipsets. The price you pay for that is a very weak Intel integrated GPU, versus the 2-3 times as fast ATI GPU the HP AMD notebooks use.

Also, again because of AMD's conservative ratings policy, undervolting has a greater effect with Turions than P-Ms.

I advise buying the highest model number Turion you can afford, simply because HP makes it extremely difficult to swap in a new chip later. Replacing the HD, while tedious in terms of moving your software, is trivial hardware-wise.

 

For my 2 cents from what I have read and from my experience with my 3 hr. V2000 AMDs are power hogs, basicly converted tower chips. Big 64 is the worst. A must for heavy graphics and gaming but for mainly mobile use stick to intel, built from the ground up. This is true down to the celeronM. (Uh oh looks like I have become the Intel pom pom girl)

"...The most interesting item? The V2000 Celeron M notebook offered significantly better battery life than its Sempron counterpart, the V2000Z, in all aspects. We were particularly shocked in how much better the V2000 did in the wireless web browsing tests when compared to the V2000Z. The same performance, but significantly better battery life? We at least found which of the three Compaqs that you should choose..."

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2625&p=4

 

Hi S80Mark,

Another thing in a connection to the watching of DVDs. Check the DVD idle software. It actually copies the chunks of the DVD into RAM, and thern turns OFF the DVD drive! Depending of how much RAM do you have (max is 768MB chunk), you can see the whole movie with only a number of accesses to the DVD! It helps a lot when you have a crappy battery.

Cheers,

 

About half of the ~20% longer battery life in the Anandtech review luee quotes above can be attributed to the Intel V2000's having a 6 cell battery with about 10% more capacity than the Turion V2000z (Turions got 4.0Ah instead of the standard 4.4Ah), or at least they did at first (PCMag made note of this). At some point HP appears to have switched the Turions to the proper 6 cell battery. The 12 cells have always been identical though. HP hasn't done this on any other notebooks AFAIK.

See this link at partsurfer.hp.com. You can see the 4.0Ah battery (part # 396602-001) and the normal 4.4Ah battery (part # 398832-001).

I'd take the 10% battery life hit to get a decent GPU and 64-bit capability.

Actually, I'm speculating on whether it was only the Turions that got the weak battery. partsurfer.hp.com shows them as being available for both Turion and Intel lines but I'm not aware of any Intel notebook getting the 4.0Ah part while at least some Turions sent to reviewers definitely did.

If you want to see how Turion vs. Pentium M compare on more evenly matched machine configurations, this is about the best comparison I've read.

 

So arent there any V2000 and V2000Z owners here who can tell exactly how much battery life do they get from a 6-cell battery.
Im really confused when i read anandtech review showing V2000 with Celeron having more than 3 hours battery life in almost every test they made.
So whats the conclusion? Turion has slightly better performance than celeron both having 1mb cache and the same battery life?

 

Read my review. I get around 2:50 Min with Turion ML-37, and average is around 2:30Min based on screen brightness.

 

whats ur underclock settings? i dont feel like testing it for 6 hrs =) i havent taken it out so and i dont want to kill the batts before college starts so it just sits closed =) lol

 

Be warned, all processors underclock to different voltage settings. Someone's settings may not work on your processor. It is best to DYI. What I did was just run Prime95 for 10 seconds after changing voltage. After a few weeks, when my laptop froze, I just bumped up the voltage.

 

lol i know im just too lazy to test, i did 2 hrs of .9 but i do get freezes when im transfering files every once in a while, so im at .925 for 4x

 

You ran Prime95 for 10 secs!!?

You have to run Prime95 atleast 6 hours to know if it is stable!!

 

LOL, like I said, I found that it wasn't stable a couple weeks later. So I bumped up the voltage and it has been fine.

 

I like Hot CPU Tester Pro. It'll peg your CPU to 100% and tell you if it fails. That and MemTest86+ are my two favorite diagnostic programs. Well, MobileMeter too.

 

With full brightness and being wirelessly connected I got a full 3hrs. before I got the low battery message on my V22403NR celeron.M This seems to be in line with 2 studies I referenced. Do AMDs have different batteries installed, you would think that would have been mentioned in the studies which were very pro-Intel.

 

v2000z has a crippled 6-cell battery (nearly 10% smaller in capacity). I wonder if the v2000 battery would work on v2000z.