How many hours can you run on BATTERY? dvX500 series

My Rig: dv6500 T7300, Vista (clean install), nVidia, 12 cell battery, 2GB ram, 2GB (ScanDisk Extreme III) readyBoost, 160GB hd

5 and 3/4 hours confirmed (then i fell asleep)??

I finally ran the battery test i've been wanting to do. Under moderate to heavy wifi and full screen video play back with some internet browsing. i downloaded about 300mb of video wirelessly. I ran my TV as a second monitor to playback video for about 1/2 an hour (s-video cable to my TV). BTW- this is a real battery killer, I lost about 15% of life just doing the TV test. I also streamed a video form my other system for 45 minutes or so and rebooted twice. The majority of the time was spent surfing the web wirelesly.

I never plan on doing this much at school/work, so i feel confident that i will get much better battery life in real world applications.

power state on battery:
hard disk: 2 minutes
Wireless: Max power savings
usb selective suspend setting: Enabled
PCI Express: Max power savings
Processor power management
Min processor state : 2%
Max processor state : 25%
Search and indexing ower saver
(Note- I shut down indexing in windows altogether, cause i don't need it)
Display turn off: 6 minutes
Active display: Off ( i'm still not sure yet, but i figure i leave it off)

Display brightness: 0% (Leave it at 0%, if you need it brighter you can always adjust yourself Manually on the keypads)
Battery: Hibernate
Critical Battery level: 3%

All the adjustments were done with the native vista power manager. i haven't used Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) yet, but i look forward to testing the difference.

 

WOW! You run that rig for 3/4 hours - that's amazing!

 

You got 5.75 hours doing all that ?

 

This is just to show everyone that no mater how much gunk you read about before you buy, your personal usage will completely be different then the rest. I wasn't expecting 4 plus hours. From all the things i read, it seemed impossible.
Also i forgot to mention that i also shut off bluetooth and the modem in device manager. my wifi signal was excellent and when i didn't need the network, i shut it down.

I would really like to hear of some other experiences and also some suggestions to extend battery life further.
Question: How long do batteries last if it's constantly being charged?

 

I totally agree with your, personal usage beats all.

As for that question it is recomended to take our the battery if your constantly using the AC.

 

I believe the reviews done with the DV6500T on battery life was with the standard 6 Cell. In your and my case, we upgraded to the 12 Cell battery, enabling that extended time.

On battery, with the HP Recommended battery settings, I get about 5-6 hours. But, I can't stand the dark screen on that setting, so I switched to High Performance and have yet to test the battery life, although there is strong evidence of greater battery loss.

 

I wonder how much battery we'd get running XP. I already have a partition set aside for it, but havn't gotten around to installing.

 

I really want someone to report back on that exact thing (XP on these machines). I really don't have time to wast after doing a clean install of vista (install plus tweaking took me a day and a halve).

ne1 have xp installed, please drop a line or two. so far i'm not impressed by vista.