New Envy 15 - How to increase battery life?

Hi Guys,

I just got a new envy 15 the other day. There is a high pitched noise that is kind of annoying, but I'll be using the laptop at a cafe 90% of the time and probably won't notice it. I'm pretty happy with the laptop otherwise.

Does anybody have any tips on increasing the battery life? Other than screen brightness and lowering the "maximum processor state" in the power plan, are there any other settings i should be aware of? I've read posts claiming to have increased battery life of an i7 envy 15 to 4-5+ hours. I think I'll be pretty happy if I can squeeze 3+ hours on my i5...

Thanks,

Eugene

 

The 4-5 hours are with the extra 9 cell slice... The standard 6 cell you will get around 2-3 hours of life

 

you should not have a high pitched whine. Most likely you have an errant wire or plastic sheeting that is loose and is contacting one of the fans. If that's not it, you could have a fan with a bad bearing. Either way, If you don't want to open it up to see, I'd take it back and grab another one.

seer

 

A lot of E15 owners have reported the high pitched whine. I believe it's a design flaw related to the CPU and not a "defect".

 

This is very interesting. Thank you for the citation to the other thread. Sound is a pressure wave created by some kind of vibrating medium. Power supplies can create several different frequencies of "whine" , but I have to admit I havn't come across a cpu that 1. either vibrates enough to create this kind of noise itself, or 2. emits some kind of electric discharge or electromagnetic field fluctuation sufficient to induce another component to whine. I "CAN" tell you one thing, my GEN1 with I720 is dead silent..sooooo, if its an inherent fault with the processor, it doesn't effect mine....

Seer

 

The high pitch whine is from the CPU most likely. i get it on my Dell. Using RMClock and messing with the transition states or something fixes it. While ur at it use the performance on demand feature which might save some battery life I would think.

 

someone needs to look up hetrodyne whine and then look at computer power supplies.

it happens. even with the premium Envy experience......

 

the best way to increase battery life is to adjust advanced power options for the "on battery" power saver mode as follows:

(1) set maximum processor state 25% (you can try less to stretch it further), and

(2) adjust the critical battery level to 2%

With these settings and by dialing down the screen brightness, with WiFi on but Bluetooth off, still doing regular work in Photoshop, After Effects, etc., but not editing 1080p video footage, playing 3D games or doing blu-ray authoring projects, I can get over five hours with the 6-cell battery before it automatically hibernates. With the slice battery in I can get another 7 -10 hours, for a total in this power saver mode around 12 - 15 hours. We have 2 slice batteries, so I could actually travel for a couple days without recharging if necessary.

At high performance, maximum brightness and really taxing the GPU, I only get around 90 minutes with the six cell and an extra 4-5 hours with the slice battery, for a total of 6 - 8 hours or so.

 

1 disable fan always on
2 turn on air conditioner

 

off topic but im curious, is your webcam working properly?

 

The camera software on default settings has some issues with compensating for the light temps giving you a kaleidoscope of color tints as you move the camera from an area illuminated by one type of light to another i.e. sunlight, incandescent, to flourescent, to dark (it has its own infrared illumination for those post 'lights out' chats LOL).

I will tell you, however, I have two usb infrared webcams that I bought so that I could vid-conf with mil personnel in a combat area and both of those systems have no trouble compensating automatically for normal illumination, tho they throw a slightly greener cast to the images in darkness.

seer

 

Newsposter, I was also considering the possibility that the noise was from the powersupply, but everyone in the other thread seems ADAMANT that the noise was coming directly from the cpu, which to me seems *very* unlikely.

seer

 

How do you adjust it below 8%? Is there a hack or program you have to use?
Mine won't go below 8

 

The whine can come from any sort of electrical component, especially ones with cheap capacitors. If you have another system to test it on, you can test whether the noise is coming from the power supply or CPU. But CPU whine has been a fairly common problem in the past (much more than power supply whine).

 

Not sure what you mean by "properly". I did notice that the video looks a little blue, which confirms what I had read in a couple other threads, but i've never had a webcam before and didn't try it long enough to be sure.

 

I've set my computer to those settings but yet I'm still only getting no more than 1:25 from a full charge on very light use (just browsing). Is there something I'm missing?

 

No envy owner has gotten more then 4 hours.... jjb and others have gotten around 3:30 with a few more tweaks and underclocking the gpu... Me personaly I have gotten around 1:30 mins-2 hours on battery and around 5 with the slice

 

I'm going to do a clean install of windows 7 to see if that gives me better results.