Ultra High Capacity Battery and Vista

I have a TC4400 tablet pc with Vista Ultimate on it. Out of curiosity, what are you guys getting (hours wise) with Vista OS and a Ultra High Capacity Battery??

This is rated for 16 hours (advertised) but I'm getting barely 7 with Vista. I'm wondering if everyone is experiencing the same thing.

This is with aero and everything turned on. I know that there is a Vista battery saver application out there and that turning down aero and other things will increase battery run time but I want to know if anyone else is getting more than 10+ hours.

 

Is this 7 hours combined with your normal battery? The biggest influence will be your screen brightness. I believe the 16 hours includes both the normal standard battery plus the travel battery.

 

I think 16+ hours mean including your internal battery. It just bothers me because the non ultra high capacity battery is rated 8 hours so I'm wondering if it would be 4 hours if I had that instead. Here I have approximately 8 hours or less for the ultra high capacity. I will try using the ambient lighting brightness control thingamagig. I do keep my brightness pretty high because I like it bright and the ambient lighting seems to be too low.

Anyone else hae any other suggestions?

 

Undervolting the CPU will give you about 15-20% extra battery life. It wont slow down your cpu at all(underclocking will though)

 

You can also try lowering the brightness of your screen, you will notice a bid difference there as well.

flipfire, have you tested the 15-20% gain in battery life? I know that undervolting helps tremendously with the heat of the CPU, but I can't see how it would increase the battery life that much.

 

16hours on battery? Have to take it with a grain of salt. Is this on stand-by only or a mix of use/stand-by?

 

Theoretically, say you lower your voltage by .200v from the standard 1.000v voltage. Thats using 20% less voltage drawn from the battery. Theres a few undervolting guides that have proven this, just google it. Its basic common sense, the less voltage you use the more battery life you will have

I havent tested my battery life before because its always running on high performance mode. I can only give average times i usually get.

 

Not quite. If my CPU is running at 1V, and I move it to 0.8V, that does not mean I'm drawing 0.2V less system wide.

It means that I'm using less power. Specifically (0.8/1)^2 = 64% of the original power the CPU required. Assuming that a processor like that used 10W, it would use 6.4W then. So you draw 3.6W less. Assuming that you had an 85WHr battery and the average power draw went from 16W (average for PCs probably) down to 12.8W, that means your battery life goes from 5.3 hours to 6.6 hours.

Naturally, I'm pulling a lot of those numbers just from values I've observed, and are NOT specific to your system. BUT, you kind of get the idea. In practice, I've been able to squeeze 30-60 minutes more out of a good system when doing that.

Bottom line is that yes, you will have more battery life. But not necessarily 20% more (my example actually increases battery life by more than 20%). And in my example, I'm assuming (roughly) the processor was running at around 50-100% usage.

Anyway, sorry for the math lesson. Bottom line, you save power. Just do not think it is the end all and be all of power consumption.

You need to do more than just the CPU though. You can underclock the GPU as well to some degree, and you can lower the screen brightness. The screen alone uses a few watts of power, and that can EASILY add more battery life just by dimming.

 

Makes you wish we had these kinds of batteries...;

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html

 

I tried to keep it simple for basic understanding. i was only refering to the cpu of course and only when its running on the max multiplier.

 

Thank you very much for the posts, good information!

I can't wait for those batteries to come around Funnyx!