battery life remaining?

Hi all,

I just bought an HP DV2404CA (see specs in signature), and for the life of me, I can't get the remaining battery life (in hours/minutes) to display when I put the cursor over the battery icon in the system tray.

I also tried a couple of battery 'gadgets' that are supposed to show this, but don't.

All I see is percentage remaining.

 

HP notebooks currently only show the percent charge remaining. There is no time remaining display. You can try using applications like RM Clock which show the estimated time remaining but their effectiveness is not too good.

 

That kind of sucks

What kind of battery life can I expect with a 6 cell on my machine?

 

i like that feature my girlfriend got the inspiron 1420 and it tell you hrs/mins my 2500 doesn't would be a nice feature but i just go by percent

 

An HP system with a Turion? You'll be lucky to get 2 hours. My dv5030us with a single core Turion could push 3 hours when I first received it, if I tweaked Windows XP and used the lowest brightness. But considering how fast HP batteries died, it was down to 2.5 hours before I knew it and, when the motherboard died after not even a year of use, it was down to just a little over 2 hours of battery life.

My dv6345us with the Core 2 Duo barely gets over 2 hours of light use. In comparison, my MacBook gets over 4 hours with wireless on, chatting, browsing, etc. More than 3.5 hours while watching DVDs.

 

Thats to be expected(its not even a fair comparision) considering HP has a 15.4" screen compared to the 13" in the MB plus your dv6345us uses a 43Whr 6 cell battery while the Macbook uses a 55Whr ??cell battery.

 

15.4" MacBook Pro with a 1" profile (closed, much less open), can also get around 4 hours of real world battery life.

Theres no excuse for HP's poor battery life, given the huge size of the battery. I have the 6 cell from my dv6345us right here resting on the palm rest of my MacBook and it takes up more than half the length and half the width.

 

Well, you have to take into account the fact that the dv6000 is available form well under $1000 to around $1700-1800 which means you would have to make some sacrifices to meet that price range. The Mac Pro starts of over $1500 where Apple can afford to use mag chassis, better materials making it thinner. Also its not like Apple dont ever have issues with build quality, overheating or any such issues which can happen/has happened with any notebook from any company.

 

Overheating? Overheating forces the system to shut down. Tell me how many Apple owners have had their system shut down from heat

Oh, and unlike HP, Apple will actually admit they have problems. How many people here had dv5000/8000 systems with keyboard issues? How many people here had motherboards die for no reason?

I know that if my motherboard in my dv5030us had died 2 weeks later I probably would have had to take HP to court, even though the system had motherboard issues under warranty and they were aware of them.

But yeah, go back and check out the money that battery recall cost Sony. A 6 cell battery that HP uses doesn't even cost $40 for them and they charge more than 3x that for a replacement. They could definitely afford to make better batteries available and not raise the price at all.