POLL: How long does your battery last?

I have a Compal HEL80 with a T5500, 5400rpm HDD and 2GB of ram, 9 cell battery and brightness at min with wifi off and I'm only getting 2:20min until dead as windows is reporting and after letting it run on battery it was normal surfing I go roughly what windows reported. I'm really disappointed with the battery life on this. I can't even watch a 2hr divx movie without needing a charge for the last few mins. I've had this computer for 4 months now.

Does the HEL80 and HGL30 have the same battery? When I took my computer in for repair and went to picked it up, they took my battery out and when I ask for my battery they couldn't remember what they did with it and took it off another Compal computer they were testing but I didn't pay attention what model.

What does Windows estimate for you on a full charge? I'm really only interested if you've had this computer for 3+ months.

Crap the poll didn't work and I don't know how to get it up.

 

I can get about 4.5 hours out of my machine in the sig, that's with the screen at the lowest setting and wireless on doing random light stuff. Windows actually overestimates a little, it always starts out at 4:47-52 but I can only get 4:30 out of it usually.

 

Mine lasts 5 minutes, whoopee!

 

I get about 3 hours average with wireless on, lowest brightness, and surfing the net (HGL30, 9 cell battery). Windows usually reports about 3 hours or so (it changes often depending on what I'm doing). I believe the batteries in the compal hgl30 and hel80 are the same. Between the two computers, I would think the battery life on the HEL80 would be only SLIGHTLY smaller since the screen is a measly inch larger.

If I were you, I'd get a program that tests your battery wear level ( Notebook hardware Control is one, though its not very accurate), and then if the battery wear is more than 20%, go back and complain that they gave you a cruddy battery.

This is all assuming you have treated your battery right ( Guide by Chrisyano)

 

I have the HEL80 with 2gig ram, core2 @ 2ghz, screen at lowest and wireless on and i get about 3hours and 15 minutes doing normal light stuff, i can easily watch a whole dvd and have power left over. i also put in a hitachi 7200 rpm drive and battery power only dropped 15 minutes, or so windows says.

9 cell battery "edited"

 

Added the poll info to the thread I don't want to expand it to "with DVD playing" or "with brightness on low", so just assume that you're answering for normal non-heavy usage (web surfing wirelessly, maybe a DVD or a video place like Youtube).

 

Do you have the 6 cell or 9 cell battery?

Did you turn your brightness down as far as you can and still be at a comfortable level?

How much life did you get when it was new? Batteries are batteries so they do lose life over time, usually about 3-4 minutes a month giving them a total useful life of about 1.5 to 3 years.

 

2-3 hour's on wireless G with min CPU and min brightness... Wireless card is allowed to manage it own power though, so that might slow me down...

9 Cell - Normally close to 3h.

 

So much for core duos being more battery efficient than turions. So far, everyone on here has a c2d and gets a little over 3 hours.

 

About 1.5-2hrs with a Celeron M 1.46..... All due to the bloody nvidia chip, argh! So hot it gets - all the time at 45 degrees centrigate :/ Cpu stays cool tho - abou 25-30 degrees.

Compal HEL80 here. Cheers.

 

2.5 hours watching "Jericho" - two and one half series. A little bit doing some stuff.
brightness - highest, cause traveled by car - was very sunny day.
Nothing was underclocked.
Hel 80, 6cell, Seagate 120gb, 2gb Ram, Celeron M430 - 1.73Ghz
P.S. all the time was small cd in the DVDrom

 

I think I got over 3 last time I checked...

 

If i have omnipass enabled, my battery would only last about 2 hrs to 2:15 min. With omnipass disabled it is 3 hrs. I have noticed that when surfing the web (using IE7), with omnipass enabled my cpu cycles continously between 13% and 55 %; if i right click omnipass and hit exit (which effectively kills omnipass process) my cpu returns to normal (1-4%) and my battery life goes up to 3 hrs.

 

Unless you state whether you have a 6 cell or 9 cell battery it is difficult to get the proper prospective about battery life.

Some people with the VBI version have the 6 cell, while people with the Channel version will have the 9 cell battery.

 

i've got the 9 cell battery. i just started using this notebook every day during the weekdays on battery this semester (starting middle of jan), but have had the notebook since august 06. i barely used the notebook on battery from aug 06 till jan 07, and did regular full discharges to recalibrate and reset. At this point, i get about 3.5 hours with nothing but word document open and min brightness and min cpu (rmclock). rmclock reports that my batt has designed capacity of 79920mWh and my fully charged capacity is 67033mwh, so does that mean i've already accumulated 16% battery wear just from weekly use from mid Jan till now? is that normal?

 

i get about 2 hour 35 minutes off my battery. Min brightness, lowest cpu speed for the c2d, tweaked everything. I think mines a six cell battery, but i have no time to look for the info.

 

ive owned 1 macbook and 2 sonys and a toshiba. All were just under 2hrs under normal use

 

i got's a 6cell batt as well. pretty ****e battery life if you ask me then - this is a celeron M - what happens when i upgrade to core 2 duo? :/ or would that have more power saving capabilities?

regardless, I've now upgraded my bios to the latest (18B) and unfortunately, despite improved performance, i must say the cpu runs a lot hotter. fan is on all the time.

another story tho, what would be the recommended way to keep batter life as high as possible for as long as possible?

is running from the mains with battery connected a reasonably bad thing to do? i heard it's better to remove the battery from the laptop if it runs mostly off of mains (which it does in my case since it're pretty much a desktop replacement comp). otherwise, would keeping it charged then fully discharging it and charging again be the better off bet ?

Cheers,

//m.

 

There's an 18B Bios update? Don't see that on the compal site. BTW is there a way to downgrade bios aswell?

 

Yes, it's available from bizcom's site, seems to work orait. All of the possible damage I've noticed with it so far is that the brightness (fn+f4/f5) buttons no longer work on linux - probably it's that they're no longer bios controlled, ther was some info on it about vista compat *sic*.

Btw, to addon to my previous post, suspending the laptop and bringing it up seems to turn some magic on (or maybe it's just a coincidence), the cpu fan now periodically goes off too lke it used to.

I suppose with a Pentium M or maybe a Core cpu I'd be getting better performance alltogether since the Celeron M is not all that mobile and power efficient after all.

More info coming soon.

Regards,

//m.

ps. sorry for the offtopic, where would I set a signature to my account? can't seem to find it in option just wanted to brag off my shiney hel80 cheers!

 

Mine is the 9 cell battery. Plz refer to my previous post above; Does anyone share my experience about omnipass as it relates to cpu usage and battery life.

 

Hel80 here, t7200 and 9 cell battery. I get about 2 hours and 40 minutes before computer shuts down. Thats with rmclock and cpu at slowest speed and lowest voltage.

 

If you are keeping your laptop connect to the main for days and days, it is best to reduce the battery to around 40%, and take it out of your laptop (and ideally, to store it in your fridge. wait until it reaches room temperature before using it again). Leaving it plugged in is very bad for long periods of time, as the battery is continually 'topped off' by the main power. Since batteries have a limited number of charge cycles, these constant unnecessary cycles used up will definitely degrade your battery.

DO NOT 'kill' lithium ion batteries. They do not have memory issues like lead acid batteries, and they do not like being totally run down to 0 charge. Doing that frequently will also kill your battery quickly. Instead, charge your battery when it wears down to 10-20% (or sooner).

I know a few people who left their laptops plugged in for months on end, or ran down the battery to 0 thinking it did the battery some good, only to find that it totally ruined the battery in record time.

To get the most battery life, reduce your screen brightness, avoid using the cd drive, avoid using any usb peripherals etc, turn off your wireless, under clock your graphics card and CPU (notebook hardware control will help) use hibernating instead of standby (for extreme cases)

 

yes, well, what I did today was run the batt down to 0%, (more-less - i just waited for it to go down to 3%,restarted, went into the bios, boosted up the screen brightness to highest and waited for the computer to power off) then completely remove it and now I'm running off of the mains completely, no battery in the way, suppose that's a good thing? I deliberately discharged it for the 'storage' period because I thought that if there was any energy laying in it, potential in this case, it might allow it for quicker deterioration?

better not be any surges/power cuts now...

regards, and thanks for the quick and reasonably comprehensive answer

 

It is better to store your battery at about a 40% charge...you should never store it totally discharged.

 

ok, charging it up as we speak(write) now. any particular reasons why it is wiser to spare it at 40% ? I was wondering, since mobile phones etc also seem to come with 20%-40%, but never 0, precharged, at least the li-ion ones.

once again wikipedia comes useful: check it out, it's under 'li-ion' if you're interested. aparently it has about 2% capacity loss after 1 year if stored in a cool place at 40% capacity. and storing it discharged is dangerous due to the way the li-ions are built and designed, that is, they have a 'minimum-allowed' power capacity. if they fall below that, according to wikipedia, an internal circuit is created, rendering the battery useless as it won't charge - mainly for safety reasons due to the way it's costructed and designed, making it dangerous to charge after they achieved the sub-minimal state of charge.

neat info. cheers for the help over here as well regards,

//m.

 

seems like numerous members 2-3 hours battery life

 

that's the real world showing it's face. I don't think that's off beat from the reviews for my model (HEL80), and I voted 2-3.

 

9 cell battery users should be getting 3-4 hours as long as their brightness is turned down and they are not using their wireless card or gaming. For example you should get a little over 3 hours watching a DVD and close to 4 hours just typing or reading.

6 cell battery users will get 2-3 hours.

These times are when the battery is new, and will slowly decrease as time goes on.

 

With my 9 cell I can get 3:10ish if I'm not using the wireless (disabled), but I'm pretty hard on my system even offline.

I think alot of people have "over-active" hard drives that are killing their time because they have ton's of busy little applications running in the background (even windows services).

 

the time quoted by the manufacturers are the most you can squeeze out of the notebook these tests are performed with the screen on the dimmest settings wireless disabled and the laptop is usually kept in idle unlike the real world thats why these tests and figures usually end up looking good in the paper only and hav very little or no relevance to the real world performance

 

I'm good, 5 hours

 

Normal usage (BT on, wifi off, batt at 75 percent) I get 4.5.

With screen dimmed I get 5.5

 

would be great if you guys put also the info about what batter you have, 6 or 9 or whatever cell, since then it's easier to wonder wether one ought to worry or not about ones battery times

regards,

//m.

 

What will be nice is if this new method of manufacturing Li-ion batteries can make it from research phase to market. supposedly its actualy cheaper parts, and almost twice the capacity. now that would be sweet

 

hah your post reminded me of a news item I read a year or so ago, about Ultracapacitors using carbon nanotubes

I haven't heard anything about them since then however. Probably because the technology to mass produce anything that is complicated and on a 'nano' scale doesn't really exist.

The things would be amazing; they would have a drastically reduced charge time, would not suffer any charging problems, have a 10+ year lifespan, would be lighter, have the ability to discharge their power rapidly, or slowly, and would be the same weight, if not lighter than conventional chemical batteries . AND they wouldn't employ flammable/hazardous materials.

These things would have limitless applications too. They would certainly allow for the electric car to become mainstream. They would also provide a much more cost effective way to store energy from solar cells, so we would have energy even when the sun doesn't shine

The downside would be that carbon nanotubes is extremely hazardous if spilled into the environment (though lithium and lead is pretty bad too).

Just some stuff I thought was cool

 

I have the 9-cell in my HEL80. When I just use it on battery, without doing any changes to the way it runs (and wireless on/surfing), I will get about 2 hours or so. If I needed more time, I would make sure to cancel every power-sucking application that I don't need and I would then expect 3+ hours of life.

When I reviewed my system at 5 months of age, I got about 4 hours with screen brightness turned down, wireless off, and very light usage (practically idling for quite a bit of the time). I did not, however, close out unused applications and undervolt the CPU or GPU for my testing.

 

undervolting does increse the battery life by a margin

 

It helps in two ways, first part is that it draws less power, but it also lowers the temp by several celcius, lowering or disabling the cooling system on most machines.

 

But when the CPU throttles down the voltage lowers as well. I can't undervolt it any lower than that, 0.950V @ 1GHz is the lowest for me.

 

every notebook is different

 

Sure, but we (at least I was) were talking about the Compal HEL-80.

 

I force my system to always run at .950V @ whateverGHZ, never had a stability problem either.. (this is what most people mean by undervolting a notebook)

 

I have a brand new HEL80 (from www.PowerNotebooks.com). So this info represents an unofficial baseline for my new battery. It's a “real world” test, with the computer in use. I didn't try to minimize everything into a configuration that I'd never use.

Most of the comments in this thread refer to systems running WinXP. My system is running Vista Ultimate. And the numbers seem very similar. So Vista does not seem to be having a negative impact.

9-Cell battery.
Brightness at 2 clicks up from lowest (2/7), WSXGA+ matte screen.
Power Configuration = Balanced (managed by Vista).
Wireless On – light-medium internet surfing, light use of other programs.
No tweaks to the system at this point (essentially as configured by PowerNotebooks)
See the rest of the system specs in the signature section below.

First use of the system on battery power (100% charge):
Pull the AC plug – Vista says expect 4 hours.
Time until system shut itself down (6% remaining) = 3.25 hours.
Time to recharge to 100% = 2.5 hours (also with wireless on, light internet use).

Ran another test a few days later, after installing various common programs (some of which may use resources), but otherwise no significant tweaks. Same “real world” use – wireless on, light-medium internet and other program use.

Second full battery session:
Pull the AC plug – Vista says expect 3.25 hours.
Time until system reached 10% warning = 2.9 hours.
Time to recharge to 100% = 2.8 hours (while using computer).

Looks like I should expect 2.75 to 3 hours with normal wireless use.
Pretty good for an untweaked system. And that's with Vista.

 

I get 3:45 to 4 hours with normal use, wifi on and pretty low brightness. It's fine for me.

 

about... 2 seconds... who thinks theres something wrong with my battery!

 

Used to get over 7 hours in music mode on my old Z96Js 6cell, or 90 minutes< playing NFS MW or carbon in high performance / max settings.

After 11 months that died down to over 3 hours, and under 60 minutes respectively

If the IFL90 can get around the same, or more I'll be happy!