CF-M34 excessive battery drain when using HSDPA USB Device

When I use my M34 with my Huawei E1550 HSDPA broadband dongle, it drains the battery in 7 minutes flat. From 100%, to 0%. Red light, no boot etc, but the laptop seems to function. Seems to as in, powering on from flat results in red light and no boot, however using the reset switch, the boot can be forced, up until the point when hard drive attempts to spin up, and all dies again. Looks like there's not enough juice to spin it up, right?

Recalibration doesn't help.

Laptop works fine without the dongle, and the onboard GPRS doesn't seem to cause excessive drain (although connection speeds of 800bytes/sec are PAINFULLY slow, and the latency is far to high for a comfortable SSH session).
I've had it run for 1 and a half hours off of charge with it hooked up via wired ethernet at home, so the battery is still good.

So, any ideas, other then carry around a power brick? I've broke all my power bricks, so right now I'm running on an IBM brick with the tip soldered on from my broken 25 brick.

I'm using this machine at school a fair bit, and they have some serious network restrictions in place, so connecting up to their network is out of the question. They have no student wifi, and we're technically not allowed phones although I'm currently using mine as an access point for my toughbook and wifi card.

Ideally, I need a solution. I'm not sure if I should get a PCMCIA based WWAN card, or make an external USB power pack for the toughbook. (I have an old DVD player battery pack but I'm not too sure on how I'd ground the USB etc, and other little wiring thingies as well as stepping 7.8 down to 5. LM385?)
Any other reasonable ideas appreciated

 

Have you tested the dongle on an other laptop?
I dont see how an usb dongle could drain the battery so fast, the usb port will not allow more than 500 mA
Maybe you have a faulty usb port, did you test the port with other external things like cd ....

 

I've tested the dongle on my other CF-M34 and it drains at exactly the same speed. Both my M34s do it.
Also I've used other USB devices no problem, 802.11b/g/n and bluetooth leave me with battery.
Maybe I should wire a USB extension as such so that it allows me to measure amperage?

 

Are you SURE that it lasts 1.5 hours w/o the card? That seems a bit odd...

 

Yep. 1.5 hours, no problems. Happily SSH'ed into my server, monitoring the backups taking place.

 

Are there any power settings for the Huawei E1550 HSDPA? My cell phone goes through batteries like crazy depending on the settings. If I leave bluetooth and irda on, batteries die fast. Also if the phone is constantly roaming for a tower, it eats batteries. When I work inside a steel building, my battery won't last 8hrs. But if I am outdoors, it goes for several days.

 

Power settings? Um, no.
Its a "3" branded HSDPA modem, and they brand these things as much as they can. In fact, I had to use 50mb of my *paid* bandwidth just so 3 could force through an update that makes their software put up ads, and show different corporate banding for themselves. Basically they don't expose anything more technical than "connect" and "close" to the user, I'm guessing to make support easier so they don't have to worry about users causing issues.
Also, documentation for this thing is very hard to come by. It it very much trial-and-error to get the right AT commands to interface with the modem's HSDPA controller.
I connect it up under linux, using a command that i found on the ubuntu forums, it seems to work a treat for opening a PPP connection on a /dev/ttyUSBx type modem, but I cant see any power saving options there. Signal is moderate to good.

 

Any cellular device will eat up its battery if it is constantly looking for a signal. Bluetooth will do the same.
CAP

 

...which is why I don't get it that the same SIM card using the internal GPRS causes far less drain that the HSDPA stick. Its honestly stumped me.