CF-R4 battery life

Hello,

There seems to be no general battery thread, so I decided to post here.
I own a CF-R4 - not exactly a toughbook, but a very tiny and nifty machine nonetheless. As far as I know they are not distributed outside Japan and I got mine from an import website.
One of the argument that persuaded me to buy this laptop four years ago is battery life - 7 hours advertised. In real-life usage, with the screen dimmed and without doing anything intensive, I found that this figure was rather accurate.
This however, was in the beginning. After a while I noticed that battery life started to shrink dramatically. Thinking that the battery was dying, I bought another one (not actually from Panasonic, couldn't find one in Europe), and had my old one "reloaded" (ie, the inner cells were replaced with others with more capacity). Of course, I also used the battery calirbation piece of software that comes with the computer.
Now, with either battery, I get roughly 5h30 hours of power, with the CPU undervolted/underclocked at the maximum it can withstand (core at 0.6V) and the screen dimmed at maximum.
My question is, why does this happen? The batteries are LiIon. One of them is not a year old, the other has been reloaded at the same time I bought the new one. I've recalibrated several times; yet, nothing doing.

Does anyone has an explanation?

Cheers,

54321

 

my guess would be: as your computer gets older you install more and more software on it, if you did it intentionally or not doesn't matter but it is there. All this extra junk puts higher loads on your cpu and has your hdd running more of the time. Solution: reinstall the Windows.

Dominik

 

I agree with gothed, I also want to point that max battery life is estimated for some 'ideal conditions', with light software running and not much hard drive work.

But, even OS (any OS, not only win) gets heavier with new versions, XP SP2 is heavier then SP1 and SP3 is even more. As well as additional software you might be using (and possibly not aware of significant part of it) - so you simply cant recreate that ideal conditions now after many years since this model was released.

Unless you make a blank reinstall as gothed says, but will such system match your idea of usefulness?

 

Hello,

I've thought of that indeed, but I'm still sceptical. I have a dedicated machine to test junk software and installed very little on my laptop (I most certainly installed many more windows updates than actual pieces of software, then updates also contribute to bloat the system...), I'm also very thorough in keeping my system clean (regular registry cleaning, regular defrags and page file defrags, deletion of windows updates uninstall once I've tested they work - this latter can speed up windows start-up quite a bit - etc.).
What makes me sceptical is the following - when I bought the computer I didn't know about undervolting, so the cpu was running all the time at its stock voltage/clock; now, it's *always* at .6V, 600MHz instead of the stock 1.2. At this voltage, I believe a pentium M dothan, dissipates something like 1W.... not so much! That's why I'm so surprised - I never use a CD player (it's external on the CF-R4), never use sound (always off), disabled the PCMCIA reader.... certainly I use WIFI and LAN, but I used to four years ago as well - and now, I di the screen much more than I used to. For sure, more junk can contribute to CPU load, but THAT much? Process explorer shows that most of the time, CPU usage is less than 30%.
Can it be that the readings windows get from the batteries are themselves junk?

Thanks again for your replies,
cheers;
54321

 

AFAIK updates really do increase the system weight that much.
Judging on my own T2 which I use for >4 years already, startup speed, general perfomance etc. (Or maybe its just because the CPU gets weaker as it grows old? lol, jk)

I don't think Windows can be wrong really much with calibrated battery, though you may see how it estimated time left changes depending on what's going on currently, it indicates more time with the idle system and less with many processes running.