Battery life estimation on the m860tu?

I haven't found a program that can give a battery life estimation in terms of hours and minutes for the m860tu. Quite strange, because I know other laptops can do that easily through the vista or xp battery meters. Has anyone been able to get this information for their m860tu via a program or setting?

 

Nope, couldn't find it either. Anyway, the estimation is generally overestimated and really correspond to the lowest possible usage. I just know that 100% ~ 2 hours; 50%~1hour; 25%~30minutes when on power saver.

 

may have just solved the problem

Although I couldn't figure out how to get it in the system tray, you can get a windows sidebar gadget that does it.

it's called istat battery mod2

Although it seems to be giving a poor time estimation of the battery life, its only been running a few minutes. maybe after a few more it'll do better at calculating the time remaining

Edit: after a few tries, this sidebar gadget's estimation has been quite off. back to the drawing board I guess.

 

Anyway, next question, tips to get the most out of the battery time. Can we get this thing up to 2 hours and 30 minutes?

 

Undervolting the CPU with RMClock and undervolting the GPU via bios flash, while using silent mode + power saver, wifi off gets me about 2 hours 30 minutes.


Really, for best battery life, you should've opted for the 5400RPM hard drive, which would give you a small boost in battery life as well.

 

Do you have aero, sidebar, and indexing turned off? I remember reading something saying that they are battery killers, especially the latter two.

 

Absolutely right.

Indexing especially, since it makes your hard drive run under load virtually all the time.

 

is there any program that will do all that with a click? im kind of sick of spending 10 minutes getting my laptop ready to go onto battery power.

 

Indexing should be off permanently anyway, since it's the worst feature ever implemented into Vista in the first place.

As far as the sidebar and aero, this program is pretty nice for that.

http://www.codeplex.com/vistabattery

 

Ok, I have found that undervolting with RMClock and changing my settings for battery in high performance to less than power saver has given me battery life of 2 hours and 40 minutes. Didn't have to give up my beautiful Aero.

 

I realized that gaming performance is poor when on battery, even in High Performance. Is there a setting somewhere for that?

 

That's due to PowerMizer that comes on automatically on Nvidia cards. It's not horrible, you can still play less strenuous games like say from 2003 at the same pace. But things of this and last year will significantly slow down.

There is a way to take it off, but keep in mind, it's probably only going to give you an hour of battery life.

 

Disabling Powermizer usually works