Series 7 chronos windows 8.1 battery life?

I have a series 7 chronos np780z5e I got in April which I just installed windows 8.1 on. I'm now getting approximately half the battery life I used to. Is there anything I can so about this? Has anyone else experienced this? I don't think it's my battery itself, I'm a bit about using battery life extender and not discharging it unnecessarily.

 

A significant number of people have reported in this forum that they are getting significantly reduced battery time once they have installed 8.1.

If you have not installed Settings version 2.2.0.5 (or newer) then do so because the package includes the power profiles and other configuration steps. If it is not offered for your notbook then use SW Update to find the 8.1 downloads for the NP940X3G. This might improve the situation but Samsung;s support for 8.1 is currently work in progress.

John

 

Which NP940X3G downloads can/should I install without screwing up my NP780z5e that would affect power consumption profiles? On the 940X3G I see a Settings 2.2.0.3 but nothing with 0.5 or newer.

 

I have the 780Z5E as well, and posted in another thread that I recently upgraded to 8.1. My battery life is pretty much the same; what steps did you do to install 8.1/ did you tweak any settings that would adversely affect it?

After searching for a few threads that reported abnormal battery drain, I downloaded Battery bar to check the details (thanks John!). With 5-6 tabs open in Firefox and listening to music on iTunes @ 60% brightness, it's reporting a discharge rate of 12.355mW, and 0.8% battery wear (I have enabled the battery life extender option in bios). The full runtime accordring to the application is 7:32, which sounds about right compared to windows 8.

 

I installed it normally through the windows store app. I can't imagine what I would have done to affect battery life in terms of settings.

 

In another thread, it was recommended to download Batterybar and see what the stats (discharge rate, battery wear) were. I think the solution ended up being that the user had to upgrade his graphics driver

 

Thanks for the suggestion, though I'm pretty sure it isn't that, I just updated to the latest graphics driver last week.

 

The UK X3G has Settings 2.2.0.5. There seems to some erratic updating of SW Update's database.

Programs such as Settings and SW Update are generic and should work with all recent Samsung notebooks. Using a hardware driver from a newer model is only appropriate if the hardware component is the same. Samsung, for example, use the Elan touchpad on most (all?) of their recent notebooks so it's safe to use a newer driver from another model. However, don't use the driver currently offered for 8.1 which Samsung have bungled.

John

 

I just installed battery bar. With settings 2.2.0.5, running exacty the same settings as Kevenn (4 tabs open on internet, iTunes playing, ~50 or 60% brightness), I get a discharge rate of -19.268 mW which sounds a lot higher than it should be based on what he said.Full runtime 4:44. Uninstalling that and reinstalling settings 2.0.0.45, with the same stuff running I get a discharge rate of -13.978 mW and full runtime of 6:31. I think this is still well short of what I was getting before.

 

14W is a lot better than 19W but you should be striving for 10W under light usage with a dim display. 90Whr battery and 10W power drain = 9 hours.

John

 

But how can I achieve that? I was before 8.1. Any other stuff I can try?

 

It's either hardware power management (make sure anything non-essential is slowed down or powered down when on battery) or software / drivers causing higher CPU utilisation. For me, it's another reason to hold back from 8.1 until Microsoft / Samsung do another iteration of improvements. You might be able to do some tweaking by looking at the individual processes in Task Manager and seeing which are using the CPU. You can also try varying the the CPU power states when running on battery and try changing the settings.

John