Tecra M2-S730 battery life

Got this lappy a week ago (1.6 dothan, 512/60/64 video)
Everything is fine, but I'm concerned with battery life from standard pack.
Once charged fully it shows a bit lesser then 3 hours of work.
Then time diminishes quite quickly. At 90% it gives 2:24

Manufacturer and several reviews claim that battery life should be at least 4 hours. I have reinstalled Toshiba Power Management is it's descibed at
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/...kceghdgngdglk.0

(however it is not clear what is the purpose of step #2?)

then XP asked to reinstall Common Modules.

However it didn't help much
May I have a broken battery or this longevity is good for this machine ?

Previously I had Samsung P30 and there were battery calibration utility at BIOS setup. Is there somewhat similar ? It looks that system reads battery value improperly.



10x !

 

I think XP is known to have this issue, or possibly Toshiba with bad drivers. Check Toshiba's site and Microsoft for any updates to the OS or drivers that may help.

Regarding battery life, I know on older batteries, they worked like how you mentioned. They will only list a change in time remaining at certain points of the battery. For example, it may report 100% for 30+mins, but then drop to 50% all of a sudden. But this only happened on the NiCad batteries because they didn't have a "smart" sensor in the battery to detect the small changes. The battery you have is a Li-Ion, so this problem should not exist.

Depending on what you were doing at the time and what power management settings you had it set to, this will also play a part in how fast your battery drains. Having the wireless on when you don't have wireless setup will drain the battery faster. Playing CD's/DVD's, watching movies & playing games will all drain the battery faster. Power management settings, if set to "Always On", it will cause the CPU to run at full speed even when on battery. This is a BIG drain on the battery, as well as leaving the LCD brightness on MAX. Check your settings, make sure it's set to Portable/Laptop and try dropping your brightness down.

If these suggestions don't help, it's possible you have a bad battery, if so, you may want to get it replaced.

Good Luck!

-Vb-

 

Just my 2cents from a M2 user that Travels a lot.
The M2 is great on Battarys. But, a kozinak said earlyer it is also how you tweek the Toshiba settings.
The Defaut Toshiba setting are very good on the M2.
My favoite thing to do now is to NOT use my DVD player ... run everything from the Disk ... Load the slim bay Extra battary and voila 6-8 hours.
Less if I go Wireless and MAX on the brightness.
I have a feeling 1 gig of ram helps run more things in ram instead of disk. Because that is what I have and the disk light flickers rarely.
(except on boot LOL)

but, fyi my favoite battary combo the 12 cell and the slim bay battary ... on even long 8-9 hour flights I have not run out of power.
In fact I have never run out of battarys power with this combo yet.

Newbie w/Tecra M2
1.5ghz,1gig,64mbvram,gigEthernet,Firewire,bluetooth,14"XSGA,40gbHDD,DVDCD-RW,802.11g,12-cell+SelectBay 2nd batt for 11.5hours at normal,iGO Juice AC combo,3-yrs SystemGuard
& a OLY c-5050 digi cam.