N5010 Battery Issues

Question

So,

My gf got me and herself a N5010 for early Christmas. Really good performing laptops when plugged into power... however the battery sucks. When screen is on lowest brightness and wifi turned off etc, even with "power saver" turned on I'll be lucky if I get 30-40 minutes of it just sitting there, even not doing any tasks. I looked for info on the N5010 and it appears it's a i5 laptop, however mine is i7.

So, everything intensive is turned off, screen brightness turned down, power saver on, and I still get very bad battery life. She is also having a similar problem. Is there a known issue with these laptops? I put my Asus and the Dell side by side and the Asus was going about 1 hour and 40 minutes after the Dell shut down.

Do Dell have a battery calibration utility for these laptops? Because, to be honest, I'm not too happy with the battery life on this when my gf was told by Dell tech support I'd get 4 hours out of it.

Also, what I mean by 30-40 minutes is it gets down to 5% then shuts off. I fully charged it, rebooted and unplugged while it was rebooting... when it came to the desktop it had lost 6% already.

Walry666 · Answer

Well, I called in my lunchbreak and was told it's within acceptable operating specs, but if it gets lower to call back or I could buy a 9 cell battery.

Pretty annoying that I literally only got this laptop and I cant even trust the battery.

khanisar · Answer

hi Walry,

i am facing the same problem, i have N5010 Laptop Core i3, my laptop is still in warranty, like 5 months remaining, it does not run more than 40 minutes on Battery,

did you asked Dell Technical Support About it?

:emotion-6:

LaptopNomad · Answer

As a benchmark how much energy can be stored in an empty laptop battery
charge the battery when the laptop is switched off with a power meter connected.

The reading on the powermeter after a full charge is an indication of the
remaining capacity of the battery.

khanisar · Answer

hey walry, try upgrading your bios, i upgraded my bios drivers from A02 to A10, my battery life increased dramatically, instead of 40 minutes, i used my laptop upto 2 hours and 15 minutes, and all this time i was surfing on web and using the laptop in normal balanced mode. regards

Walry666 · Answer

Hi, I've already upraded to A10 and still having the same issue.   Also, I don't have access to a powermeter unfortunately.

LaptopNomad · Answer

Remaining capacity in DELL laptop batteries is calculated as the result of 1 qualified discharge.
In Windows 7 the conditions for a qualified discharge can be set automatically.

The process is known as capacity learning and be triggered quite easily:

1.    The laptop battery is not charged by the AC adapter during measurements
2.    Self-discharge of laptop battery cells is under a preset value
3.    Temperature does not drop below the low temperature threshold
4.    Discharge current does not drop under a minimum preset value
5.    Discharge current does not exceed maximum overload value

Basically an Idle situation in any OS triggers this process.

After this the ihternal value of the battery life time or Full Charge Capacity in the Laptop
Battery Gauge chip is updated as the actual capacity.

Windows 7 has been suspect for some time to drain batteries faster than other OS's.
Microsoft denies this.

Locked Topics – Laptops General

N5010 Battery Issues

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