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7174
December 8th, 2003 06:00
Battery working time!
Dear Dell Users,
I bought my Dell Latittude D500 around 45 days ago. I wanted to know, how long can the battery run under straight working hours? Because mine works only for 1.5 to 2 hours at max. Is this normal?
Thanks in advance for any comment or help.
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makdolby
1 Message
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December 15th, 2003 14:00
Hi, I too have had recent problems with my battery life. I have now owned my DELL C600 for 2yr 5months. The battery used to last anywhere from 2-3 hours. I then got a second battery which gave 5-6 hours or normal use. Recently the first battery I had with the laptop now only lasts 45 minuets. The power bar would go from 100% to 85% to 26% then off giving hardly no time to save my work. I now only use the replacement battery I bought over a year ago now, but this only seems to last just over an hour or so. I have just upgraded from BIOS A13 to A23 which is supposed to give a better, more accurate update of how your battery is doing. Also BIOS A23 seems to give better battery management under WinXP but I'm still on Win2000. I have also just noticed, looking through the messages in Control Panel Power Options you can select various power schemes. Mine was set to portable laptop which apparently makes the processor run at a lower speed than your maximum. You can change this to Always On which is supposed to make you DELL run at 100% processor speed...I have yet to conform this.
I would suggest that 1.5 - 2 hours seems about right [depending on what you are using it for?] I'm still looking at the DELL site and may email them to find out the manufactures spec for a definitive answer. I have emailed them before and them seem to answer you.
Please let me know what you find.
Famous
67 Posts
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December 15th, 2003 18:00
I used to be a battery engineer for Energizer. If you are using your battery heavily (deep cycling from charged to discharged and then charged again), you will be lucky to get much more than 1 year of full power out of it. After that, the battery time will begin to decrease.
Your mileage may vary.
Good luck!
Lord Epidemia
51 Posts
0
December 16th, 2003 05:00
Hi,
Normal expectations for battery life may vary. It depends on how you use the system, and how the settings are configured in the Bios and Operating System.
The devices that draw more power from the batteries are the LCD and Processor. If you decrease the brightness of the screen you can get more time while on battery. On the new system, there is a feature called Intel Speedstep that will allow you to save some battery power by decreasing the clock speed for the processor while running on battery and will increase it to the max while running in the ac adapter.
Flashing the bios is the best way to accurately optimize the battery life. For a battery under normal usage can last about 2 hours. When you notice that the battery doesn't hold the charge any more, then start thinking about buying a new one.
Sincerely,
Lord Epidemia