I upgraded to Vista ultimate. the Battery which was coming for 4 hrs approx (on hig battery life mode) now comes for max 1.45 hrs... !! i know vista has lots of graphics and all... but any way to increase battery life.. !!
Welcome to the new Vista!!! If I turn all the toys off on Ultimate (Sidebar/Aeroglass/quikset/lower brightness/etc) I can pull 2 hours out of my brand new extended 85wh XPS battery.
Ive heard others brag about 7 hrs with XP... I just wanna watch one full DVD!!!
Ide like to see this thread become a comparison amongst users with tips though
I am lucky to get a an hour on my laptop with a 6 cell battery with Vista. It basically cut my run time in half over XP. Now if someone would design longer running batteries that are reasonably priced we could be happy. I can't wait to see how much power the next windows will use. Maybe we are heading towards nuclear powered laptops.
You answered your own concern with the letters AMD. The processor has alot to do with it. When I was in NYC last Dec, I saw a sign near times square. It was adding up the energy saved through use of AMD processors which made me curious.
I subsequently read an article that hyped AMD processors demonstrating that they can get as much as twice the battery life from portable laptops....
This is the first real life example I would probably relate this too though
SIDENOTE: What would be nice is for posters to state if their system is on performance/balanced or power saver mode and if they shut anthing off such as sidebar/quikset/adjust brightness/bluetooth/network etc...and then state their maximum batt life...
That is strange. I have the 6 cell battery on 1501 AMD processor MK36 single core and I get roughly the same battery life ( about 3 hours ) as I was with MCE 2005. And I usually keep it set to Max Performance even on batteries.
pcgeek are you running all the effects like aero glass and also is your wireless enabled and screen brightness up. I actually have an AMD ml-32 processor and run wireless and screen brightness on full. With xp I could get about two hours but now about 1 with vista. I didn't mention that the laptop is a compaq not a dell and it will also be the last compaq I ever buy as it is el cheapo. I do have 4 dell desktop computers, two of which will get vista installed or probably a dual boot with xp and vista. oh the option is on balanced, but the ati video is on max acceleration.
Message Edited by MaximusHQ on 02-19-2007 05:55 AM
Yes I am running in Max performance mode, Max Brightness on the LCD, Wireless adapter on, Aero Glass effects with the Sidebar running with 3 Gadgets, and the video at full acceleration.
I ran it unplugged tonight for just short of three hours ( 2 hours and 50 minutes ) and it still was showing the battery at 30%. During the time I was surfing the web, and I burned a 500 MB CDR. I think it would have gone over three hours if I hadn't needed to bail out for work.
Granted the time may have been shortened had I been watching a DVD or playing a game.
The notebook is also only two months old, as that would also have some bearing.
Is there a specific way to adjust the acceleration of Video ( you stated running at full acceleration). I have been having trouble lately with playback of video or live streaming ... it always seems to be buffering which then stops and starts the video (pain in the but). I am on cable internet so its not the connection.
Just switch to Power Saver mode in Windows Mobility Center. I get about 2.5 - 3 hrs with my new Inspiron 6400(and that's with nothing disabled). Don't expect to get full battery potential if you are running the goodies. i could probably pump out about 4 hours off the battery if I really wanted to. Play with the settings in Mobility Center, that's what it is there for. :)
The update driver is posted by Dell for this graphics adapter.... Im hoping the prob with my video lies in the background activity which I believe is because I am still using RC2; there is alot of debugging utilities and whatnot for tracking and recording events.
Don't know about yours, but mine is an ATI 200m graphics. I installed the vista drivers directly from ATI and on mine they were found under driver downloads in the vista 32 bit, integrated/motherboard since mine is integrated. They work fine and give you the ati catalyst control center where a lot of stuff can adjusted including something called powerplay where you are able to choose max performance or max battery life. If you have a nvidia video graphics I would look it up on nvidia.com and see if they have a compatible version as those will likely have more options than the dell drivers. At least the last time I tried dell's nvidia drivers some years back they were limited very much compared to the nvidia.com ones.
Message Edited by MaximusHQ on 02-19-2007 11:19 AM
flamenko
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Posted February 18th, 2007 23:00