7730/7530 Battery life with only integrated graphics

But the XPS has it apparently?

And the precision, and the HP Zbook not. Seems to be the HP/Dell don't think battery life people with do work without sGPUs in workstations.

 

Unless something has the the latest generation, the XPS doesn't have an option to run totally without the dGPU. If your system has a dGPU, then it is basically stuck in the "Optimus" configuration — All displays are connected to the Intel GPU, and the dGPU should be "off" unless it is needed. (Same goes for the Precision 55X0.)

 

That's precisely what I mean: the XPS, with the 'normal' Optimus configuration, achieves 10-12 hours on a single charge. What is so different about the Precision that its battery life plummets when a dGPU is installed?

 

Sorry, I meant what Ionising_Radiation said. I should have been more clear.

 

@SvenC, @Kyle, I've been speaking to Dell Support about this matter, and I brought up this forum post to them. They requested for battery reports so that I could forward it to them. May I ask if both of you could generate a battery report:

Code:

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\battery-report.html"

and upload the resulting HTML file, so I can forward it to Dell? Apparently the technicians want to investigate why some systems have much better battery life than others. Do ensure to remove any personally identifiable information (like names, IP addresses, etc.) from your files, as a privacy measure. Thanks very much.

If either of you don't mind, could you share your Service Tags, too, via PM? Thanks very much.

 

Here is my report. I hope it is good enough without service tag.

See the 26th of April where I explicitly lowered the power mode on battery to slider position 2 of 4 for light work. That got me 9 to 10 hours. For real work, if on battery, I use slider position 3 or 4, which is more like 3 to 6 hours.

 

Thanks Ionising_Radiation for taking up this matter with Dell, and it's fantastic that Dell techs want to investigate this issue.

I can generate the report, but I rarely, if ever, use Windows. I'm a linux user, so I'm not sure if booting into windows and doing just the battery report will be useful?
One thing I could do is when I leave the house, boot into windows and keep it on for the day. Not sure if this will be useful as it is a "no-use" scenario?

 

The thing is the battery report is generated over the lifetime of the Windows install, so even if you only ran the battery down in Windows once or twice, I'm sure it'll be useful.

 

The question is how do I run it down without being actively involved?
Literally, the only work I've done in windows for the past year is: install windows updates, install MS office, read some drm'd pdfs, and fill in some web forms that were not working in linux.

If I boot into windows, open up a webbrowser and log into gmail so there is some automatic periodic activity which I'm away at work, will it be enough?

 

I would suppose so—provided Windows doesn't make your computer go to sleep! So you'd have to disable that particular setting.