Latitude E4200 4 cell battery life?

For how long will 4 cell battery power Latitude E4200 ?

I just placed an order for refurbished Latitude E4200 with 4 cell battery, but I realized it is only 29WH battery after placing the order.

Can such a small battery provide enough run time to be usable?

 

This is the only E4200 review I can find out there...

http://www.trustedreviews.com/laptops/review/2009/01/19/Dell-Latitude-E4200-12-1in-Ultra-Portable/p1

They say 250 to 320 minutes without wifi on the 58WHr 6-Cell. That's exactly twice what you've got in the 4-Cell (this "cell" figure is meaningless after all -_-), so you should see anywhere between 125 and 160 minutes under the same circumstances... which is kind of not that much.

 

Hm..
It will be ok if I can get 160 minutes, but 120 minutes is a little short.
I guess I will have to get 6 cell of ebay.

 

Actually, I think you should try it yourself first.

Now that I think about it, I think there's something wrong with their testing methodology. 160 minutes on a 28WHr battery suggests an average power consumption of about 10.5W throughout that test... which is a little bit ridiculous.

My E6400 gets about 10W under light use with wifi; there's no reason an E4200 should be pulling the same amount of power without wifi when it's got an LV processor, smaller screen, no optical drive, and so on and so forth.

 

In my experience, the ULV dual core CPUs don't use much less power then the P series CPUs. My Toshiba R500 has the U7600 and it might give 7 hours on its 6 cell battery compared to my E6400's 6 hours.

I've seen my E6400 get down to below 8W now it has an SSD. The E4200 should match that under light usage with a dim backlight so > 3 hours should be achievable on that 29WHr battery. However, you need to set the critical battery action threshold down to 1% otherwise Windows will shut down with 15 potential minutes run time remaining.

John

 

Thanks for the info.

I guess I will have to try out 4 cell and decide what to do.


Commander Wolf. Is your avatar Mikoto from To Aru Majutsu no Index?
Ability to generate and control electricity like her will solve battery issue for sure. LOL