Latitude E6400 and battery

I have been reading about people getting so many hours out of their E6400. I have the 9 cell battery and running the screen on the lowest setting, Bluetooth off and wifi on im getting close to 6 and a half hours of battery life. Is this normal.

I heard about doing a clean install, what does this do, and what benefits would i be achieving by doing this?

Is there anything else i can do to get a little more juice out of the battery when i need it? I plan to have wifi on most of the time when it is being used. Basic web-surfing and Microsoft word...

Thanks

Joseph

 

What're your specs? If you've got the NVS 160M, six and a half probably isn't too far off from what you can/should be getting.

 

Sorry Specs.
Running Windows XP Pro free upgrade to Vista
Core 2 Duo T9550 2.66GHz
4 gigs of ram but windows sees 3.48
Ultrasharp WXGA+ LED display
NVS 160M
250 hd 7200 RPM
Bluetooth

 

Yeah, I think six to seven is going to be pretty typical with this configuration. You lose a bit less than an hour on the six-cell just for the NVS 160M, so that'll be about an hour and a half on the nine-cell. Then you've got the T9550 and the 7200RPM drive, and that'll probably cut another half an hour (off of the most conservative configuration).

The clean install will hopefully get rid of anything that's consistently eating a few CPU cycles here and there and putting a drain on the battery. Depending on how bad the factory image is, you could get a substantial increase in battery life with this.

 

The T series CPUs have higher idle power leakage than the P series (and not just a higher maximum power rating). This can make 1 - 2W difference to the power drain under light usage.

John

 

I get around 6 with basically that same configuration, except with the X9100 CPU, which has even higher idle power draw. You're battery is fine.

 

Is there anything that i can do to get better battery life? What does a clean install do to improve battery?

Thanks

 

A clean install may help a little, but it's probably not worth the effort. The Latitudes come very crapware free from the factory, so I doubt there's anything using extra CPU cycles.

What you can do is use some of the power saving features in Dell ControlPoint. If your aim is absolutely top battery life at all costs, you can go into Dell ControlPoint>Power Manager>Power Settings, and then hit "Enable Extended Battery Life". That disables a whole slew of features, from optical drive to reducing LCD refresh rate. There are some other settings you can mess around with too.

 

You can try to replace the T series processor with a P series processor.

I can regularly get between 8 and 10 hours out of a single 9 cell with wifi and bt turned on doing web surfing/general office work.

I've got a P8600, 4gb, LED display, and a SSD drive. using a regulary 7200rpm drive drops the battery by about 20 minutes

 

What about video card?

Can you do me a favor and check what your discharge rate under minimal settings?

I get around 10-13w discharge rate with a P8600, 250GB 7200RPM, and Quadro 160 NVS when I have everything but wifi off.