Short Battery Life on Quad-Core+Nvidia E6420

Does anyone experience short battery life on E6420 configured with the Quad-Core i7 and Nvidia GPU? I disabled Optimus btw, so I'm running Nvidia GPU all the time.

With power saving settings and max clock speed of 50% (i.e. 1.1GHz), I could only get 4hr and 30+min ish at best using normal workload with wi-fi and about 30% brightness, and I'm using a 60WHr battery. Based on the reviews I've read on notebookcheck.net, the 97WHr battery gives close to 9hr battery life, which means that my rig should give close to 6hr of juice.

Have other users with Quad-Core i7 experienced the same issues? Should I enable Optimus? How much does that help in battery life? Anything else that can be done?

 

1. Check the wear level on your battery. Those 1 year warranty batteries seem to run into wear issues not too long after that.
2. You should be enabling Optimus. The whole point is to save batteries by not using the discrete graphics GPU (that's another chip to power when the integrated one is built into the CPU).
3. Not sure how long it lasts when stretching it, since I don't usually leave it continuously on when on battery (I usually put it to sleep/standby when I put it down).