vostro 1400 9cell windows 7 x64 battery life problems.

wow, that's a mouthfull of a title. Hopefully it explains itself.

Basically I'm super happy with win 7 x64 on the vostro 1400, except for the terrible battery life. Off power, it's less than 40 mintues even on the 'power saver' mode. I'd get 3 hours plus out of my 9 cell battery on XP...

any suggestion as to how I go about improving this problem? anybody else experiencing this?

I've looked for some answer here, but not found too much except for how to get RM clock to work on x64 so far.

any help would be great. Thanks in advance for the advice

Stuart

 

I would start by looking at the battery capacity and battery drain rate. I would use RMClock for this. Installation details are here with a link to a signed X64 signed driver.

Watts x hours = watt-hours. A good battery is normally around 50 watt-hours while a normal power drain when running on battery is 10 to 25W (depending on hardware - dedicated GPUs can consume lots of power), so I would expect more than 40 minutes run time. We need to see if if the problem lies with the battery (lost capacity) or a very high power drain.

John

 

Ok, I'll do this tomorrow. Thanks for the heads up. Stay tuned for more.

 

Maybe theres a chance that your battery is dying?

Even though the Vostro 1400 is a bit older, it should still be getting more than 3 hours of use unless you are setting the screen at full brightness.

Win7 may also be indexing your hard drive which would eat up battery life as well.

 

Ok, so all installed and running. Here's what I've got.

Remaining capasity: 51582 mWh (98.3%)
discharge: 25208 mW

So by that it seems that it's all ok as far as the battery goes eh? so power drain it is. What would be the next step in diagnosis?

Peace
Stuart

 

At that power drain rate, you should get about 2 hours. Run the computer on battery and make a note about every 10 minutes of the power drain and the remaining capacity. You may see that the capacity suddenly makes a big drop.

Do you have a dedicated GPU and is its power management working? 25W is quite a high power drain for light usage. Also what CPU usage are you getting?

John

 

Unless you're using a battery that was purchased in recent month. I would say that your battery had already been loosing it's charge capacity, especially if it was came along your purchase of this set.
Hence, you can't really blame it on the operating system.

 

well, the battery died yesterday. blashing orange charge light... must have been a coincidence that I just installed W7. Thanks for the help people. Off to find a few battery or go back to Asus land

 

Batteries do wear out and die, but when is very unpredictable.

You should be able to find both genuine Dell and compatible batteries on ebay, both at prices lower than if you bought from Dell directly.

John

 

RMClock is a good idea. I used to use way back when...I'll check out the Win 7 x64 compatibility. Right now I get around 6 hours on Win7 and Xubuntu on this Vostro 1220. Maybe I can edge that up a little.