What kinda performance are you getting from your Latitude battery?

Another ting to add to my ever growing list of E6400 problems...

Im getting under 2 hours from my laptop on "Balanced".
Is that really low are am I crazy?

Mind you, this when I was writing a Word doc and doing absolutely nothing else.
My fan is running at 4800rpm, all the time so maybe thats killing my power?

 

if your fan is running at max speed, your CPU must be doing some pretty intense work. check your processes and see if anything is taking up a lot of CPU

 

Ive had a fan issue with this laptop for ages.
My task manager is telling me that im using over 50% of my cpu but when I check my processes and applications Im not really running anything!

No clue.

 

it might be a service, i kept having the problem with one service on my m4400...

 

What do you mean by a "service"?

 

open the task manager and click on the services tab....shows all the currently running services

go to performance tab, open the performance monitor, and look at cpu...if a service is using up a lot of CPU you can see it there

 

I got 3.5 hours out of my E6400 a few days ago on more than half brightness and with various USB devices connected. I just wanted to check if the battery was still performing OK. I also disabled the critical battery action so the computer was run until empty, which helps the calibration.

If you are getting very poor battery time then we need to figure out whether the problem is loss of battery charge or high power consumption.

If the fan is running fast, are you using a docking station?

You can use the battery info page of RMClock to show the power drain. See how this varies depending on what is connected and what you are doing. 2 hours means around 25W power drain (if 6 cell battery).

John

 

Check some of the dell control point software and the webcam software. I have to shut that down often becuase it starts to use up 30-50% CPU usage. The moment I kill those programs in task manager the fan also slows way down. Make sure you go to Dell.com and download the latest versions of the software and BIOS. Dell has been releasing many updates in the past 60 days.