240W Charger / 99WHr Battery / Airplane Power Limits (85W)

Now many of us purchased these laptops as gaming laptops or high end production.

But for me I travel alot, so sometimes I find myself using power inverters in the car or plugging into the power outlet that first / business class usually provides on a flight.

Power Adaptor questions

I'm currently in the air above Colorado on my way to Phoenix right now and ran into a dilema.

When I plugged in my 240W powerr adaptor from Dell, the "auto shutoff" on the plug in the airplane engaged because I guess most plane power plugs don't support beyond 85W power draw!!

So my question is, is it possible to run a smaller power adaptor when on a plane just to provide more power, and run in a "power friendly mode" in the sky that doesn't max out that power draw?

It's impossible to even use the 240W even when it's not connected to any laptop, after 3 seconds the plug itself goes out and turns off until I unplug it - hence the failsafe.

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Battery Questions:

Also, while gaming is not practical AT all on these devices, I'm wondering if a custom power profile that provides a balance of speed and battery power (over 6 hours possibly) can be achieved with some tweaking.

I'm going to play around with some power settings.

Right now in my custom balanced mode with a max 80% CPU power, and turning off all performance options, running in power save mode, I'm getting about 5 hours 30 minutes from this battery for basic web browsing and production tasks (aside from rendering and gaming). So that's not bad but I think this battery can push 6-7 hours and would love to find that perfect setting to where I could essentially work an entire day on battery without ever needing to charge

 

I don't think you can use any other charging brick. Something to do with it being paired in the BIOS. Won't even acknowledge anything different. This is my own conclusion after reading about the ASUS under powered brick fiasco many are facing. Smaller brick is not charging their laptops when under full load.

 

Get a dell power companion. I have an 18000mah one I used with my XPS13, works fine with the AW17R4. It's a 90Whr battery pack (so really 70Whr) and I am not sure how long it will last in the AW17, hadn't had a chance to test yet, but I love the thing. So freaking useful to be able to daisy chain your laptop charger and a battery pack like this so its always charged up.

 

It says it does 19.5V output on the back, but I doubt it can push much more than 100 watts of power. It will extend your life when you are doing work, but I don't know if it would shut off when you are gaming or not.

 

nice!

 

I tried a 90W and a 130W Dell adaptor with my 15 R3 and both work, at least with the IGPU. The laptop not even complains that the power adapter is not strong enough, but it would probably throttle if your try to game with it.