Timeline 4810TG Windows 7 battery issues

Hi,

I did a clean install of Windows 7 ultimate 64bit a few days ago.
All is fine except one major issue; My battery capacity dropped to half of that in Vista. I am now lucky to get over 3.5 hours. In Vista I had an average of 6-7 hours.

What could be the cause of this? I have updated all drivers and empowering software. I also installed the Vista version of the Optical Drive Power Management just to see if that was the cause. No luck

Anyone else experiencing poor battery times in W7? Is 64bit known for reducing battery times?

BR, Lasse - Norway

 

I have the Aspire Timeline 1810tz which came pre-loaded with Windows 7 64bit Home Premium and I get about 6.5 hours web browsing with wifi so the problem is not Windows 7.

 

Did you install the drivers from Acer DVD or from the Web?

 

I downloaded all drivers and ePower software from Acer website. All 64bit versions and from late October.

CPU usage is normal and should not be causing this.

Is there any way to test the battery to find out if it might be damaged?

Thanks for any help.

 

Run this command, and it will generate an energy report on your C drive. You can then review any settings or errors, etc. that might be causing excessive battery use. It will also report your battery capacity at the last charge.

powercfg.exe -energy -output C:\EnergyReport.html

 

Hello,

Got the same problem.... Just switched My Timeline 4810 to Windows 7 (32-bit) and it doesn't look like my battery will be as good as before.

Did you manage to fix the problem?

Thanks !


Marie-Claude

 

Same problem- I have the 4810T with Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Battery life went from 7+ hours to 4 1/2 to 5 hours.

 

i am having the same issue with my 2 (two) brand new 4810tg, delivered with preinstalled win7 64bit by acer. both barely have 4 to 4,5h running time on battery (using the preconfigured acer power-settings). thats very disappointing and i am curious what acer support says on this issue. anyone already complained so far?

 

Yes.... I sent them an email yesterday.... I must say they are pretty quick to help (I was very surprised of this and I though I would get the help I needed). Unfortunately, this is the final answer I got.....

Please note that Acer does not support changing an Operating System. Changing the Operating System may cause driver conflicts. You have the option of upgrading or changing your Operating System at your own discretion. However, it is preferred that you keep to the original configuration of your system so that all the programs and applications in your computer will recognize all the hardware installed in it.

The drivers are usually found on the Restore CDs or on the hard drive recovery partition (for medialess system). This may sound frustrating but you cannot use the Restore CDs to reload the drivers to a different Operating System. These drivers are configured with the original Operating System that came preloaded with your computer.

Very disappointing answer..... I'm kinda relieved now that I see that Pommery have the same problem and that is computers came with Windows 7.

Pommery, could you ask them the question and report us back their answer? I think it might help us a lot. Here's the link to post them a question:
http://www.acersupport.com/email.aspx

Thanks in advance for your help !



Marie-Claude

 

Since they advertise explicity that 4810T with Win7 has > 8 hours battery life (see PC World magazine December 2009), we can basically file a class action lawsuits...

 

yes, lets go

i contacted acer using mcleblanc19 link but they refused to give me a constructive answer due to the fact, that i purchased my 4810t in europe... so i tried to contact them but my serial-number was not accepted either by there web-form very disapointing customer service...

 

I assume the poor battery is caused by a faulty driver. I checked the Acer website and now it looks like Acer stopped posting updated drivers for W7 64bit.
That means - there is a problem but no current solution. 3-4 hour battery life is no "Timeline" in my ears!

BR; Lasse

 

i get about 6.5 hrs when browsing ,hearing songs ,and sometimes playing with videos in win 7

 

ive got a 4810t running windows 7 RC ultimate 64. i get 6-7 hours in regular use. i have a retail copy of windows 7 ultimate 64 that im just waiting to install until my school goes on winter break, i hope this doesnt happen to me when i upgrade

 

I'm also having major issues with battery life. I'm getting almost exactly 5 hours just browsing the net and listening to music. I even downloaded aerofoil which disables all aero glass feature and sets the power setting to maximum battery life when unplugged. Could it be that the batteries are failing early? FYI I have a 4810t that I bought on 10/19 that came with Vista and I was getting almost 8 hours.

 

I am also getting 6-7 hours using 4810T and clean install of Home Premium x64. Interestingly, in many other notebooks, Win7 boosted the battery life.

 

My AS3810TG-944G50n (SU9400) does work well under Windows 7 after boot. BUT I have a strange issue after starting the PC from standby mode the battery discharge power is more than twice as before.

I do measure the discharge power with the free tool "batterybar" ( http://osirisdevelopment.com/BatteryBar/index.html). The discharge power is around 4800-6000 mW. After wakeup from sleep mode it is 10000 mW. I checked that with windows 7 64 bit and 32 bit editions. Settings for measuring: Energy saving mode ON and the display to lowest brightness and WLAN off.

With that tool you can easy check the consumtion and watch the actual battery capacity.

 

oh will try it.
and also try cpumonitor small and great software for checking cpu usage
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/dencpumon.html

 

Just bought a AS4810TZG-414G32MN (SU4100) at the weekend. I've not had a chance yet to test the battery life for a complete discharge cycle but I did install Battery Bar to see if anything odd was going on.

It seems my laptop also seems to wake up in a more power hungry state than when it went to sleep - battery bar reported a drain of > 10000mW (this was on min brightness, WiFi on and "power saving graphics"). Battery bar was predicting a lifetime of around 3-4 hours at this point.

One thing I discovered while playing around was that if I touched the powersmart key to take the laptop out of power saving mode, and then touched it again to turn power saving back on, the drain on the battery settled down to a more reasonable 8000-9000mW and then dropped further as things powered down. I ended up with a predicted 7 hours battery life which is a bit better

Might be a simple workaround until the underling cause is found?

 

Thanks for the info. Just as mine. My 3810 went 3 times to the acer service and they barely want accept that as a problem because they can not repair that. It must be a BIOS problem.

Really very bad. Because with such a portable device the standby function is important and has to work the correct way!

I'am eager to know if the problem also exists with the SU7300 CPU.

 

I think i found the solution because now i got 6-8 hours battery time against 2-3 hours before i made the change.
My computer:
4810TG
Su3500
ATI Mobility Radeon
Windows 7 32bit
What i did was to press F2 at startup to enter bios setup then i changed switchable grafic to discrete, saved and exit.
When i entered windows the graphic drivers automatically installed and from that point i always get 6-8 hours batterytime depends on what the computer is used for.
hope that helps.

 

This problem happens on the dual/switchable graphics models with ATI & Intel graphics. The problem is that after a Resume from Sleep, both graphics chips are on, so the power consumption is much higher.

The workaround is either:
- After Resume from Sleep, switch the graphics from Intel to ATI and back again to Intel (this will shut down the ATI chip)
- Disable Sleep altogether, use only Hibernate (the problem doesn't seem to happen with a Resume from Hibernate)
- In the BIOS, switch the laptop to Discrete graphics mode only (ATI only), but this will take a bit off your battery life because the ATI chip consumes about 1W to 1.5W more power than the Intel one, so overall you will lose about 10% of battery life

Lenovo users also report similar problems with Lenovo laptops with ATI swithcable graphics. Looks like this is an ATI driver problem.

 

I had the same issue till a day back, but right now it looks resolved.

I did a clean install of Win 7 last week, installed all the Acer Power Management Softwares and Drivers, but the system showed a max of 6 hrs on the battery meter, that too when on Power Saving mode and doing nothing.


I am not exactly sure what did the trick, but I guess it would be either one of the two.

1. Win 7 updates.
2. Win 7/Acer software has a self learning capacity.

The only thing I noticed is, any change in the power usage takes 5 min to reflect on the battery meter.

When I put the system on Power Saver mode and then switched the screen off and later switched it on, it for a moment showed me 15hrs.

Now this is what the battery meter shows.

Is there any load testing software which could simulate the usage so that we could test the machine to see how long the battery really lasts. I really can't keep doing the same activities for 6-8 hrs, really

 

I never trust the remaining time calculations from the battery meter. It always seems to be either wildy optimistic or pessimistic - maybe it hasn't learned enough about my usage patterns yet

BatteryBar has a very nice tooltip that tells you your current power usage ("Discharge Rate") and max battery capacity. Dividing "Capacity" by "Discharge Rate" gives a very approximate battery life. E.g. currently I'm using 6.5W and my battery can hold 59.4Wh which gives just over 9 hrs if that rate is maintained. I'm never going to get 9 hrs as the discharge rate will increase if I should do anything more taxing than read this forum

It's also a good way to see how well the laptop is conserving power. At the moment I use around 6W with Wifi and screen on min brightness. Resuming from sleep with the ATI graphics card powering up will raise this to around 11-12W effectively cutting the battery life in half. I then have to use the switch graphics "trick" to get the ATI card to power down and lower the power consumption.

Lets hope Acer / ATi / Intel come up with a fix for this problem soon...

 

I tried to run this command, invalid command ?

 

This is a good workarround, thank you for posting this info. I just tried that and get almost 8 hours when Word/Excel, WLAN on and web browsing but no videos and no youtube. 3810TG, SU9400.

But Acer really has to bring the repair of the BIOS! A workarround is not what we have payed for when we bougt our Acer notebooks!

 

I think your problem is different. Your 3810TZ has not the switching graphic cards. Only the TG and TZG models have the problem which Acer still did not fix! Mine was tree times in the Acer shop and still the same problem!

 

Try this one

powercfg -energy -output c:\energy -xml -duration 10

 

I have the same laptop as you, 3810TG SU9400, but with a 7200rpm harddisk. I also get around 7-8 hours with ATI graphics only if using WiFi only, not too bad and definitely acceptable.

You might also want to try the other workaround - disable Sleep in Windows, and use only Hibernate. I estimate we can get about 10% more battery life with the Intel graphics vs ATI.

 

I have to put all of this in the cmd.exe window ?

Still get "invalid parameters" when pasting everything..

 

Have you been looking for the difference in speed between 7200rpm and 5400?

 

Yes, the 7200rpm drive is noticeably faster than the stock drive which was a 500GB 5400rpm Toshiba.

The faster drive makes the whole laptop feel quicker. Next upgrade will probably be an SSD when they become affordable.

 

"powercfg -energy -output c:\energy -xml -duration 10" without quotes works for me in cmd.exe (windows 7 btw). I dunno then, if its not working for you.

 

hi all,

I was planning to buy this laptop AS4810TG-A23 in the coming weeks and was wondering if there was any good news regarding whether acer had got around to fixing the issues with the ATi / Intel graphics and the overall battery life.

Sorry I was also wondering... I am planning to do a clean install of Windows 7, could anyone give me some valuable links I should jot down regarding where to download the latest drivers and software for my laptop. Any help would be greatly appreciate

-strider

 

With the newest firmware the problem is worser than before. The only acceptable work around is to disable the Intel graphic in the BIOS. But then you do not get 8 h battery operation. ASUS UL30, UL50 and UL80 family is comparable but without that problem and with a better keyboard and larger battery.

The link for the Acer drivers in Switzerland:
http://www.acer.ch/acer/service.do?...ryISOCtxParam=CH&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=1630370327

 

so how much on average are you getting with the discrete graphics turned on through bios?

thanks for the other recommendations I'll go have a look at those models

 

With WLAN enabled but no videos it is 6-7 hours.