M14X- A question of Battery Life.

So far i'm loving my M14X, but i have one minor discrepancy. Even when fully charged and on the lowest settings, the battery will only get about 2 and a half hours maximum off the wall just browsing the web (facebook, youtube, ect.) :/ I've tried all the tweaks for boosting the life of the battery but it only increases by a few minutes if at all.

This isn't exactly the end of the world, since i knew the M14 would be a power eater from the start. But it is a little disappointing, as I've heard of many people getting 4 or even up to 6 hours of battery life when just browsing or word processing.

Any suggested setting tweaks to maybe help me get this kind of life out of the battery would be much appreciated.

 

What sort of tweaks did you try, that way people can suggest additional things to tweak to give you some more battery life.

 

do you have a solid state drive? it makes a huge difference

 

I got about 5 hours on battery. I follow the tweak to maximize the battery on m11x forum.

 

I've tried turning off Alien FX, ending all processes from Task manager that aren't essential to running Google Chrome, setting all the power settings i can find to Maximum Battery Life, turning the screen brightness all the way down, making sure i have all other programs closed (such as uTorrent), ect.

Even with all this my computer estimates my battery life at 100% to be just over 2 and a half hours.

 

The HDD is 7200 rpm

 

nice 5 hours...
i got 4 hours...
link of that thread???

 

With those settings you should almost get 5.5-6 hours. I would call Dell and ask about a new battery

 

turn on the nvidia gpu activity meter and make sure that nothing is running. ie when i quit project64 it continues using the nvidia gpu.

 

Can someone link the battery guide?

 

Hi,
Here is the link :
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ry-life-what-you-getting-how-make-better.html
This is what I do :

In the power saver setting:
AlienFX: Off
Turn off hard disk after: 5 min
Wireless Adapter Settings: Maximum Power Savings
Sleep after: Never
Hibernate after: Never
Intel Graphics Power Plan: Maximum Battery Life
Lid close action: Do nothing
Power button action: Hibernate
PCI Express Links State Power Management: Maximum Power Savings
Processor - Minimum power state: 1%
Processor - Maximum power state: 75%
System cooling policy: Passive
GPU Power State: Balanced Mode

In the bios: Disable ethernet, blutooth, card reader

Disable the intel display audio in the device manager

My brightness is at 1st or 2nd level. The lowest level is too dark for me and the 3rd level is too bright.

Mute the speaker when I don't need

Disable some stuff on msconfig
Name Startup Type
Acronis Nonstop Backup service Disabled
Acronis Scheduler2 Service Disabled
Fax Disabled
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) Disabled
Media Center Extender Service Disabled
Net.Tcp Port Sharing Service Disabled
Routing and Remote Access Disabled
Superfetch Disabled
Telephony Disabled
Volume Shadow Copy Disabled
Windows Defender Disabled
Windows Search Disabled
Windows Update Disabled

Make sure you don't connect anything to the usb port when you don't need.
Make sure you don't have a disk on the dvd drive when you don't need
Do some disk defragment once in a while

 

thanks + rep

 

To maximize battery, I actually put my CPU to 800mhz on battery. I can do pretty much all tasks at that speed lol

 

I get 3 hours and 50 minutes with the keyboard lights off and the screen on dimmest setting. That while I surf the web. This is pretty good for a computer meant to be plugged in mostly, my cousins Macbook Pro gets like 4 and a half hours full charge. Not too much difference, especially Apple has great battery life.