High CPU Usage?

Greetings all,

I was recently on a flight to Canada, and decided I'd bring my new M11X with me. I was able to comfortably play games from 35,000 feet, which for me, was something I'd never done before. It was weird playing in that environment, but it worked incredibly well, and was a very enjoyable experience.

...the only problem is, the battery lasted an hour and a half, starting at 100% charge. This is with the WiFi/LAN/BlueTooth DISABLED (completely, through BIOS), screen brightness all the way down to the lowest, nothing running in the background (other than required system processes, etc), and all the fancy lights turned off on the keyboard/front, etc. The CPU overclock was not enabled in the beginning, though I ended up turning it on (boosting it to 1.7GHz) to see if the increased CPU speed would lessen the load and thus save battery life. It didn't.

I pulled up the task manager and kept an eye on the CPU utilization, by alt-tabbing from Left4Dead 2, Bad Company 2, etc. The CPU was constantly pegged at 100%. When the game is closed, utilization hovers around 0-1%.

So... is this to be expected? Or is it possible my drivers are fubar and I should maybe consider doing a clean install or something?

I can understand a constant 100% load on the CPU will KILL battery life.

I only have 2GB of RAM at the moment, but was considering a jump to 4 or 8. I don't think this would impact CPU performance, though, other than cycles spent working with the page file, correct?

Please advise.

Thanks much!

 

Sounds pretty normal to me, 2 hours is around what most people get whilst gaming, remember the CPU will be hit the hardest when gaming, so 100% sounds pretty good to me

 

yeah, i'd fully expect Bad Company 2 to max out the CPU, which is the limiting factor in performance on the M11x... so, it's only natural that it will run 100% utilitization. Nothing sounds out of norm, no worries!