New M11x woes...

I got my new m11x today, and I've been fiddling with it and loving the hell out of it practically all day. There are a couple problems I've run into though that I can't seem to find solutions for, even searching through the forums...

1) Somehow when I'm not plugged in I can't adjust the screen brightness. I've fiddled around a little with both windows 7's brightness / power settings and alien fusion, could it be that they're conflicting somehow or one is canceling out the other?
2) My battery life is WAY lower than expected - I'm OCing my R1 to 1.7ghz, running with alienfx lights on browsing the internet with screen brightness around half and my battery life registers around 4 and a half hours with a full charge. I remember reading reviews where a guy was getting around 7 hours with an OC'd R1.. what's going on here?? ahh D:

 

2.- check the windows energy plan or the alien fusion energy plan and the light affects on the battery life, i have 7hr of battery right now on balanced plan

 

i think there was a update to the alienware command center that was supposed to improve battery life.

 

I wouldn't have thought 7 hours could have been achieved with the FX lights on. Those things will burn through battery.

 

4.5 is about right with any load or enabled graphics... lights... etc. I can get a lot more than that with minor effort.

 

Is there a way to set alienfx to turn off certain lights (the logos & speakers) when switching to battery mode? (i always need the keyboard backlighting) Also, anyone know why the **** I can't change my friggin screen brightness?

Update:
Restarting the system seemed to fix the screen brightness problem. My battery count is still much lower than I'd like tho - does the keyboard backlight really eat up that much energy or are there any other things I can do to increase my battery life?

 

You can control the lights via "events" and conditions... you should be able to do something like that.

For brightness can you do it in the control panel(s)?

 

When it was having the problem, no - I couldn't change it in the control panel or alien command center. But again a restart fixed it entirely. Hopefully the problem doesn't happen again.

 

Out of curiosity, did your laptop wake up from sleep when the brightness wasn't working?

 

I don't think so.. I think it worked fine other than the inability to dim the brightness.

So I've dimmed the brightness and turned off alienfx, made sure the graphics were on integrated... and I can only get the battery to estimate around 5 hours at full charge. Why?? D:

Also, m11x just completely froze up - I tried everything in the book and had to resort to holding down the power button to do a hard shut-down. I'm worried.. anyone else ever have this happen?

 

If you haven't already, download battery bar and see what your battery drain rate is. Divide capacity by discharge rate and that'll be your real battery life. Not sure if this applies to all laptops but W7 battery life estimate tends to fluctuate a lot for me so it's often unreliable. Being on power saver helps. Also choosing a lighter virus scanner might help. Battery bar should read your capacity as around 70W or 70,000mW. If it isn't maybe your battery is just bad. If I recall correctly, people were getting around 8W discharge doing light browsing on the R1.

Freezing might be due to an unstable overclock. Not sure which benchmark to run to test this (I think it's called furmark?) but you can also run the POST test (F8 or F12 upon bootup) and if an error pops up that should mean your OC is unstable.

As for the brightness issue, hopefully it doesn't happen again. There are plenty of reasons for why this could happen but I remember on my last laptop (SXPS 1340) it ended up being a hardware issue rather than a software. If it doesn't pop up again, then good. If it does, make sure you have all the latest drivers. If it becomes a persistent issue overtime it's most likely hardware related.

Worst comes to worst, since you just received the laptop, you can always ask for a tech, or better yet a system replacement.

 

multiple have had freezing issues with the wifi and heavy bandwidth usage or large file transfers

 

I downloaded battery bar and my discharge rate fluctuates from around 8W, 9W if I have my keyboard backlight on (set to dim mode on battery), and estimated battery life is around 7 hours according to battery bar (this is on lowest brightness setting with wifi on and utorrent downloading multiple files in the background and google chrome running). So maybe it was just that windows 7 wasn't giving me correct battery life estimates. Btw, even when both battery bar and windows say I've charged to 100%, and I leave it in a little bit extra just to be sure, I only read around 97% once I unplug. Any ideas why?

Ah that might explain.. I was using chrome pretty heavily while simultaneously running 3 downloads in utorrent and 2 in steam I think. Is this a hardware defect / something that can be fixed, or is it just something to be reasonably expected under extreme bandwidth load like that?

On a side note, what are people's thoughts on the best way to keep your battery life healthy? Is it better for your battery long-term to let it discharge fully, then recharge before plugging in, or to keep it plugged in most of the time even when it's around a full charge?

 

letting it fully discharge is one of the worst things you can do actually.


Here's HP's lists of do's and don't's wrt the battery:

I believe the best thing to do is keep it at ~40% to store it, but you need to be careful because it'll lose charge relatively fast, and you don't want it to get too low.

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TBH I always keep it on and charging. I've done that with every laptop I've owned, and it hasn't caused enough battery wear to matter, though I upgrade about every two years.

 

Very cool - thanks for the advice.

Btw my m11x froze again today.. arrg. I had just started it up, utorrent was running 3 downloads and I initiated another download and that's when it froze. Is this is a hardware problem, a software problem, or not a problem at all (something that's normally expected for the m11x)? I've only had the m11x a couple days and it's already frozen 2 or 3 times... and I don't really want to return it because everything else about it is great (no hinge problems, no screen touching keyboard, no OC issues..) and I'm afraid if I send it in I'll get one back that has problems like those. Any suggestions, anyone?

 

the freezing might be due to OC. try disabling OC and continue to monitor if it happens

 

Torrents are famous for locking up certain routers. What settings are you using? Due to bandwidth/geographic issues AND Linksys router I ended up with:

Global Max Conn: 170
Max conn per: 60
Upload slots per: 6

 

I don't think it's the OC, because I ran the BIOS diagnostic and it showed no problems..

I also have a linksys router - how do I look up my settings tho?

 

This is a bit of sidetrack but your torrent client has configuration options... I was only saying that for some (and me too) the defaults would cause lockups on the router.

I do not run torrents from my M11x but if others are reporting issues with heavy network use and IF its related to torrents, then I am reminded of the linksys issue. Cant hurt to try.

 

About battery: remember that many things happening in the background drains the battery; Is bluetooth on? wi-fi? is indexing disabled on your hard drive? how much virtual memory have you allocated? how many applications are running? how many processors are running in the background? certain browsers give more drain than others!
I think people who achieve 7 hours, its with not intensive use, but you can really niddle and fiddle with settings to get the best battery life, if you want to.


about lock ups: it could be tons of issues due to freezes. bad install? bad hard drive, bad driver... you should do a run check if you have the latest of everything and write down during what and how you get lockups.

things like torrents, can just make your computer freeze. some more than others. remember, it's not really "healthy" for having lots of files being downloaded to the hard drive. or maybe its wrong to say its unhealthy, but it is wear and tear. a hard drive likes better to just have things installed, with a specific number and not more added... don't know if it is the same for SSD!

firefox, and stupid flash can also be a major cause. particularly more on one of the systems with lesser power, than the real heavy ones. Have you tried CTRL + ALT + Deleting, when it freeze? not possible either? Have you checked your temperatures? have you checked how much processor power you are using when idle?

 

As far as screen brightness getting stuck, i've found two different fixes. First, switch the graphics. Second, just closing the screen resets it.