What's your experience with battery life been?

So all of Alienware's claims about how long the m11x can go on a charge aside, whats everyone's real world experience with how long the battery lasts on a single charge? E.g. power-save mode?

Does it stand up to watching a few hours of full screen movies?

Comparable to netbooks?

 

I use mine during quiet times at work, I get just short of 5 hours with medium/low screen brightness and no mouse.

I'm usually browsing the net or watching a few films.

 

Yeah on my R1 I get about 2 hours if I keep the cpu overclocked and have it on the 335m at full brightness. If I put the cpu to stock and run on the integrated card at about medium to low brightness I get close to 6-7 hours of just browsing the web and watching youtube videos. It lasts almost 8 hours with wifi off and me just typing notes in class.

 

Most systems will get advertised times - at least for a while. The trick is that 3years later those same run times are rare!

I've gotten 6.x with wifi but not in a habit of testing. probably half that w/335 on.

 

wifi off, screen level low, keyboard lights off, I get a little over 10 hours of internet surfing on my r1

 

With no compromizing. i get anyware fro 6-8hrs on intel gfx surfing & streaming music.

Never ran the battery down all the way on Nvidia gfx while gaming but i have had a few 2hr TF2 sesions & had some juice left over to surf a bit.

Im always OCed @ 2.0ghz, with all the lighing fx on & i use what ever brightness is good for the lighting im in (usaly 2-4 bars on the OSD app) and one thing to note. these run times are based on having the battery level set to shutdown the laptop at 7%. so it normally says i still have about 30-40min left but i shut it down anyway to reduce heavy battery wear.

 

ditto (sorta) as I do nothing special to save power other than switch graphics. Doubt I can get 8hrs though

 

On my R2 I don't think I have ever reached 4 hours w/ wifi. The strange thing is software makes such a big difference. A while back I could get to 12mW~ discharge surfing (no videos) but now I can never get below 17mW~ and with videos or audio it goes up to mid 20mW~. Never changed the settings just regular graphic updates and such.

 

I saw in another thread there is a taskbar widget for the mW discharge rate, does anyone know what this is?

 

Just to be clear when i get around 8hrs give or take im not using the latop 100% of the time. i have the display set to turn off after 5min on battery and there are periods of time were i may not "use" it for say maybe 5-10 min which may add up to 20-40min total during the 8hr time span. but keep in mind its still "on" streaming music or what ever and never goes to sleep. (sleep & hibernate dont work well for me for some reason and when it goes to resume it wont boot so i lose everything that was going on). i should also note that i have done a fresh install with the disc it comes with & all the drivers on Dell's site.

 

ah ok. Havent tried that specifically. I set mine to not dim or sleep for a LONG time so I can see emails etc that roll in.

 

BatteryBar

It's a great little battery monitor and I find it to be very accurate.

 

Well I find it the hotter it runs the lesser the battery life, just after my motherboard replacement I can get 4hr 30 mins or so but before that I can only use 3hrs 30 mins.
On R2 though, bet the CPU isn't power optimized.

 

I rarely use it on battery but whenever I do I never complained.