xps 15 l502x battery life

I can't find much information about it other than an AnAndTech review. What is the xps 15 battery life when using the 6cell/9cell?

 

I've got the 9 cell and it lasts maybe 6 hours with moderate usage, and days ime if you use low power settings / put it to sleep when you don't use it.
Thats with an i7

 

i get about 3 hours with 6 cell i7 2630qm

 

How long do you think I could get with using intel graphics, mid-low brightness, and only doing word processing with battery saving mode on? (9 cell)

 

I get about get over 5.5 hours on the 6 cell battery with HyperX 1866 ram and the i7 2820QM with the stock WD caviar black 750 GB 7.2K RPM Harddrive.

This is with the screen on the lowest factory brightness and all power settings in the power options set to the most power saving setting. Also, I have Dell's Power Option utility to set Aero to Basic when on battery. On battery I keep the keyboard backlight off and minimize the use of the track pad as it uses more CPU resources than the arrow keys when scrolling websites. Also, I set the audio to turn off the audio hardware after 5 seconds of no sound and have most of the windows sound effects turned off as they turn on the sound hardware and are all around kind of annoying when they blast off during a meeting.

The thing I found to suck the most constant battery power are desktop widgets. Ones that monitor the GPU stats are the MOST draining because they keep the Video card ram clcoked and prevent total shutdown of the nVidia solution even while the Intel GPU is the only one being used.

Right now my battery is 88% charged and my battery meter says 4:33 for time remaining while I type and 4:52 if I pause to think for a few seconds. It is usually accurate if I keep the usage the same throughout the entire discharge cycle.

If I keep all the power settings stock and dont try to minimize battery drain at all, I get around 3.5 to 4 hours of battery usage keeping outlook minimized and opening a few office programs here and there while heavily surfing the web (intranet and database). This is still plenty for my typical usage and what this is what I typically do for work as I have access to 130W Dell chargers in just about every single location I use the XPS or my E6410.

 

I get about 2.5 to 3 hours out of my 6 cell with mine set to "High Performance". I've got mine tweaked to get every ounce of speed and power out of it too. Nothing shuts off or slows down. I've used it in "Power Saver" and "Balanced". I believe what SPL15 is saying. If you tweaked it in for power frugalness you could get at least 5 hours out of it. This is a rocking laptop. Powerful, good looking, beautiful 1080p display and long battery life.
-joe-

 

I get 6-7 hrs with the 9 cell browsing the net and playing music, screen at minimum brightness. I also turn off the screen when only listening to music. If you turned wireless off you would get even more.

At the moment I have 6hr 18min left with 88% battery. Both the screen and the speakers are amazing

 

Wow, this was great advice. I had all those widgets going b/c they looked cool and figured weren't very resource intensive. Had no idea what a difference they made. I just shut them all down and although I haven't had a chance to see how it affects my battery yet, my laptop almost immediately dropped about 10-20 degrees and stopped the annoying constant fan on/off cycle. It was running about 60-65 degrees before and now it seems to be between 45-50. I still have core temp program and the battery widget running but will probably turn those off also.

 

Glad it helped ya out! I have coretemp updating every 5 seconds in the back ground with the CPU widget as well as the battery widget updating every 30 seconds. While this does drain about 20-30mA extra from the battery, the info to me is more important than the estimated 30 minutes battery rundown time it gives. For me to run over 3 hours on battery power in one sitting, I really have to make an effort at ignoring all the Dell power adaptors accessible to me everywhere I am.

To no one specifically at all - Doing things to save a few milliamps here and there is good, but you gotta find the balance of enjoying the power of the laptop vs battery rundown life. Kinda like a car, it would be pointless to buy a nice performance car only to putz along everywhere day to day to save on gas mileage. However, if you're on a long road trip, it makes sense to take er easy to conserve gas. If you cripple the performance of the laptop too much in order to save battery life, you probably were better off buying a laptop more suited to this in the first place.

I think one of the biggest factors with battery rundown time besides hardware is Windows itself. I love win 7, but I think MS dropped the ball on power management for mobile PC's...