ms1057 has horrible battery life?

Hey, I just bought a used ms1057 off ebay ( ms1057) . Its an intel core 2 duo btw (he lists both, probably copy and pasted, but the screenshot shows core 2 duo). I havent received it yet, as it is still in the mail, but it appears to have a 8 cell battery, yet the owner says it should only get about 2 hours of life. Later on he emailed me and cautioned me again saying:

I thought I was supposed to get around 3.5 hours? Is what he says actually true or should I suspect something else is going on?

 

Happy owner here...

Though I've never benchmarked my battery life, I don't think I've ever topped a couple hours with the battery. Since mobility is not always my first concern, I would like to find the 4-cell battery for this laptop, but they didn't seem to make too many. Another thing I'd like would then be an external battery charger. But they don't make laptops like they used to... Am I the only one who wants to come home, grab another battery and get going again?

In any event, here's the result of

Code:

$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info 

present:                 yes
design capacity:         4400 mAh
last full capacity:      3628 mAh
battery technology:      rechargeable
design voltage:          14800 mV
design capacity warning: 0 mAh
design capacity low:     0 mAh
capacity granularity 1:  1 mAh
capacity granularity 2:  1 mAh
model number:            MS-1057

serial number:           

battery type:            LION

OEM info:                MSI Corp.

Do you use windows? Anecdotally, I have experienced even worse battery life under windows. But in both cases, I'll add the caveat that I generally never "scale down" and do battery saving things like not running X, or turning down the brightness.

 

I have the laptop now and I have been using it. It doesnt seem like windows XP is speedstepping the cpu at all, even though it is enabled in the BIOS (is that an issue with merom processors and m1507s?). The fan also kicks in at 40 degrees, which is seems a bit low to me. I have linux installed except I havent got around to installing cpu frequency scaling yet. What I am doing currently is disabling speedstepping in the BIOS which throttles the CPU to 1.0ghz and I have been getting a little over 3 hours on dim screen and wireless.

 

Use Notebook Hardware Controller(NHC) for it. Sounds like it will help in your situation.