New Samsung Notebook 9 series. 2.5 hours battery life ??

HI guys!
I have a new Samsung Notebook 9 series. SSD drive.Since i first got it, i only get 2.5 hours battery life on a full charge. All i'm doing is working on Excel spreadsheets and MS word documents.
Any idea what could be wrong??

Thank you.

 

disable keyboard backlight?

 

Which model and what is the battery capacity?

Run BatteryInfoView and see how the discharge rate varies with your usage pattern and factors such as display brightness or whether WiFi and Bluetooth are in use (use airplane mode to turn these off). Manufacturers claims of battery life are usually for light usage with a dim backlight etc. (they always say "up to" which means the best case. Also, if the computer is very new then Windows 10 might still be busy doing housekeeping. Another small power saving tweak is to set the maximum CPU state when running off battery to 99%, which disables turbo mode.

John

 

While on the subject, is there any type of software/tool out there than can help re-calibrate/"freshen" (if you will) your battery?... Like something that can be done to improve one's Battery Wear Level? Or make each battery life cycle last longer?

 

Samsung used to provide a battery calibration utility in the BIOS although it's nothing clever - it only lets the battery fully drain and avoids Windows's feature of shutting down / hibernating before the battery fully drained - and can be done by leaving the notebook sitting at the BIOS screen. It's worthwhile doing this every 6 months so the battery can check if empty means empty but don't do it too often as full discharges are not good for the battery chemistry.

Samsung also used to provide a battery life extender option in Settings which limited the maximum charge to 80%. However, they dropped this 3 or 4 years ago claiming that improved battery technology made it unneccessary. We haven't seen reports here of lots of dying batteries so perhaps they are correct.

Most of the wear on Lithium batteries occurs at the ends of the charge range: When squeezing in the final charge when recharging and sucking out the last charge when discharging. Most manufacturers have addressed the charge problem by substantially reducing the charge rate as the battery gets above around 80% while it's over to the user to minimise the full discharges. High capacity batteries tend to have much longer working lifes than those which aren't up to the task and they will all suffer if heavily used. A low rate discharge will be less damaging than running a 3D game on battery for an hour or two.

Many batteries do not report charge cycles. Perhaps because it is a poorly defined parameter. I assume it represents a complete discharge from 100% to emptywith corresponding recharge and 4 discharges/recharges from 100% to 75% is also equivalent to one charge cycle. However, high current discharge / recharge is likely to cause more wear than a low current discharge / recharge.

This is a long ramble and doesn't answer your question properly, but the overall battery technology seems to be better now than a few years ago (although I always like to have the potential to change a battery even if it needs a screwdriver).

John

 

which exact model do you have?

did they? with latest 900x5l i can set it to 85% in the samsung setting.

 

Then they must have added the feature back. I think it was dropped around 3 or 4 years ago (notebook models ending with "E"?) but was there on the B, C and D (charge limited to 80%).

John

 

For models outside Series 9, that change even happened mid-cycle: The NP770Z5E from early 2013 was replaced mid 2013 by the NP870Z5E, with the only difference (as I recall) being a change in keyboard color and the disappearance of Battery Life Extender (BLE).

I found BLE to work wonders for keeping a healthy battery: Battery Wear in my NP700Z3A is still only around 10% after almost 5 years (HWiNFO64 reports 9% some days, 11% other days). I leave BLE on most of the time, but charge it to 100% once a week when I bring it to a meeting where 80% may not be enough.

I am glad to hear that Samsung have brought back this useful feature!

 

Wasn't there a another change between the 770Z5E and the 870Z5E which has to do with the actual screen? I believe that were reports about screen burn and this was addressed in the 870Z5E variant, or was it only addressed in the 8705GZ?

 

Oh yes, you're right, there was something about that screen too: Some owners having problems with it being grainy and others with image persistence. The latter problem seemed to be debated somewhat, with other members saying it was just a matter of too high brightness, to be expected with that panel, or even correctable with drivers/settings. Or something... I forgot about that!

 

No backlight provided on my model

Samsung NP900X5L-K02US Notebook 9 15" Laptop (Iron Silver)

At Amazon, it's rated as 12 plus hours battery life

 

Note the footnote on Saumsung's website (the source of "Up to 12 hours")
*Based on laboratory testing. Results may vary. Battery power consumption depends on factors such as network configuration, carrier network, signal strength, operating temperature, features selected, vibrate mode, backlight settings, browser use, frequency of calls, and voice, data and other application-usage patterns.

This review tells me that the battery is 39Whr. To get Samsung's 12 hours (which means a 3W power drain) you will need to have the notebook turned on, but doing absolutely nothing, display on minimum brightness, WiFi / Bluetooth turned off and any other power saving options turned off. So the 12 hours is an upper limit which bears little resemblance to real life usage but makes good advertising material. I would consider 5 to 6 hours to be the upper limit in everyday usage. My current main notebook (a Dell Precision 5510) has an 84Whr battery and I can get to 10 hours if I'm careful. If your battery is starting to wear and has lost capacity (BatteryInfoView will tell you this) then you will get even less time.

John

 

Not really sure, what it all means, but this is the data from the BatteryInfoView

 

Thanks. That's very helpful.

The information confirms that your battery is healthy with the fully charged capacity being almost as big as the designed capacity.

Monitor the charge /discharge rate when you are running on battery. Divide the information by 1000 to get Watts (eg 5000 mW = 5W). For the conditions I mentioned above you might get as low as 3W but as soon as you start doing anything on the computer you are more likely to be around 5W as a minimum. If you are using 12W then you will get less than 3 hours on the battery.

Being able to see how your usage affects the power consumption helps you to manage the battery time better. A bright display uses a lot more power than a dim one. You can see this for yourself by looking at the battering discharge while changing the brightness setting.

John