Samsung Q35 battery life

With a fully charged battery and no programs launched my Q35 indicates 3 hours 15 mins battery life. The actual battery life in use is much lower than this. I've seen reviews and other threads indicating that I should be getting up to 5 hours. Its running Windows Vista with the power saver option and the screen on the lowest level of dimming. The hardware spec is T5600 1.83Ghz Duo core processor with 1gb memory. The fan's not running, the hard disk is paging occasionally. The indicator on battery itself lights up 100% charged

Is this likely to be a battery issue or is there anything else I can do? Can I claim to the supplier (RM plc) that its faulty?

 

Either you have got a duff battery or active processes are using too much power.

Several suggestions:

1. Turn off the eye candy in Vista.
Two ways I can think of, but there may be more:

A. If you have got the My Computer icon on the desktop, right click and select properties. Then select the Advanced system settings on the Tasks list. Give yourself permission to continue, then click on the Settings button in the Performance category.Then, on the Visual effect tab, click on Adjust for best performance. However, I then go down the list and select Smooth edges of screen fonts. Apply that setting and you get a Windows which looks more like Windows 2K (I have my XP installations set up that way as well).

B. Go to the Welcome Center (you can open it in Control Panel if it is closed) then near the top right of the screen click on Show more details. This gets you to the same page as My Computer > Properties, so follow the same procedure as above.

I find the display much clearer without the visual effects. For example,the edges of individual windows are much easier to see. I think I've already said is that the only eye candy feature I like is the open application previews. I'm sure there is more tuning to be done.


2. Get RMclock from http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml and use it to (a) check the CPU speed (should be 1000MHz / 1GHz in power saver mode) and (b) check the battery info. What is the fully charged battery capacity.

3. Look in Task Manager (right click on the task bar) and go to the profiles page. Which processes are using CPU time?

4. If you have a web browser open, disable flash. I use Firefox with FlashBlock. Anything flash, with the browser even if you are off line hits the CPU.

5. Disable Bluetooth. In XP there is a simple way to stop it. In Vista it seems you have to disable it. I found Bluetooth did nasty things to the battery life.

6. Load the Windows Performance Monitor (Start > Run > perfmon, OK). Select Performance Monitor, then right click on the graph area and select Add Counters. Click on the + for Processors and select %C3 time. This is the processor deep sleep state and under light load on battery should be around 80% to 90%.

You may want to read the bit about power use and battery in my Q35 review. I was initially disappointed.

Also, it seems that these batteries only develop their full capacity after a few discharge-recharge cycles so you may not get the best running time at the first or second attempt.

Do all of these one at a time when running on battery and check the reported battery run time after a minute or two of applying a change.

Let us know how you get on.

John

 

Thanks for your advice John. I've checked the CPU usage and nothing much is running - total less than 5%. How do you disable programs in Vista? -does this mean uninstalling? The computer is at work at the moment so I'll have to wait until monday to try your other suggestions

 

btw... this is what i've experienced in my Q35, at first i try the power saving option for the battery, but seems like the is not really the good option for that... for this i dont know what the reason...

then i changed back to the Optimized Power Setting by samsung... the battery life seems to be more stable... longer life... till now, my battery running from 3-4 hours, but only 1 or 2 full cycle of charging...

I'll try for the battery life test later after 4-5 full cycle of charging to get the full performance of the battery.

Currently i'm using 5-6/8 or brightness while on battery, with vista eye candy off, bluetooth off, and with processor T5500 1.66 n 1Gb RAM

 

Disable blutooth in the device manager, you will definitely get an increase in battery life.

 

Definately run the battery calibration a couple of times, ideally once a week for a month and see if the battery is impacted at all.

A good 5-6 recharge cycles will definately make a big difference, as is the case with most batteries.

No common issue with these batteries though and no major reports of poor performance so if the issue persists and your getting substantially reduced battery life then it would definately be cause to contact RM or Samsung Directly about a replacement battery.

 

I've had problems with the BIOS calibration on my X60 plus. It put the battery wear at 15% (after about 3 months use). I contacted technical support who recommended that I should fully deplete the battery (by disabling the alarms) and then recharge, and repeat a couple of times. The battery wear went down to 9%. Lower, but still not good. After nearly 6 months it is now at 11%.

My Q35 arrived with 2% battery wear and is now at 4%.

John

 

I would deplete the battery using the Calibration tool in the BIOS rather than in Windows to get a better wear %. 2% over 3 months is pretty good, especially if your recharging the battery a lot. I would also recommend trying a calibration when the battery is really, really cold (place it in a freezer bag and stick in the freezer for 2 hours) when it has been fully charged beforehand. Let the battery warm up, full recharge and you should notice an improvement. I managed to get an old P28 from 28% up to about 7% doing this.

 

btw... can someone tell me the full process about depleting n calibrating the battery... thank you...

 

There is an option in the BIOS for battery calibration. Just leave it running overnight. If I remember correctly, it makes sure that the battery is fully charged then runs it down and counts how much power it can get out of the battery and stores that info somewhere as the fully charged capacity. The benefit of a correctly calibrated battery is that the run-down in use is more predictable. Otherwise you will discover that a worn battery suddenly drops from, say, 20% to the battery empty alarm.

John

 

Thanks for all the advice. I've disabled BlueTooth in Device manager and run the battery calibration a couple of times to fully discharge the battery. The predicted battery life is now up to 4 hours 17 minutes. A few more questions:

How do I re-enable Blue tooth if I ever need to use it?
The above responses talk about battery wear - how do you check it?

 

Go to Device Manager, right click on the Bluetooth device and select Enable.

Various softwares will interrogate the battery data. The one I use with Vista is RMClock (which I use for undervolting) but it will also give the battery information. See the attached. The Fully charged capacity is the actual capacity. The difference between that and the Designed capacity is the wear.

4hrs 17 minutes is still not impressive. What display brightness are you using (you need to be somewhere around 2/8) and do you have a web browser open? Is your wireless on or off? I find the Samsung Optimised power scheme is at least as good at power saving as the Power Saver power scheme.

I recently swapped my Q35's Hitachi HDD for a Samsung model and this seems to be giving the promise of another 10 to 15 minutes of battery time, but you should get to around 5 hours with some further tweaking.

John

 

Is this number based on the standard 6-cell battery ? That is very impressive as it means it takes less than 10W.

 

Yes, definitely only the 6 cell battery.

It appears that Samsung did a few power saving tweaks such as there is only one IDE channel serving both the HDD and ODD. There's a standard Intel chipset, CPU and GPU.

The attached MobileMeter power drain is done in XP (MobileMeter doesn't work with Vista) and shows the power drain getting below 10W but spikes back up to around 15W when there is serious CPU / HDD activity. This is without internet / wireless and display on 2/8 brightness (reasonably usable indoors).

I have a feeling that the Samsung Optimised power profile in Vista might give a little more time than I am seeing in XP, once Vista's bells, whistles and eye candy are all switched off. The CPU can then spend around 90% of the time in the C3 deep sleep state (see attached).

There are people who can get nearer to 6 hours on their Q35s. I believe the old Core series CPUs are are little less power-hungry than the Core 2, but what I would like is a low voltage CPU.

I wait to see how the Q45 fares in this respect (ditto Q70).

John

 

thanks.

I am wondering if Intel's chipset has some advantage in power management over ATI/Nvidia.

 

The Intel GPU isn't very powerful so it doesn't use much power. ATI promises good power management but either them and/or Samsung have failed to deliver in either the X60 plus or the R20. Maybe the Nvidia GPUs are better. However, it's difficult to get a powerful chip to cut down on power consumption when idle in the same way as a big car engine will always consume a bit more fule than a little on.

Intel have put further effort in cutting back low load / idle power consumpion in the Sata Rosa chipset. If you haven't read this Anandtech article, do so. If I buy a new computer, it would have the Intel chipset and GPU. I don't need more powerful graphics.

John

 

Readers of my Q35 review may recall that I could not quite reach the end of a 3 hour DVD when running on battery (it would stop about 10 minutes before the end with the backlight on a fairly dim 3/8).

Recently I set up the Q35 to be dual boot XP / Vista using the Vista Business upgrade. To provide space for the upgrade I also swapped the 100GB Hitachi HTS541010G9AT00 5400prm HDD for the 160GB Samsung HM160JC (also 5400rpm, also note that my Q35 has a PATA HDD interface).

Apart from being much quieter, I also think the Samsung HDD uses a little less power as suggested by Tom's Hardware (although the Hitachi HDD in that test is SATA) and Table near the end of the Digit-Life review of the WD Scorpio. The latter indicates that the Samsung uses about 100mA (=0.5W) less during read/write activities but the idle power may be about the same.

I discovered, when doing a DVD playback test on Vista that I could reach the end of the 3 hour DVD with a few minutes to spare. This is contrary to the general thinking that Vista is a worse power hog than XP. I should state that, for both operating systems, I have Visual Effects set to Best Performance except for selecting Smooth edges of display fonts.

The attached graph shows the battery run down performance for 4 scenarios. All these tests used the backlight at 4/8, which is fairly usable. PowerDVD was used for both with the mobile power setting at Balanced. On Vista I used the Samsung Optimised power scheme.

1. Vista, with a 2GB SD card enabled as ReadyBoost
2. Vista without the SD card
3. XP with 2.25GB RAM
4. XP with 1.25GB RAM (the standard for my Q35)

The key findings are that test 1 had 8% (~14 minutes) remaining on the battery at the end of 3 hours, test 2 had 6% (~11 minutes) remaining after 3 hours, test 3 stopped at 2hrs 50 minutes with the battery on 3% (~5 minutes remaining) and test 4 stopped at 2 hours 52 minutes with the battery on 3%.

My conclusions:

(a) The Samsung HDD uses about 0.5W less than the Hitachi HDD (based on a backlight power difference of 0.5W since the range from minimum to maximum backlight power is about 4W)

(b) The Samsung Optimised power scheme for Vista is managing the power better than I have achieved under XP and has provided about an extra 15 minutes playback time. It appeared that Vista was running the ODD for short periods and then caching the data.

Since the original tests the battery wear has increased from 2% to 4%.

I have not undertaken any similar comparison under light load (these tests are somewhat time-consuming) but Vista is suggesting that it could run up to about 5 1/2 hours, which would be an extra 1/2 hour above what I achieved with XP. Maybe half of that is attributable to the HDD and half to Vista's power management.

The difference between tests 3 and 4 suggests that a higher capacity RAM module may use a little more power. Possibly 5 minutes in the 5 hour light load scenario.

John

 

thanks for the info, I got similar result in Vista vs XP as long as power management is concerned, it is in general better than XP.

The situation of Aero(which is widely published) is IMO more complex. My guess is if it is enabled on efficient 3D system(like the Intel one or other IGP) it actually save power by offloading to the GPU and have the CPU live longer in C3/lower power state(I at least have observed this behaviour where without Aero, my CPU runs in a longer period of higher frequency). However, for powerful 3D GPU where power saving is not the aim, asking it to do even the simplest thing would consume some pretty high baseline power.

BTW, it seems that PATA HD actually use less power than SATA, at least that is what I see for my Hitachi model according to their spec, about 0.2W or so.

 

Yes, this shows clearly in the idle power consumption in the Tom's Hardware charts. It is less clear in the Digit Life Table 2 (because the interface type isn't clearly shown) but the Samsung ....JI (SATA) have an idle current about 40mA higher than the ....JC (PATA). This is about 0.2W. So much for progress! It is equivalent to 2% of 10W or 6 minutes of time on the Q35 at light load.

John

 

maybe this is lil bit off topic... but i think still in the same direction... so i was looking at

DDR2-RAM 1 GB 667 MHZ NOTEBOOK CORSAIR and
DDR2-RAM 1 GB 667 MHZ NOTEBOOK KINGSTON

so what is the different between these two brand of RAM, which one will use more power or there are no significant different between this two RAM? was thinking to add up 1Gb Module to my Q35...

 

I have never seen any review of notebook RAM which compares power consumption. In fact, any comparative reviews of normal RAM are hard to find (Digit-Life has some).

Kingston's data sheets show the power consumption. Their 1GB 533 and 667 SODIMMs use more power than the 1GB 800 (I didn't know they existed) or the 2GB module.

I can't find any datasheets for the Corsair RAM. The timing data for the 1GB Value Select is attached. These timings are exactly the same as on my Transcend 2GB module but you may find that they are a little slower than on the Samsung module.

I don't think it is worthwhile losing sleep over the memory timings. See my post in this thread. I would just get whatever CL=5 DDR2 SODIMM RAM I can find at the best price and hope that it is not one which consumes a lot of power.

John

 

i see... there are also 800 from kingston... i need to check for that then... maybe will be usefull... but depend on the price... seems like you have a lot of RAM in your house... really nice...

 

I don't think that Kingston 800MHz RAM has arrived yet but it will be good because CL=5 @ 800 will be CL=4 @ 667. However, it will be stuck at CL=5 in your Q35 to match the on-board RAM.

I have a few spare modules arising from upgrades. They normally go back into the computer when I pass it on / sell it off.

At the moment I've got 1 x Transcend 2GB + 1 x Corsair 1GB in my X60 plus.

John

 

i see... meaning... if i dont have the on board RAM... then my RAM will be running on CL=4 @ 667 with the CL=5 @ 800 is it?... so rite now... it is pointless to have the 800 as the power consumption will be the same is it?

 

Two issues:

(a) I don't know of any notebooks which actually run 800MHz at 800MHz, so it would be clocked down to run at 667MHz. But at 667MHz I would expect it to run at CL=4, which is faster than most 667MHz RAM (I have actually found this module rated at CL=4 @ 667MHz, with a price about 50% higher than normal RAM).

(b) Your Q35 has some RAM fixed on the main board. CPU-Z can't see this module properly in the SPD table so the only way to check the speed of the on-board RAM is to remove the main module then use CPU-Z to check the timing. My Q35 has 4-4-4-11-16 at 266/533 with the on-board RAM only (Win XP is very slow with 256MB!). I believe the latest Q35s with 512 on-board use faster RAM.

I wouldn't worry about the RAM power aspect. There are not enough data to make rational decisions and the difference in battery time is likely to be a few minutes only.

John

 

okay... thank you for your response... i will check my on board RAM later... just like what u said earlier where you just leave the on board RAM alone so that the result reading will be for the on board card...

 

Hi guys,

after tuning my Q35 a bit, I seem to be getting about 4:30 hours battery time while surfing the Internet on wireless LAN with the following settings:

WLAN on
Bluetooth off
Brightness 5/8
Windows Vista Business (most effects turned off)
My own energy savings plan with rather low CPU settings

Machine is a Q35 Pro Bamit, CPU Core2Duo T5600, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Hitachi SATA HD

Do you reckon 4:30 hours is OK for this setup, regarding WLAN is being used all the time?


Cheers, Ernie-

 

I think that's pretty good... eventho till now i haven't really have 3 good cycle of my battery used... cause of all the problem till now... so havent test my battery to full life yet...

but considering you say your own saving power plan... mind sharing what you really set there?

 

I would say that 4:30 with those settings is good. Turning off the wireless and dropping the brightness a couple of steps should get you well past 5 hours.

John

 

Sure, here you go:


Power plan when running on battery
(translated from German Vista, names might be different on English Vista):


Main settings:

Turn off screen: 3 mins
Standby: 15 mins



Advanced settings:

HD off: 1 min

WLAN: max power save

Standby after: 15 mins
Hybrid standby: no
Hibernate after: 120 mins

USB save energy: yes
PCI Express: max power save

CPU min: 1%
CPU max: 30%

Search: power save

Screen off: 3 mins

Multimedia: power save


(With these settings Vista issues a warning that they might effect system performance. I just ignore this warning, performance seems fine)

 

Hello there.

I got a Q35 last week, and i cant change brighness settings under "energy options" on control panel.

I select "balanced" settings, and then i click to proceed to advanced settings.

Inside there, i should see a rollover option to select the brightness level on each of the battery and connected levels. But i just dont see it.

I installed drivers correctly but no way, it wont work.

Any help on this?


Thank you


Sammuel Moretto

 

I recall that the brightness levels may be handled by Samsung's Battery Manager.

Do you have Battery Manager and is it working OK?

John

 

no i don't think so, i see there display manager, network manager, but no battery manager.

Btw, i would like to know where i could find Q35 vista drivers? Because i could find them on Samsung's website, but i don't know why, i dont find them anymore there, just XP drivers.

=(

thank you

 

Here are the Q35 Vista drivers and software . You should also make sure you have BIOS 25SD from here.

The global download site is usually the best source, but occasionally there is something additional at samsungpc.com.

John

 

That was some huge help from you, i really appreciated.

Thank you John.

Have a good day.


Sam

 

Btw, i installed the battery manager software, but no succsess on running it.

Installed all updates available on Samsung update software.

Installed Battery manager. AFter installation, i checked the option to automatically start it after installation finishes, but it didnt start.

No icons were added to the taskbar, neither to the start/programs/samsung folder.

I see the process is running background, as "EasyBatterymgr3.exe" but it shows nothing to me, no aditional options to the energy options in control panel, nothing. Similarly as i havent really installed it.

I then tried to reinstall many times, but no success. I have no clue on how to fix this.


Any clue of whats going on? Any user's permissions issues? maybe OS version?

Im currently using Windows Vista Ultimate 32, on Portuguese language. I dont think this would be any issue tho.



I'd like some help on that.


Thank you

Sam

 

Did you try the right click "run as administrator" option, both for the installer and for the program once it is installed.

I think Battery Manager accesses the hardware and operating system at a fairly low level so Vista will think it is malicious and try to block it.

John

 

Yep i tried but no succsess, there are no icons on taskbar or desktop, just on programs's folder. I then try to execute the program from there but it opens nothing.

Really strange, i did that procedure of adding INTERACTIVE access to the registry keys, as described in a thread on this forum( http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis...09/370263.aspx), to be changing power saving settings without being the administrator (my user is the administrator, so i did this in a last hope).

I cant imagine some solution, i will try to install newest updates of Vista Ultimate.

Anything on BIOS that should be set? or maybe some fault from my battery?

 

Yep, fixed it. But manually, no software work.

Theres an option on BIOS, under the tab "Boot", called "brightness mode control".

there are 2 options:

User control
Auto

It was set previously at "auto", and then i have set now to "user control".

Immediatelly removed energy cable from notebook and brightness remained the same, so now its working perfectly.

Altough no option came new into the "energy options", under control panel, nor at any place, now it works like hell, no screen darkness when cable is away.

As i couldnt put battery manager to work nicely, so now its a manual option for people who wanna disable automatic brightness level.


Thank you

Sam

 

The battery on my Q35 only lasts around 3 hours. I have tried ernst42's power plan settings, but it doesn't make much difference.

RMClock is reporting around 9% battery wear, which doesn't seem too bad for 6 months, but it's also reporting a discharge rate of 15-16mW. BT is turned off, but WiFi is on, and I'm running the display at 3 bars. All of Vistas eye candy is also off.

*Edit*
Forgot to mention, I tried the samsung battery calibration through the BIOS, but it didn't seem to make any difference.

My battery currently reads 16%/29mins

Any ideas would be much appreciated
Neil

 

15-16W power drain is way too high. Are you using the Samsung Optimised Power Plan?

I presume your CPU is crawling along at minimum speed. Have you got a web browser open? I use FireFox with FlashBlock and AdBlock+. Flash can put a lot of load on the CPU even if you are off line and it's in one of the tabs which you are not viewing. Such stuff should be banned IMO but the next best is to block it.

You can check the CPU state in the Performance Monitor. Start > Run > Perfmon. Then select Performance Monitor from the list on the left, right click on the graph area and select Add Counters. The click on the + to the right of Processors and select %C3 time, click on Add. It defaults to a red line, so go down to the bottom and edit the properties of the line to change the colour. If your CPU is lightly loaded then the green line should be up around 90%.

If the line is stuck on zero then go to the Advanced CPU settings in RMclock and enable the C4 states (never mind C3, C4 is deeper sleep but perfmon counts it as C3). If the %C3 is below around 90% then use Task Manager to see what is loading the CPU - see which processes are clocking up CPU time.

John

 

Thanks for the info John.

The reading is with nothing open, just RMClock.

The OS load hovers between around 1%-8%, sometime spiking to around 12-15%. The CPU Load shows as anywhere between 40% and 99%, but I believe this is a known issue with the application.

I will have a look at the CPU states now......if I enable something with RMClock...do I have to keep it running all the time?

I do have various apps running in the systray, and they are:

NOD32 virus scanner
Windows defender
Radix Reload
Intel graphics tray icon
Samsung recovery solution
Easy display manager
Sync centre
Mozy Backup - set for manual backups

Power profile is samsung profile, with the changes detailed by Ernst32.

Cheers
Neil

 

I've checked the CPU state, and it's hovering around 90% at idle

 

Are you using RMclock just to monitor the power drain?

What CPU speed and voltage are showing on RMclock's monitoring page? On battery the voltage should be 1.0 or lower.

John

 

Purely for monitoring yes......I only asked in case I had to use it to activate the C4 state

CPU frequency ID and Voltage ID are 6.0 and 0.950 respectively. CPU core clock and throttle shows 798.

 

Task manager reports 77 running processes, but surely that doesn't matter if the CPU usage is still low.

 

Is there any chance it could be related to the new BIOS?

 

So far everything is ticking the right boxes. CPU (which one? - I have a theory that the T7200 takes more power because of the bigger cache) at minimum speed and voltage and spending most of its time in the C3 low power state. Bluetooth is off.

What happens to be battery drain current when you put the backlight to minimum? Also turn off the wireless? Also make sure you have nothing plugged into the USB ports. You should be able to get the Q35 down to around 10W when it is on idle. Is anything keeping the HDD busy?

go into Device Manager and look for those devices which have a Power tab and make sure Allow to turn off on battery is selected. Go into the display properties and see if the display power management is working.

We can't exclude the latest BIOS if you were previously getting batter battery life.

John

 

If I right-click and select graphics properties, I get the intel driver util. Under display settings, I goto power settings, but all of the options are greyed out, none of the boxes are ticked, and the slider is set to maximum quality......could this be the culprit?

With brightness on 1, and wifi off, it goes down to 12.5W at idle.

All devices are already set to save power.

 

It's possible that if the GPU's power management isn't working then that could account for a few watts. I presume you have read this relevant thread. It is relevant although it is for the Q45.

We need someone else to look into their Q35 and see if the GPU power management is working. It should look something like the attached (right click on Desktop > Graphics Properties > Display Settings > Power Settings). I know from fiddling with my Zepto, that this needs to be enabled in the BIOS.

John

PS: In the mean time, you can try to install the previous BIOS from SamsungPC.