samsung series 7 battery- better life?

ok so I'm new to these forums. hello everyone

I recently got a used samsung series 7 (np700z5b-s01ub to be exact) model for a smokin deal- came with windows 10, a 250GB SSD installed, extra battery and 3 chargers for under half the price when it was new!
express cache disabled (obviously, SSD does fine) and its just a spare flashdrive carrying windows 7/10 install files. the chargersare an awesome bonus- I'm coming from a samsung r525 (awesome rig, I'll miss it but it just wasn't poweful enough for some things I wanted to run) and I discovered that both of my old chargers were bad- not the port I had redone on it years back (whew) threw the old ones away and the charging port is the same for both. r525 is now handed down to brother with no laptop for Christmas gift

loaded windows 7 back on it, loaded my stuff, very fast especially with SSD. Alumium body and backlight keys are amazing. plays dolphin emulator (smash games) every well. can get to 720p before slowdown... slowdown on menu for project m but fullspeed gameplay for most levels, 1.5 naive works fine. also PCSX2 old gundam seed destiny game runs perfectly fine with only slowdown on explosions...D3DX11 seems to work best


sometimes the graphics car gets gltichy with f.lux..minor issue. also whenever an program had a "boot at start" option, it would never turn off, had to rename programs to get them to stop starting up when windows would. strange windows 7 glitch

my number one concern is the battery... rated almost 6 hours? on a battery rated 80,216mWh I wasn't getting much with the battery in- buddy told me he had it for awhile and switch from the original battery which had a broken reset button. ok so old battery was 31% wear

I change out the batteries (never opened up a laptop before, not even the old one, what a trip) and the new one only has 2% wear after full charge amazing.... but I only got it to last 2 1/2 hours on surfing and youtube what!? thats not much better then my old laptop with half the mWh...

whats up with that? how can I get a better longer lasting charge? discharge rates seem to be in the 20s.... 38 as we speak... just chrome with not even a high screen setting

why is this? what can I do to get closer to the 6 hour mark. even 4 would be awesome

 

I suspect that the main problem is that the dGPU is refusing to go to sleep under light usage conditions. There are others who can better advise which driver combination works for them.

John

 

here is what Im getting from GPU-z

http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/16/12/21/k8d.png

what should I do about the drivers? they say its most upto date

 

Try using the drivers provided by Samsung's SW Update software. Newer drivers may not work properly unless customised by Samsung.

John

 

@ironchar: I have a NP700Z3A, which is similar in hardware to yours (Sandy Bridge i5-2450M, Radeon 6490M) except it's a 13 inch screen.

My battery is 65120 mWh and has been at 9.1% wear for several years, keeping Battery Life Extender on most of the time, which limits charging to 80%. But when I just checked now, it had gone to 11.4% wear. That's still good for a 4.5 year old laptop.

I get about 4 hours on a full charge with "normal" use. That does NOT include massive WiFi data use (which takes lot of power due to the antenna design in these models) nor heavy CPU/GPU use. I could probably get it to 5 hours or more if I switched to Silent Mode (Fn-F11, it switches to Windows Power Saver profile and caps the CPU speed at 800MHz).

As John mentioned, make sure you use drivers from Samsung SW Update as opposed to newer generic drivers. This also includes Samsung Settings (Easy Settings for Win7), which contains power management and keyboard drivers. That doesn't mean you have to install all of the bloat that SW Update offers.

There is a comprehensive Windows install guide for Samsung laptops here (post #40 in the linked thread) which includes advice about drivers and how to keep it lean.

Following are a few links to posts I made previously about power management on Samsung laptops:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...p870z5e-np880z5e.713184/page-464#post-9638123

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...np870z5e-np880z5e.713184/page-58#post-9188768

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...n-samsung-laptops.688064/page-10#post-9060674

I hope this helps.

Oh, and welcome to NBR and congrats on your new (old) Sammy!

 

one thing i'm noticing is that cpu usage never seens to go below 24-25%

is that a core i7 thing?

anyway I'm downloading some drivers like graphics... not sure if its helping

what if its my battery being old? I did rescue it from complete 0% charge. the capaity may be fine but the discharge rate can't handle?
hmm somethings up with my cpu though it seems to work hard lots when it does need to even on slient mode. I remember having to turn off hyperthreading in BIOS for dophin preference... is that something to do with it?

 

25% CPU usage suggests that something is stuck in a loop. Task Manager may help you identify what it is. Turning off hyperthreading should not increase CPU utilisation. Is it a dual or quad core CPU?

You can see what the battery is doing and the current charge status using BatteryInfoView.

John

 

quad core.

montoring with HWiNFO 64.... what could it be? a program stuck in a loop?

found it in resource monitor!... an svchost.exe from windows causing it? weird!

 

Thanks. Quad core with hyperthreading disabled confirms that you have one culprit. Did you install Samsung's recommended graphics drivers? A problem is that there can be many instances of svchost.exe running and the challenge is to find which program or driver has called this particular instance of svchost.exe. One possible method is to run Process Explorer. Another method is to try killing that instance of svchost.exe and seeing if something else stops working or complains. It could be a corrupted driver so the third method is to reinstall all the drivers using those provided by Samsung's SW Update. The ultimate possible fix is to reinstall Windows.

John

 

thanks yeah I did.

I had this problem with the r525 except then svchost.exe ran that old amd altheon up to 100%.... I don't even remember how I fixed it.

I've had some issues with windows update on this one.... back when first installed it wouldn't update at all- had to manual install some updates, then ran windows update.... over time it covered updates

now theirs a few security updates.... its back to taking forever to install them-left the computer for afew hours to install 7 updates still would show 0% after afew hours what the hell man

drivers seem sound. literally problems with windows update.... and msconfig start up services not working properly... I'd rather not reinstall windows.

when I kill that svhost the only thing that stops/shuts down is windows update. everything else is sound. it'll come back up later and shoot the cpu back to 25% idle


but really.... windows update isn't working on my old computer either... its gotta be windows update

 

Ah! The dreaded Windows Update. I had that problem on my Samsung NP900X3B (Windows 7). If I killed a process (win something) than that would stop the CPU load). I eventually fixed it without reinstalling Windows but can't remember the details but one part of the process was lots of rebooting. Also try selecting the updates one at a time. There's also a way to clear the download cache, which might be corrupted. Use your favorite search engine to find out more.

John

 

cleared cache... lost my updated history... no solve


to hell with it... just disabled it and kill that svchost... wayyy less cpu usage. screw windows update mircosoft really f'ed up here

I'm getting 4-5 hours of battery life EASY- hell 4.5 on 75% charge that's really good coming from a 2 hour standard


one last question for now.... trackpad sucks granted, but sometimes I need it for emergency use.... how can I enable easy right-click? settings aren't helping,,, oh, double tap on the bottom right? clunky but it works

 

Keep an eye on the CPU usage - the Windows Update will keep trying. One day it will succeed. When you have time try installing one update at a time and rebooting before trying the next one.

Regarding the touchpad, there are two control panels in the Elan driver package. Samsung use the simple one. There is a lot more information in this thread.

John