Battery Life

[ark42]

I got a laptop with a 2.53GHz Celeron D and XP Home. When its fully charged windows estimates the battery life at 2 hours but then it ticks down real fast and estimates only just over 1 hour after a few minutes. How can I extend the battery life? The laptop is brand new. I'm hoping to at least be able to watch 1 DVD on it with a fully charged battery. Other then dimming the screen, what else is there? Will the HDD shut itself off if its not being used and I'm just watching a DVD? Can the CPU throttle its speed back at all?

 

[Dre]

If you have any external items like a mouse or USB hub conected to the laptop, you can disconnect them and save some energy.

 

[ark42]

Yeah, nothing external is plugged in. I also see Fn+F2 to disable the 802.11b/g and Fn+F1 disables all the LEDs. Its supposed to be an 8cell Li-ion battery. The model number is Li4402A. Mobile Meter says its a Dynapack 4400 and the designed capacity is 52800mWh. Just sitting there Mobile Meter says its using 20-30W when unplugged and doing nothing too.

 

[iamme]

have you compared your battery life with those from reviews of your laptop. the manufacturer estimated battery life will almost always be inflated.

if you're still getting battery life worse that what others are getting, you may want to get it replaced while it's still under warranty.

 

[ark42]

Its a Gateway M520CS, they claimed 4 hr battery life but I expected maybe 2-2.5 or so. I have no idea how accurate that windows battery icon in the tray really is, maybe I should time it to see how long it really lasts until shutting off.

Is it unreasonable to expect this thing to be able to play a DVD on a full charge?

 

[ark42]

I tried putting in a DVD (Kill Bill 1) and with a full charge, Windows decided to hibernate at about 1:25 into the movie, so the battery only lasts for about 1.5 hours when playing a DVD. Seems really low to me.

 

[iamme]

i don't know if this has ANY significance at all, but CNET.com recently rated the Gateway M320 as a "don't buy" strictly because of the poor battery life. perhaps that might apply to the M520 as well?

it may not hurt to give Gateway a call to see what they say.

if they claim that's the best the M520 can do, and battery life is important to you....you can either buy another battery (perhaps an extended one) or return it for different laptop. best of luck!

 

[vegetation]

1.5 hours on a dvd disc movie playing would be unheard of for a pentium M based system but not all that uncommon of in a celeron mobile system. Not sure how a celeron-d rates power-wise to a pentium M.

 

[morris81]

You need to remember the Celerons do not support the speedstep function that mobile cpus have. In other words, your celeron is running at 2.53GHz all the time and takes more power to run at that speed then a pentium M cpu. Also, a manufacturer's battery life rating is usually skewed, and usually they rate the max battery life, with the LCD completely dimmed.

In general, I would recommend staying with mobile cpus like the pentium M which are designed with higher battery life in mind.

 

[ark42]

*sigh* - is there a way to upgrade the CPU from a Celeron-D to a P4-M or P-M that supports speedstep?
Not sure what socket or anything a laptop would have. I know mem/hd are easily upgraded though.

I did pick up a 100W power inverter (10-15V DC in, 120V out 100W max, $20 at office max) and it works well enough in the car with that.

 

[morris81]

You probably can not upgrade to a Pentium M as the chipset wouldnt support it. Your best bet is a mobile P4 or a P4M cpu. You could always check gateway's website and see what other cpu configs they are selling with the laptop and go from there.

 

[ark42]

http://www.gateway.com/home/pr...ptb_m520.shtml?clv=Img says they sell it with a P4 518 (2.8GHz) or 532 (3.06GHz) but it doesn't say Mobile P4 or P4M, just P4, so I'm guessing its a P4 without speedstep?
For some reason I thought all P4 and Celeron now-a-days had speedstep. Oops!

Anybody know of a utility that will manually power down the HDD if I dont need it? (like when I'm just watching a DVD)

 

[IntelUser2000]

That would be Prescott based Pentium 4 Mobile with Speedstep.

 

[Alansan]

try to see what motherboard chipset it uses. From there, you will be able to see what you can support.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Is it a new laptop? If its recent, you can probably return it. If you get another Celeron, go for a Celeron-M. If I'm not mistaken, Celeron-M's are just Pentium-M's with 512KB cache(?). Thus decent performance and good batt life for low cost. HP and Toshiba have Celeron-M solutions around $1000-$1100USD