Friday, July 29, 2005

Laptop update...

I'm not so sure about the battery life of this thing and as I posted on Notebook Forums:

I got my laptop a week ago and was wondering why it seemed to be running down too fast, especially since it has the 9-cell battery and a constant praise item has been the long battery life.

Last night, while watching DVDs, chatting and surfing with the thing set to Max Battery and the screen dimmed to half-brightness, it drained to 3% and went into hibernation after about 3-1/2 hours. I had an optical mouse and a Kensington Flight Lite 2.0 plugged in at half-brightness, but that's not going to eat up 1-1/2 of the supposed run time, is it? (I also have Omega drivers and set Powerplay to Balanced while on battery.)

Do I have a duff battery or unit or what?

Others and reviews spoke as if this thing would last 5+ hours. Drat.

Smacked down by Dirk Belligerent at 1:18 PM

2 comments:

chooktah said...

Keep in mind, any battery-life quote refers to the life when idle. I have a ThinkPad T-42 w/ the extended life battery (adds at least a lb to the weight) and when it's fully charged it'll tell me I have 5-6 hours of charge left.. but that figure changes dramatically depending on the apps I have open. If I'm surfing and using Word every so often I can expect that number to go down to around 2.5-3.. that's just the way they work or don't work depending on how you look at it. - I, of course, kept the battery that came w/ it and keep it in the case (charged) for medium-long flights or whatever cuz it's gonna run out.. especially if I'm watching movies.

did you get an Inspiron or a Latitude? - never had an Inspiron but at a previous job I was issued a Lat and was pretty pleased w/ it. Although I gotta say, the T-42 buries anything Dell makes at this point. And the price reflects that.

7/30/2005 12:02 PM
Dirk Belligerent said...

As noted before - scroll down - I got an Inspiron 6000D. I was basing the supposed battery life on other users' comments. I'll shake it down some more.

8/01/2005 8:37 AM

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