Realistic / Real World 9-Cell Battery Life

[wololo]

I have a T410 with a 6 cell battery and can say that it's pretty much useless.  I can manage to get at most 2 hours out of the Laptop on a single charge!

My T410 Specs are:

i5 2.67GHz

8GB Ram

Win7 64bit

NVidia Optimus

I'm curious to know what kind of battery life people are getting out of the 9 Cell?  Can you get through an 8 hour working day on a single charge?

I typically use my laptop for: 

Visual Studio Programming

Web Browsing

Word / Excel

Email (Outlook)

Live Messenger

80 - 90% screen brightness

What can I expect from from a 9 cell based on the above usage?

Cheers

[bgjerding]

Well, the 9-cell has about 1-1/2 times the capacity of the 6-cell, so you should expect about 1-1/2 times the life if you use it the same way, or about 3 hours in your case

Note that this isn't the "real world experience" answer your requesed, but it _does_ take your usage pattern into account.

[Iucounu]

I can get that much on my T420i, but that is with Office programs, some light browsing, and reduced screen brightness (though with the battery option "Automatically optimize for battery lifespan" checked, which means it doesn't fully charge).

Have you tried turning off that option?  You might get better run times, though your battery would probably need replacement sooner.

Is it possible that your Optimus graphics aren't switching off properly?  I only have HD 3000 so don't know anything about it.

I think the biggest culprits, with your battery life, are probably the Visual Studio programming and the screen brightness.  You might try looking at your running processes and getting rid of some junk, if you find it.  You might also try checking email less frequently (this might involve not running Outlook all the time, and/or setting it to check the server less frequently, etc.).

What's your watt usage?  Right now I'm typing this on battery, with screen at brightness 10, Jungle Disk Workgroup running in the background, antivirus etc., Office loaded, 10 windows of Firefox, Textpad, and some other odds and ends, and I'm at between 7 and 8 watts.

Have you tried turning off Turbo Boost?  Does that help at all?

How old is the battery?  Is that the sort of run time you were getting when it was new?

You might also try running Firefox with a memory cache instead of disk.  I don't know if that would help battery life, although it would reduce disk usage a bit depending on how much you surf.

[ColonelONeill]

You're probably consuming too much power in the first place. Try to make sure the NVidia GPU isn't activating when it shouldn't be and draining power.

Also go to an elevated command line and run "powercfg -energy". Read the results for anything that might be causing excess power consumption.

LCD power consumption increases drastically with higher display brightnesses. Set the brightness lower; 80-90% is usually for outdoors.

You should be able to get about 3 to 4 hours out of the 6-cell as you say you use it.

Also:
a) How often do you defrag?
b) Which browser do you use?
c) Do you compile while on battery?

[wololo]

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ColonelONeill wrote:

You're probably consuming too much power in the first place. Try to make sure the NVidia GPU isn't activating when it shouldn't be and draining power.

Also go to an elevated command line and run "powercfg -energy". Read the results for anything that might be causing excess power consumption.

LCD power consumption increases drastically with higher display brightnesses. Set the brightness lower; 80-90% is usually for outdoors.

You should be able to get about 3 to 4 hours out of the 6-cell as you say you use it.

Also:
a) How often do you defrag?
b) Which browser do you use?
c) Do you compile while on battery?

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Hi and thanks for your advice. 

I am concious of the NVidia GPU and don't do any video during a normal usage so i don't think this is having adverse effects on my power consumption.  To answer your specific questions i am running Win7 64 bit (so defrag is automatic) and Firefox for web browing.  Yes I do compile on battery when not at a power source.

I understand that LCD brightness drastically reduces battery life but any lower than 80-90% is more comfortable on the old eyes.

My aim was to buy a 9 cell battery if it can drastically imporve battery life over what im getting now. 

[wololo]

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bgjerding wrote:

Well, the 9-cell has about 1-1/2 times the capacity of the 6-cell, so you should expect about 1-1/2 times the life if you use it the same way, or about 3 hours in your case

Note that this isn't the "real world experience" answer your requesed, but it _does_ take your usage pattern into account.

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Thanks that's helpful to know