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Folks with 17-inch laptops...what's your battery life?

A

arcas

Platinum Member
Title says all. In your real-world usage, what kind of battery life are you seeing? What are the specs of your machine?

 
Dell i9200, P-M 1.8GHz undervolted to 1.1/0.7v, 128 meg mr9700.
A little over 5 hours on 9 cell battery.
 
About an hour and a half, or less, depending on what is being done.
 
Dell i9300, PM 1.6Ghz, 5400RPM HDD, NV 6800, 6-cell battery.

Around 2hrs 15mins on "Maximum Battery" mode, and brightness 3 clicks down from full, browsing web using wireless.
 
Originally posted by: arcas
Originally posted by: RobsTV
Dell i9200, P-M 1.8GHz undervolted to 1.1/0.7v, 128 meg mr9700.
A little over 5 hours on 9 cell battery.
Click to expand...

Nice! How old is your battery?
Click to expand...

Battery brand new.
Also have a 6 cell which lasted about 2 hours playing DVD's, or 2.5 hours browsing, but those tests were done prior to undervolting.

Lower voltage (undervolting) helps in a couple ways besides lower CPU voltage, because this results in lower heat, which means no CPU/GPU fans running, which also means longer lasting battery. Actually though, CPU fan is rarely on anyway, even at full speed max performance A/C mode or 1.8GHz @ 1.1v, as temps rarely hit 55c, unless 3d gaming.

When on max battery saving mode, CPU drops to 600MHz, @ 0.7v.
That still is fine for DVD playback, but of course no 3d gaming in max battery mode.
I would guess that the P-M running at 600MHz, still runs about the same as 2 GHz celeron, or AMD 1GHz (just guessing by how it feels).
 
Thanks for the responses, guys. Sounds like ~2 hours with a Pentium-M and 6800. I'm not looking to do gaming from the laptop so I'll probably pick something less than a 6800 which should help run time (or is the mobile 6800 not a power hog when not actively doing 3D stuff?).

Thanks for the pointers about undervolting, RobsTV. I'll keep that in mind. I'd also be interested to see how your battery is performing after it gets some age on it. I noticed a friend's 15" Powerbook initially got 4.5 hours but quickly dropped to around 3-3.5 where it seems to have levelled out.

 
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