Walmart Black Friday HP Laptop Battery Life

[Gunslinger08]

How long is it lasting for everyone? Did anyone buy a higher capacity battery for it? If so, where and how much?

 

[gerrynjr]

about 3 hours, with backlight turned all the way down

 

[Hacp]

Originally posted by: joshsquall
How long is it lasting for everyone? Did anyone buy a higher capacity battery for it? If so, where and how much?

I would have to say about 2-2.5 hours with wireless on/ Lowest dimm.

 

[cherrypik]

Same here. I was on the internet and ripping a backup and the battery lasted about 2-2.5 hours. Can the battery be upgraded? Or should I remove the battery and get run it off the regular outlet?

Has anyone tossed in a 512 stick of ram. Notice any difference? Does it come with 2*128 or 1*256?

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: cherrypik
Same here. I was on the internet and ripping a backup and the battery lasted about 2-2.5 hours. Can the battery be upgraded? Or should I remove the battery and get run it off the regular outlet?

Has anyone tossed in a 512 stick of ram. Notice any difference? Does it come with 2*128 or 1*256?

It comes with one 256MB stick. The memory slots are really easy to access.

 

[cherrypik]

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: cherrypik
Same here. I was on the internet and ripping a backup and the battery lasted about 2-2.5 hours. Can the battery be upgraded? Or should I remove the battery and get run it off the regular outlet?

Has anyone tossed in a 512 stick of ram. Notice any difference? Does it come with 2*128 or 1*256?

It comes with one 256MB stick. The memory slots are really easy to access.

Cool. I purchased the PNY memory from staples. I'm guessing that I could probably put the 512 in the 256 slot and move the 256 chip to the open slot. Did you upgrade the memory yet? If so, have you notice a difference.

I like it so far but the battery life is a downer for me, so far.

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: cherrypik

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: cherrypik
Same here. I was on the internet and ripping a backup and the battery lasted about 2-2.5 hours. Can the battery be upgraded? Or should I remove the battery and get run it off the regular outlet?

Has anyone tossed in a 512 stick of ram. Notice any difference? Does it come with 2*128 or 1*256?

It comes with one 256MB stick. The memory slots are really easy to access.

Cool. I purchased the PNY memory from staples. I'm guessing that I could probably put the 512 in the 256 slot and move the 256 chip to the open slot. Did you upgrade the memory yet? If so, have you notice a difference.

I like it so far but the battery life is a downer for me, so far.

No, I haven't upgraded it yet, but I'd assume it'll be quite a bit faster. The hard drive is slow (4200 rpm), so more memory will mean less virtual memory use. You can also up the graphics memory, to increase video performance.

I'm thinking about buying a 12-cell battery for mine. That should increase battery life to about 5 hours.

 

[DragonMasterAlex]

Originally posted by: gerrynjr
about 3 hours, with backlight turned all the way down

How do you turn down the backlight?

 

[DragonMasterAlex]

I've already found a 60GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive to put in one of the units we got (we got 2, one for the female and one for a gift), and the intention is to pump the RAM to the max on both units.

Speaking of which, has anyone tried using 2x1GB? According to HP's site this laptop only takes 1GB, but the *official* spec for the RS480 chipset it uses claims a 2GB max, and other laptops using the same chipset also claim 2GB max. I'm hoping the HP site is just misprinted, but does anyone know for sure?

Jason

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: DragonMasterAlex
I've already found a 60GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive to put in one of the units we got (we got 2, one for the female and one for a gift), and the intention is to pump the RAM to the max on both units.

Speaking of which, has anyone tried using 2x1GB? According to HP's site this laptop only takes 1GB, but the *official* spec for the RS480 chipset it uses claims a 2GB max, and other laptops using the same chipset also claim 2GB max. I'm hoping the HP site is just misprinted, but does anyone know for sure?

Jason

Some people have been saying that HP only offers tech support for up to 1 gig, but that the laptop will support 2 gigs. Give it a shot, and let us know. Worst case, you can return one of the sticks.

 

[cherrypik]

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: cherrypik

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: cherrypik
Same here. I was on the internet and ripping a backup and the battery lasted about 2-2.5 hours. Can the battery be upgraded? Or should I remove the battery and get run it off the regular outlet?

Has anyone tossed in a 512 stick of ram. Notice any difference? Does it come with 2*128 or 1*256?

It comes with one 256MB stick. The memory slots are really easy to access.

Cool. I purchased the PNY memory from staples. I'm guessing that I could probably put the 512 in the 256 slot and move the 256 chip to the open slot. Did you upgrade the memory yet? If so, have you notice a difference.

I like it so far but the battery life is a downer for me, so far.

No, I haven't upgraded it yet, but I'd assume it'll be quite a bit faster. The hard drive is slow (4200 rpm), so more memory will mean less virtual memory use. You can also up the graphics memory, to increase video performance.

I'm thinking about buying a 12-cell battery for mine. That should increase battery life to about 5 hours.

How much will one of those batteries set u back?

Dagonmasteralex, did you find any good deals for the 7200 harddrive online?

 

[DragonMasterAlex]

Originally posted by: cherrypik

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: cherrypik

Originally posted by: joshsquall

Originally posted by: cherrypik
Same here. I was on the internet and ripping a backup and the battery lasted about 2-2.5 hours. Can the battery be upgraded? Or should I remove the battery and get run it off the regular outlet?

Has anyone tossed in a 512 stick of ram. Notice any difference? Does it come with 2*128 or 1*256?

It comes with one 256MB stick. The memory slots are really easy to access.

Cool. I purchased the PNY memory from staples. I'm guessing that I could probably put the 512 in the 256 slot and move the 256 chip to the open slot. Did you upgrade the memory yet? If so, have you notice a difference.

I like it so far but the battery life is a downer for me, so far.

No, I haven't upgraded it yet, but I'd assume it'll be quite a bit faster. The hard drive is slow (4200 rpm), so more memory will mean less virtual memory use. You can also up the graphics memory, to increase video performance.

I'm thinking about buying a 12-cell battery for mine. That should increase battery life to about 5 hours.

How much will one of those batteries set u back?

Dagonmasteralex, did you find any good deals for the 7200 harddrive online?

Best prices I saw were around $148, but I found one on the forums for $100. Hopefully I'll find a second one soon.

I started an unofficial support thread here, though!

 

[karmasore]

my brother got bored with some friends and waited in line at our local walmart for a few hours and he ended up picking up one of these laptops because he couldn't pass up the deal. he eventually sold it to my girlfriend.

i formated it last night for her and got it going. formating and installing the drivers went flawlessly.

i installed World of Warcraft on it last night to test it out and it was absolutely unplayable. i'm hoping a gig of ram in this thing will speed it up a bit. what do you guys think?

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: karmasore
my brother got bored with some friends and waited in line at our local walmart for a few hours and he ended up picking up one of these laptops because he couldn't pass up the deal. he eventually sold it to my girlfriend.

i formated it last night for her and got it going. formating and installing the drivers went flawlessly.

i installed World of Warcraft on it last night to test it out and it was absolutely unplayable. i'm hoping a gig of ram in this thing will speed it up a bit. what do you guys think?

I ran the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo on it at 800x600 and it seemed good enough to play. This was with only 256 megs of RAM as well.

 

[karmasore]

ahh

maybe ill install an fps game and see how it works out...

gonna still upgrade the ram though :-D

 

[MercenaryForHire]

If it's the X200M, it'll run like utter s*** until you up the RAM to at least 512MB and dedicate 64MB of that to video.

- M4H

 

[Gunslinger08]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
If it's the X200M, it'll run like utter s*** until you up the RAM to at least 512MB and dedicate 64MB of that to video.

- M4H

Yeah, it is. You can up it to 128MB. I'll be doing so shortly.

 

[lostnthenet]

I installed another 512MB Ram in mine the same day I got it. Loaded WoW the other day and it played pretty nicely. Thats with 640Meg System RAM and 128M video RAM.

 

[DragonMasterAlex]

Originally posted by: karmasore
my brother got bored with some friends and waited in line at our local walmart for a few hours and he ended up picking up one of these laptops because he couldn't pass up the deal. he eventually sold it to my girlfriend.

i formated it last night for her and got it going. formating and installing the drivers went flawlessly.

i installed World of Warcraft on it last night to test it out and it was absolutely unplayable. i'm hoping a gig of ram in this thing will speed it up a bit. what do you guys think?

I've got some RAM inbound, but I swapped the 256 from the second lappy into the first, and I can tell you that WoW is playable with 512MB of memory. Note though that I play it from an external USB 2.0 drive, 7200RPM

Edit: I also installed UT2004 to the hard drive (the internal 4200RPM drive) and it ran well enough to play, even with 256MB. With 512 the stutters went away even at 1024x768


Jason

 

[kamranziadar]

I am selling 512MB PC333 Laptop Ram brand new sealed.