Inspiron 6000, about batteries

max 3hrs. thats if your lucky, real lucky.

id expect more like 2.3-2.5 avg from that.

Get the 8 cell if you want 3-5 hours.

The truth is [i]mine[i] lasts about 3 hours MAX. That is 3 hours without wifi and with the screen dimmed way down. If I'm going wifi and full screen I would only expect 2 hours max, probably less.

Taking out my audigy 2 zs, dimming the screen, undervolting to .700 and making sure powerplay is on gets me around 2hr 50 mins of DVD play on a 6cell.

or 3-4hr of solitare or somesuch


oh and using ik8 fan control to turn off the fan can extend the battery significantly (30 mins-ish), mines set to only turn on at 47 so its off most of the time.

no 8cell, its a 9cell. and unless you need the extra few hours on battery, just go 6cell. i wish i woulda, but i have the 9cell, and to tell ya the truth, it makes no diff to me now!

And I am glad that I took the 9cell and not the 6cell cause battery time can't be long enough and with the 9cell I get 5-6 hours for low cpuload works like surfing, email, office, programming (with few compiling steps in between).

i can get just over 5 hours with wifi on, programming, with compilations every 30 mins with take the CPU to 100% for under 5 mins..... oh and occasional web browsing (for code)

CPU temp peaks at 27 degrees

Yes, 5 hours is almost allways reachable (depends on the backlightsetting as you can easily add 50% powercunsumption when going from mininum to maximum brightness) and most times I end at 5 1/4 to 5 1/2 hours.

I use a Inspiron 6000 with integrated graphics, 1gb PC533 Ram (2x512), a pinmodded 1.7Ghz/400FSB P-M (which I clock to 1.6 Ghz/533 FSB when on batteries - this also keeps the temps down and fan off 95% of the time. If I really need the power I can switch to 2.26Ghz, but that will considerably shorten runtime), 80GB 5400 HDD, DVD-RW, WSXGA+ Display, wifi and bluetooth enabled (bt costs about 5 minutes batterie time ).

To get to these runtimes you need to undervolt the cpu (which is almost always possible) and use something like nhc (notebook hardware control) to enable more multipliers than just min and max. With that I reduced 6x voltage to 0.7V instead of 0.998 and 12x to 1.036V (you have to make stability tests to find stable undervoltage settings for your cpu).
Also be sure to fetch i8kfangui to change the fanbehaviour (if you idle most the time no fan is needed if you undervolt).

Most of the times my cputemp is in the upper 30°C when idling with fan off all the time, just when starting to compile the fan might spin up until about 2 seconds after compilation finishs.

Brightness is 2 or 3 notches down from maxsetting to reach these values.

And just one more reminder, runtime also depends on hdd and cd/dvd usage as those drives also love power
But usage of those is minimal if you are coding, just compiling takes a bit more power

If you can stably undervolt your M740 to 0.7V@6x (which will work almost always) and ~1.1V at 13x (and voltages between 0.7 and 1.1 for the other multis) and use fangui to keep the fan off when idle (mine starts at 45°C) you should get similar runtime, as long as you have enough ram to kepp your lappy from swapping all the time while coding.

guys have any of your warranties been affected by pin modding etc? Sorry for the thread highjack, I get ~3 hours on a 6 cell if Im doing good.

As said many times before: Pinmodding voids your warranty.

Only if they find out

Which they will if they check the thermal compound on the cpu.

Yep, depends what you are getting fixed

thermal compound does not void warranty.. There's no rule that said you can't add AC5 or something to your CPU.. is there?

As long as you don't need to take apart your laptop to change the compound you would be able to stay in warranty, but as you need to open and partly disassemble it it's easy for dell to say that you actually caused the damage that you want them to repair in a warranty case.

And yes, the servicemanuals are on their server, but as the disassembling is only there and not in the manual you got from them (on hdd) you are not allowed to disassemble the laptop without risking to void your warranty.