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battery testing...

post #1 of 2
3/15/05 at 7:53pm
Thread Starter 
I've noticed a decrease in the amount of battery life in my 4530GZ. This model has a 6-cell battery stock and I purchased the laptop in November. I tried to fully drain/charge the battery earlier this week to recalibrate windows and got a little improvement. Next I ordered the 9-cell unit from Gateway to see what it could do. For my test I set the laptop at 80% backlit, power properties at "always on", and ran SETI along with some other application to see what kind of battery life I could achieve from the two different batteries. I also turned the status leds off too. The 6-cell unit, fully charged, lasted 1 hour 40 minutes. The 9-cell unit, fully charged, lasted 2 hours and 35 minutes. I know that changing the power properties to laptop/portable or gateway management will give me alot more battery time. I just wanted to see what the batteries could do while maxing out the processor with a decent screen brightness ( and didn't want to wait too long to get results). I think for my next test I will put in The Return of the King extended edition with max battery setting and the Wi-Fi card off and se e how far I get.
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post #2 of 2
4/3/05 at 6:30pm
My Gateway 400 w/6 cell using the "recalibrate" option within the bios got me no real gain in battery time. I've run it 2x within 2 weeks with the battery already at 100% on AC power.

As you mentioned having the screen, video chipset, HD, wifi, nic etc... power down and back up, on demand, is the best way to go if battery time is the number one consideration. Keeping your HD defragged on a regular basis will help as well as if you have enough RAM to fine tune your swap file size (less HD usage).

Good Luck
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