Re: Declining battery life: e1405 with 9-cell battery

On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 07:51:01 -0700, notaguru
<notaguru-obvious@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

e1405 - and you're right: I should have been more descriptive.

Shouldn't be too hard to believe, as the promo is something like
"7+ hours" with this extended battery. It has run 8 hours
driving only an external display.

It's a Dell e1405 with the WXGA+ screen, Core Duo @ 1.83GHz, 2GB
RAM, and a 120GB 5400RPM drive. Vista Home Premium. I also use a
2GB SD chip with ReadyBoost.

Wireless, Bluetooth, Aero (great!) and Sidebar are always ON. No
IR, and I don't use the speakers.

At idle, the Sidebar Multimeter shows RAM at 58% utilization
with a typical application load (all MS Office 2007, Firefox,
Thunderbird). Defender plus Avast, plus a few utilities and
tools, run in the background. Services have been carefully but
thoroughly trimmed, but Superfetch is ON.

On battery, the screen and 'performance level' settings are much
lower than when on AC power, and the HD shuts down quickly, but
those settings have never changed over time.

This unit is satisfyingly fast on AC power.

What do you like about Aero?

What side bar gadget do you use for performance monitoring (you
mention RAM, what about CPU?).

I have a 640m, and use very aggressive power management, above and
beyond what you write about above, and I could attain 6.5 hours.

However, that is with wi-fi and bluetooth turned off, no sidebar to
keep the CPU active, display turn off after 1 minute, shortcut to a
blank screen saver that I can use for less than that, Vista indexing
turned off, and the advanced power setting tweaked to only go up to
25% of CPU.

What is Superfetch?

Anyway, battery life can be greatly extended on those laptops if one
knows how to do it -- I could never attain 6.5 hours with wireless
turned on however.
.

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