Typically how long does your battery lasts with P-M speedstep enabled under ALL of the following conditions being present at the same time:-
1. Max brightness / no power saving features enabled.
2. Web browsing
3. Wifi enabled
4. Winamp playing in the background
1 hr? 2hrs? 3hrs?
Would be interested to know how much of an advantage (if any) speedstep offers in terms of battery life compared compared to a non-speedstep CPU under the above conditions.
difficult one to answer - depends on the configuration and model of laptop your using.
I've got a 6000 with the WUXGA screen - full brightness will leave you blind after a few hours use!
With the 9 cell battery I can have the laptop playing music and surfing for around 4 hours (depends how loud you have the music as to how much it drains the battery) and that's at half brightness with speedstep enabled. There is definately a difference with no speedstep but to get a definitive answer you'd need to get someone to try out what you want.
My Latitude D610 uses a P-M. If I get a chance at work next week, I will see how long it lasts and let you know to give you a rough idea.
Normally I have a 2nd battery in it so it does last a very long time... But I suspect it should last between 3 to 4 hours with just the main battery with full brightness and wifi enabled.
Ant
Would be appreciated if you run a test of battery life.
If you could also say:-
- what battery you've got that would be helpful eg. 4 cell, 6 cell etc
- what processor speed
that would be helpful
(Am wondering if its worth trading in my CelM for a P-M - I get a maximum of 2 hours on full charge).
Just had a go for you. But I had to do little more than you wanted.
It didn't last as long as I'd hoped, but I did mange to get two and a quarter hours out of the single 6 Cell battery.
I switched Dell's "Quickset" app to presentation mode so that it didn't keep going into powersave mode too. Wimamp was playing the whole time, and I set the screen brightness to brightest. I was also using wifi the whole time. Bluetooth was disbaled.
I did however, have to deploy a Ghost image during that time which meant the onboard NIC was being used for about 50 minutes of the time. Normally it can be automatically disabled when not being used, so that will save more battery life. Also the image was being read off an external HDD using USB2, so that may have made a slight difference to performance too.
Unfortunately that extra work I needed to do with my laptop would have affected the battery life a bit, but hopefully this still gives you an idea.
My Laptop's main spec is as follows:
Dell D610 Latitude
Pentium-M 1.86Ghz Centrino jobby
SXGA+ LCD
1GB RAM
Intel ABG Wireless
Mobile Intel Graphics (not the ATI one)
80GB HDD
If you do need one that will last a long time, I would recommend getting a model that has the option of adding a 2nd battery in the media bay. As I hardly use my optical drive, I have a 2nd battery installed most of the time. With the two batteries, and under normal use, I can sometimes get over 6 hours out of it.
I hope this helps in your decision making!
Ant
Thanks for that - much appreciated.
I have an 8 cell 43W but get no more than 2 hours from it using a 1.3 CelM. Probably not worth me replacing the CelM it with a P-M in the cirumstances.
To be honest, you're probably right. You won't gain much by buying a new laptop I don't think. Besides, batteries don't last forever. They tend to deteriorate after a year or so.Originally Posted by davidstone28
Aren't Celeron-M's are supposed to be as good as Pentium-M's in terms of power usage anyway?
Ant
celeron -ms are poor. they don't support speed step. Best thing to do is drop a low end pentium M in it of ebay for a bout 50-70 pounds. This at least allow you to use speed step. Then you get the choice of using centrino hardware control to undervolt the CPU and you can choose to lock it at its lowest speed step mode to save on battery.
I had (actually still have) a delld810 with a normal 6 cell and a 6 cell media bay battery that i can get 8-9 hours out of it if i play with the volage settings. Only problem is that000 the lapotp is quite big.
I had no idea about that! I will bear that in mind in future.
Ant
Yup, that's right - CelM don't speed step where as P-Ms do, hemce me asking the question in the first place. Was curious though what sort of difference it makes to battery life. From what you're saying, it does seem to make a difference but probably not a huge one - up to 20%-40% depending on the application(s) used?
Not sure if you're aware of this, but there there 2 fabulously useful utilities for Dell laptops that help with fan control, ramping, noise and heat output, etc etc They function best on P-Ms as you have more control over the stepping and voltages etc
Notebook Hardware Control
http://www.pbus-167.com/chc.htm
i8kfan control
http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html
Last edited by davidstone28; 10-11-2005 at 02:33 PM.
Thats bril! Cheers, I will have a look at those apps. Tbh, I would have never of even thought to look for anything like that...
Ant
I use this on my inspiron 9200. It's fantastic.
I have a pentium-m 1.7 and set my cpu to max performance when it's plugged in and max battery when on the road.
The hard drive temp monitor's pretty cool too. If you see things are getting too hot you just change to max battery until the laptop cools down again.
The ability to overclock ATI graphics cards is good too.
I generally get a minimum of 3 hours out of the 53w battery and that's with a 17" widescreen display.
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