Laptop battery life

bushmins · 29 Oct 2008 at 04:48

Does anyone have an idea of how long a brand new laptop battery should last when fully charged?

Ive gone through the charging/discharging process to get it to full capacity.

Its an old P3 600 laptop. Ive tested a full charge running a music CD in windows media. It last 2 hours.
The battery is a 10.8V 3400mAH.

When i start the laptop the battery life is 100% and (says it) will run for 3h50mins, it then goes down to about 95% and 2 hours. It does this after about 2 mins of run time.

EsaT · 29 Oct 2008 at 08:51

Laptop batteries loose their capacity over time.
(also heat is big problem)

So if that battery is original or once replaced that's quite decent time.

bushmins · 29 Oct 2008 at 09:03

Its a brand new battery, 1st used yesterday.

Dano · 29 Oct 2008 at 09:46

3400mah and two hours seems pretty good to me, especially for a laptop of that age running the optical drive, of course it will depend on the laptop itself and what you are doing with it too, which is why the time remaining estimate can be so vague when it is first started.

bledd · 29 Oct 2008 at 10:02

disable things like sound, av and brightness and it'll go a lot further

playing a cd is bound to rape the battery, rip to mp3 then play from the hd

hybrid · 29 Oct 2008 at 11:17

Have you cycled the battery completely? ie. complete discharge then recharge?

hybrid · 29 Oct 2008 at 11:18

Also, with it being an older laptop it probably won't have any of the newer 'mobile' versions of hardware in so it will suck the power.

bushmins · 29 Oct 2008 at 17:17

hybrid said:
Have you cycled the battery completely? ie. complete discharge then recharge?

Yes, I did all that. Its actually at 1.5 hours not 2.

Aod · 29 Oct 2008 at 20:54

use batterymon and find out how much capacity your battery ACTUALLY has left. Li-Ion batteries will lose their capacity even just leaving them on the shelf.

if the batteries are kept fully charged or fully discharged, they can lose up to 70% of their capacity per year!

kingy666 · 29 Oct 2008 at 22:42

Your lucky i only got 40 mins max out of my fujitsu siemens amilo xi 17" laptop (with 9 cell battery), bigger the screen the shorter the battery will last plus my lappy has a ati x1800 graphics card.