Battery

Windows 8 Battery Life

I wanted to get a quick post out there regarding Windows 8 battery life.

I’ve been at a meeting today where I’ve been using my Windows 8 Lenovo X220. The machine has the standard Lenovo hard disk (and not an SSD like some of my other machines) and has the standard 6 cell battery.

I left the house with this morning with about 80% battery, used the laptop for about four hours for note taking with OneNote 2013 and now I’m at home, I’ve still got 50% battery.

That’s some pretty amazing consumption if you ask me. Give me a 9 cell extended battery and an SSD to replace the rotating disk, and I think I could quite easily get a full days’ compute out of this machine.

Windows 7 Laptop Battery Issues

Due to a growing amount of chatter on blog sites and the like, Steve Sinofsky, President of the Windows and Windows Live divisions at Microsoft – Head of Windows 7 has posted on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog about the problems.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2010/02/08/windows-7-battery-notification-messages.aspx

Having been a user of Windows 7 since Build 7000 – The first Beta, I have had no such problems with the batteries as a result of Windows 7, but as a result of the batteries themselves.

I use a Dell Latitude D630 which is about 18 months old now. From new, I could get about  five hours usable battery life from my extended life 9-Cell Dell battery, however over time (While running XP and Vista) this degraded to about three hours as is to be expected when the laptop is connected to a docking station for the majority of the day. The battery continued to worsen and it got down to about two hours before Build 7000 became available.

Read more…

The Myth of Leaving it Plugged In

The aged old myth of leaving your laptop plugged in forever and a day remains strong even today.

Many people claim that this is an old adage that doesn’t apply to modern Li-Ion (Lithium Ion) batteries, however there is just as many people who disagree. Even Apple agree with an official statement on their site about not leaving your laptops plugged in all of the time:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

However, an article on the Dell website doesn’t recommend the same thing – In actual fact it neglects to comment on what you should do once your notebook is fully charged. HP even circumvent the topic in their article.

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/batteries_sitelet/en/replacement?c=us&cs=29&l=en&s=dhs
http://h20271.www2.hp.com/SMB-AP/cache/122140-0-0-155-121.html

Read more…