New Dell Vostro A860, I love it....BUT...after full charge, I only get 1 hr of battery life?
Is that normal? I've heard the battery time on these was good - but only active for 1 hr without a charge seems silly
I'm looking for a new laptop for school/work, and so far I think the Vostro V13 seems good. What do you think?
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Anyway, my only concern is that it only has four hours of battery life. However, it does come with a 7200 RPM hard drive, which seems like that would eat a lot of battery life compared to a 5400 RPM hard drive or an SSD. Well, I have an extra 80 GB SSD in my old laptop, so my questions are...
How much (if any) battery life do you think I would gain by replacing the 7200 RPM hard drive with the SSD?
Also... Would you recommend the Vostro V13, or is there another laptop that you would recommend for school?
My XPS M1530 is a beast, but it's starting to get worn out and it just isn't convenient enough to bring to classes all day. Netbooks are too small for my hands (and eyes!). I really do prefer big screens, but I suppose I must compromise for the sake of mobility/convenience, so hopefully I'll be able to get used to the 13.3" screen.
It looks like Dell just released on their UK site a new Vostro laptop called the A860. I'm surprised because I haven't heard anything about this before launch and the lack of mention on the boards.
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It seems that they come pre-configured, which means the choice to configure the specs is pretty much limited to what they have offered already.
I believe I have narrowed down my laptop purchase to the Vostro 2510. I would really like a backlit keyboard, but I have been receiving mixed messages as to whether or not the 2510 includes that option.
Since it's not mentioned anywhere on the Dell website, I am assuming the worst. I saw this website saying otherwise: http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/dell-vostro-2510-laptop (bottom of the page under "built in extras").
Can someone please clarify? If it does come with the 2510, it must be standard since it is not an option while customizing. Why would they not offer this on all of their models?
I'm super happy with win 7 x64 on the vostro 1400, except for the terrible battery life. Off power, it's less than 40 mintues even on the 'power saver' mode. I'd get 3 hours plus out of my 9 cell battery on XP...
any suggestion as to how I go about improving this problem? anybody else experiencing this?
I've looked for some answer here, but not found too much except for how to get RM clock to work on x64 so far.
I have a dell Vostro a860. Real nice machine!! I would like to get a better CPU than the Celeron one that it comes with. From what I've read its a pain to take apart the the A860, but I would like to get a little more performance with a better CPU. I have upgraded to 4 gb of ram but it is not much better than the 1 gb it came with. I would like to know what is the best CPU I can Upgrade to on my machine.
View 10 Replies View RelatedI have Dell Vostro A860 running Windows Vista. It has I-394 and VGA ports.
I want to output video and audio from this laptop to my HDTV (Panasonic Viera Plasma 42") which has most video inputs like HDMI, component, s-video but not VGA.
Is there a way to do this and if yes how? I route audio output from laptop to my 5.1 system via Pioneer A/V receiver.
Dell Inspiron 1545 and a Vostro A860?
View 8 Replies View Relatedon the difference in build quality between a Dell Inspiron 1545 and a Vostro A860?
View 9 Replies View RelatedI am planing on getting this machine for my home office use. Couple of questions about RAM upgrade.
1. It comes with 2G RAM 1x2048MB stick; I wan to get this up to 4G; Has Vista-32 preinstalled. Will I be able to USE all 4G or less than that (I know Vista reports all 4G as installed), but does it it really use all 4G. Specs say max RAM is 4G. Is it worth getting this upgrade now, or
2. Should I just get the upgrade and when Windows 7 comes out, will it be able to USE the full 4G, even if 32-bit
I've had my laptop for only 2 weeks (I bought it brand new), and I've never had this problem before. Starting today, my battery wouldn't charge past 82%. It charges fine until it reaches 82%.
Then, it just suddenly stops charging. After looking at an advanced battery monitor, I saw that the charge rate after hitting 82% was 0 mW (no charge...). Is this a battery monitor calibration problem? Or a battery problem? I've only had my laptop for 2 weeks...
I am looking for real world feedback for the 6 cell battery on the XPS 16. This would be mainly word processing and Internet surfing, with the screen at about 1/2 brightness
View 10 Replies View Relatedcheck this out. 6 cell.
View 10 Replies View RelatedI have Dell XPS 1530 and I have 2 problems,
1 – Keyboard. When I type cursor seems to jump around a lot. I would be typing and suddenly the cursor is in the middle of the previous sentence and it’s a mess. Is that something common, is that me or is that something I need to call Dell?
2 – Battery life is extremely short. I hear of such thing as deactivating your video card ( I have GeForce 8600 GT) and that supposedly helps you with the battery life. Does this laptop offer such opportunity?
Why is the Studio XPS 13 so terrible on battery life? ~2.5 hours on power saving mode, 1 on high-performance. I believe the Sony Z rates around 3-5 hours on power saving, as does the Latitude 6400. Is it normal to have this low of a battery life for a 13.3"?
What is draining all the power? How does the Z pull 4-5 hours on its battery life?
I don't want to shell out for a 9-cell and also have to deal with the added weight... but this is ridiculous.
Also, are there any new deals for the 9-cell batteries?
Here a bit of summary of how to enable some advance power plan settings, the highlights are disabling the core parking override and max % of unparked cores.
-Windows by defaults keeps at least one logical core active per physical processor core. With the nehalem architecture parked cores consume almost no power.
-Also keep in mind if you set max unparked cores to 50% it may still activate all cores because 50% of 8 hyperthreaded cores is 4.
-You can use resource monitor to see if cores are parking
-once you've done the registry tweaks below you should have some extra options in your advanced power plan settings
-Setting you power plan back to defaults nulls you the changes to it is harmless and reversable if you are careful
-If you are not comfortable making registry changes don't do this as you can really screw your computer up, if you mess up the wrong things in your registry
Open Regedit (type regedit into the startmenu search box)
Expand location to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPowerPowerSettings54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00
In order to enable some advanced power plan settings you will have to rename the REG_DWORD "Attributes" to "_Attributes". This one it own does not change how your computer runs, it simply adds an extra option into your advanced settings for each power plan
Here are the relevant registry keys:
0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583
lets you set the minimum number of unparked cores (I set this to 25% for power saver)
3b04d4fd-1cc7-4f23-ab1c-d1337819c4bb
turns on additional processor throttle states, caution this throttled my laptop to the point that it was almost unusable you can change the attribute to _attribute but leave the power plan setting disabled.
447235c7-6a8d-4cc0-8e24-9eaf70b96e2b
Sets the processor power state when parked, I think the default is ok
5d76a2ca-e8c0-402f-a133-2158492d58ad
Option to Disable processor idle states, not really relevant on a laptop
a55612aa-f624-42c6-a443-7397d064c04f
Processor core parking override, this one is key, it you don't disable this in your power plan settings you will only park "virtual" cores
ea062031-0e34-4ff1-9b6d-eb1059334028
Maximum number of unparked cores, this is useful to put your computer into "dual core mode" in power saver if you set this to 25% or 50%
my S-XPS 1645 battery lasts only 1.5 hrs..
is this same with you guys as well or is this just in my case....
My battery charger doesn't charge and the blue light isn't turning on.
Is it safe to assume that it is dead?
Are there any tests I can do to verify if that's the case?
I've had it for a year and 3 months, is that the typical life of a battery charger?
I have a e6400 with SSD, a P series processor, LED screen and 9 cell battery. On the balanced mode, it is at 94% and 2h32m left. That sounds REALLY low to me. I have WiFi on, brightness up, etc. but still sounds extremely low.
View 10 Replies View Relatedi like having my m1530 on my lap (unplugged) in the living room while i watch tv/babysit so far i can only make it last 2 hours at the most(surfing the web,messengers) with the brightness 30% and powersaver mode.
well i was reading on the thread on how to underclock your cpu...theres a problem with that:
-numero first im too lazy (hurts my head when i try to understand the thread,hence the "[ADVANCE]" on the title ^^")
-numero dos having a t5450 on power saver mode (50% max perfomance) is slow enough... so i tried to look for a better solution and found this...
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i think its great...my battery up to 2 hours and 20-ish minutes.
i think vista users should give it a try
Anyone running Win 7 RTM and noticing lower battery life? My 6 cell can barely push 2 hours, though its missing about 30% of its capacity due to wear. Its about 18 months old with a lot of charge and discharging. I do like Win 7, the laptop is running very snappy with it.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI have a Latitude E6400 having Windows 7.how to prolong my battery life when I am at my home;
should I keep
1) Laptop connected to A/c supply even after its fully charged (with battery)
2) Remove the battery once it's fully charged and keep the laptop on A/c
3) Remove the A/c once the battery is fully charged and charge it next time
when its about 10%
My work at home comprises of net surfing and gaming.
Ive always gotten, well, not so much battery life out of my machine. However, today Ive realized it might be a problem with it, rather than how it is meant to work. Today I put a DVD (AC/DC live!), plugged an hdmi cable into my tv, and it died half way the 2 hour concert. All my laptop was doing was working as a dvd, so, I figure something must be wrong.
View 10 Replies View RelatedI have a brand new XPS-15. When I use it on battery power, the battery only lasts for about 2 hours. I could check to improve battery life. Â I've disabled some start-up programs....
View 3 Replies View Relatedtook a little over a hour on balanced power to drain to below 10% and just downloading , 50% display
View 10 Replies View RelatedMy m1530 battery life is very poor, im only getting around 40mins unplugged, Im not running power-sucking tasks either,
i just use internet and msn messenger when im unplugged. I switched to the power-saving plan and its not really making any difference.
Its so annoying now does anyone know what could potentially be the problem?
I'm having some battery life issues with my laptop, and i wanted to see if the performance of my battery is normal, or if something is wrong.
At first, my battery started draining really fast so i replaced the battery in July, and now im seeing the problems again.
Basically, I need my laptop for class, and i have microsoft word, wi-fi running, and a web browser during that time period. My brightness is set on about 4, and the battery option is on portable/laptop (note: i have tried max battery with same result)
i'm getting less than an hour of battery life..
i was wondering if there was anything i could possibly do to improve this, perhaps purchase a 9-cell battery, or if there might be something more wrong with my computer that i should get checked, i'm not sure if this is normal battery life, but i don't remember it dying that quickly before.
I know that everyone has different configurations and such, so while that does have an impact, I still want to know what is the general ballpark battery life you guys are getting. From what I am seeing, 2 hours is the average for the 6 cell, whereas the 9 cell is only 3?
I ask because as strange as it sounds, using BatteryBar indicates that the 6 cell that came with my 1640 has a capacity of only 5100mWh! That sounds very strange, because I know that on my XPS m1530, the 9 cell had a capacity of nearly 86,000mWh. I am having a 9 cell sent to me for my XPS 1640, and hopefully that will fix things. Maybe the battery's circuit board is reporting the numbers wrong/shrug.
I am strongly considering taking my laptop onboard to try and kill off a few hours especially as i have a good 100gb worth of films & series on it, but i want to try and squeeze every last drop out of the battery!
I will obviously be turning the brightness right down and turning off the backlit keyboard, aswell as wifi etc, but is there a way to drop the cpu speed to 15-20%, or whatever the laptop needs to run a film?
I wont need the full 17" screen, is there any way to turn off 3/4 of it so that i am only using a portion of it? if not is there any colour to use as the background that wont draw as much power, as im guessing fullscreen will draw more power.
I just bought a Dell Studio 1555 laptop with the following customizations made
1) Vista Home Premium x64
2) 9 Cell Battery
3) 512mb ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570
4) 4 GB Ram
Can you guys recommend me some softwares which can check my Battery performance. I am not sure if I am right on this but "THIS" software when run simulates various levels of activity on the laptop such as Casual use, High Intensity use etc etc. It runs by itself and then we can see for how long the battery has lasted. I don't think the battery meter is very accurate so can you please help me with this. Thank you. I hope I have explained myself properly
Also an unrelated question. In the future if I wanted can I get my laptop upgraded in the following parts by Official Dell people?
1) Processor
2) Hard disk
3) G card
4) Ram .....