My laptop lasts on battery for ...
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I have no idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I treat the battery as a built-in UPS, so I have no idea how long it would run if run right until drained. It's lasted at least as long as promised in the past, but I don't tend to do much besides play music and edit code when it's unplugged and on the road.
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Battery life varies so much on what I'm doing... if it is just sitting there idle, I'm sure it will reach its advertised battery life. If it is cranking away at a game or has a VM or two chugging along [1], then all bets are off.
The ironic thing is that Linux suspends without issue. OS X, no problems. However, it seems that with Windows, half the time it suspends... it just doesn't wake up and pretty much needs a reboot. Of course, hibernating works well, but that adds a good amount of time as the machi
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Amazingly, my 2010 Lenovo T410 battery lasted 2h20m while I was presenting a game design to some people in a meeting, after I finished it had 6% left.
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Nope, own monitor. 14", 1440x900.
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On my Macbook Pro I installed an SSD and upgraded to 16 gigs and battery life has improved significantly while running Fusion. I can get 4 hours off a full charge whereas it used to be two hours tops while running on VM with the stock hard drive and 8 gigs of ram.
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One of the better ways to kill a battery is to keep it plugged in all the time. Take it off the charger once a week and let it run down.
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The second best way to kill a lithium-ion battery is to let it run all the way down before you recharge it every time. While chargers and batteries differ on the specifics, heating during charging does kill batteries faster and the most heating typically happens in the first and last few percent of charging capacity. Additionally the last few percent typically takes longer and benefits you far less in actual run-time. I personally recommend not making a habit of letting your lithium-ion batteries get bel
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I didn't say let it run all the way down, though I can see why you think I implied that. I can't vouch for WinTel manufacturers but Apple doesn't keep the charge at 100% if it gets left plugged in. I've had excellent battery life on my two Macbook Pros I've had the last 8 years. I typically plugin in around 20% or so.
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One of the better ways to kill a battery is to keep it plugged in all the time. Take it off the charger once a week and let it run down.
The only way to truly preserve the life of a modern Lithium battery is to get it into a comfortable SoC at around 80%, and then unplug it and keep it in a cool dry place. Draining it just for the sake of giving it some time off the charger is going to at best result in no improvement (if the charger was over-charging it), and at worst result in killing it faster (if the charger had it balanced and you put it through a discharge/charge just for shits and giggles). The charger knows to disengage when the ba
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Yeah, mine's lost half its battery life from that. I'm making the effort to run it on the battery as much as i can now. But the problem with doing that is that when you really need to run off battery, the battery's unlikely to be fully charged. That's a serious flaw in laptop battery systems - and one that there's probably no currently forseeable fix for.
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Yeah, mine's lost half its battery life from that. I'm making the effort to run it on the battery as much as i can now. But the problem with doing that is that when you really need to run off battery, the battery's unlikely to be fully charged. That's a serious flaw in laptop battery systems - and one that there's probably no currently forseeable fix for.
If you really do spend all your time at your desk, get a small, cheap UPS and plug the laptop in to that, and remove the internal battery completely (after running it to about 80% SoC). It will be mostly charged if you should need to pick up and go in a crisis, and you can have it fully charged in about an hours notice.
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For the first time in my life, i own a laptop that doesn't have an easily removable battery - a Samsung series 5 ultrabook. Normally i won't buy any device that doesn't have an easily removable battery, but a matt screen is more important and there's not many options when it comes to laptops. It's also the worst laptop i've had (in 20 years of owning them) for battery longevity.
Re: About 10seconds. (Score:1)
Not useful without more data (Score:5, Interesting)
You do know battery life can get shorter over time, right?
Our fleet of 80 Lenovo T420's standard batteries started from about 5:30 and went to 1:00 just after two years' use. Some died sooner than others. Some users use them always plugged in. I'd be surprised if one of them switches power profiles or uses a balanced profile when using the laptop. (Full on presentation mode 24/7.)
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How many times were the batteries cycled? Even if just once a day, you're lucky to get two years.
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Windows says 3:30 1:20 2:50 4:20 0:35 ! (Score:2)
Windows estimates on how long anything takes seem to be pretty random. For battery life, that seems to be exacerbated by the manufacturer's power management software as well (and I haven't figured out which lies my new HP tells, compared to the old Dell.)
We have a new program from the IT department at $DAYJOB, which puts the machine into hibernate overnight if you haven't used it for an hour or so after 7pm. (These are laptops, so the energy the company gets to brag about saving is on my electric bill, no
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Which is a good reason to do a full discharge once. (Or once a year or so. Or a month, like the GP said: To calibrate the controller...)
No longer true either (Score:1)
For Apple notebooks though, draining the battery from full charge until the computer turns off calibrates the controller that manages the battery.
Another example of old advice. That has not been true since Apple switched to non-removable batteries.
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Yeah, my daughter has an Android tablet that she's TOTALLY thrashed the battery on because she keeps running it to flat ; I've sat there and watched it drop 5% charge in less than a minute. My 2012 Nexus 7 is still going strong, even better now that I've upgraded it to Android 5 and ditched most of the apps with resident processes (for the most part : the official Twitter app, which exceeded my official threshold of "fucking creepy" some time ago).
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Many laptops have a battery preservation mode which avoids full recharges. Long term storage (or worse, usage) at 100% capacity is damaging to a lithium ion battery, so limiting charge capacity to (e.g.) 50% the lifetime can be dramatically extended. It helps in any case, but it's particularly useful if your laptop is usually plugged in. Unfortunately, this feature is often hidden away somewhere, or requires an extra download - almost nobody uses it, which is a shame.
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what is the use of a battery if you are limiting your recharge to 50%. I would much prefer replacing my battery every 12-18months and be at the 75%+ of capacity. My current X1 Carbon still maintains about 80% of capacity after 18 months.
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>You do know battery life can get shorter over time, right?
That is such a relief to hear, I thought I was just getting slower.
not bad (Score:1)
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My first MBP was the first model in 2007 and I gave it to a friend 2 years ago. The battery held 2 hours until just last year when it finally gave up the ghost. I think it was a sony battery.
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I have an early 2011 and upgrading to an SSD caused me to go from 3-4 hours to 6-8 hours reported after a full charge with the real useful life averaging about 5 hours with the load I put on it.
I hate to do it (Score:2, Interesting)
Because I'm really not an Apple zealot by a long shot.
But my MBP (2012 15" retina) to this day still lasts 6-8 hours (depending on dedicated GPU usage mostly - flash kills it more than anything, no idea why flash 'needs' a discreet nVidia chipset to render...).
My 2014 Lenovo ThinkPad Edge (also 15") lasts typically 4 hours off the battery.
Similar workloads (internet / email / document editing), lenovo is running win 8.1 (it's my work machine when traveling), MBP is obviously my own personal machine.
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Apple got a lot of bad press a few years ago for massively overestimating their battery life and is now quite a bit more conservative. They've gone from claiming 6 hours to claiming 8, but at the same time they've shipped lower power CPUs and doubled the size of the battery. There was a Kickstarter for an open source compatible laptop with very similar specs to the MBP floating around last week: they were also claiming 8 hours on battery, but they were shipping a battery half the size of the MBP. I guess
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Apples Power Management is very good. (Score:2)
Aside from building the hardware and the OS and making it fit, Apple also builds their own batteries, which, truth be told, are almost second to none. On top of that, Apple was first to dare build a non-replaceable battery into their MB Air. On top of that they put serious custom built power-management into their notebooks. I've got an MB Air myself and after 4 years of usage the battery life still is impressive. Note: I'm not an Apple fanboy either, although I do own the mbair and a 2007 Macmini.
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None of the batteries in any of my laptops work anymore.... I have zero choices to vote for!
I'm in the same boat. I have two old Dell Inspirons and the battery has failed in both. I just run them off of power, and hibernate/suspend-to-disk when done working (which I have configured to happen automatically when I shut the lid). It's not as nice as having a working battery, but it's useable. I could buy new batteries, but last I checked, the official Dell ones are several hundred dollars, and third-party knockoff ones are almost a hundred. That's not worth it for my 10 year old laptops that I g
plugged in most of the time (Score:2)
...but I do take the laptop out occasionally, where it'll last for as long as the journey from Nottingham to Brompton (West Central London) lasts, often upwards of four or five hours doing anythign from playing videos to playing games. Generally, if I'm near a socket it's plugged in though, I treat the battery as a six hour UPS - to be used only when necessary. So far it's lasted nearly four years.
You insensitive clod... (Score:2)
I don't own a laptop!
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My desktop PC has multiple screens (one of which is 42") and a full-size "ergonomic" keyboard. No laptop can come close to this experience.
To be fair, I do in fact "own" a laptop (iBook G3), but I haven't actually used it in 6 or 7 years. I don't have anything against them, I just haven't had much need for one in recent years. Last time I traveled, I found my phone was enough to stay connected, and if I ever needed a "real" computer, it was not hard to find. Frankly I don't see much use for that form-factor
Macbook & Dell (Score:3)
The Macbook was more expensive (not that much, when the Dell is added all options, RAM, disk...) but it just... delivers. Dell is cheap-built and doesn't deliver to its promises.
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The Macbook 2012 is definitely within the 90~95% range. The Dell Latitude 2012 OTOH has always been, even as a new laptop, within the 40~60%.
The Macbook was more expensive (not that much, when the Dell is added all options, RAM, disk...) but it just... delivers. Dell is cheap-built and doesn't deliver to its promises.
I totally agree ... my mid-2010 macbook pro still holds about 89% of the original charge and lasts about 6 hours on battery in regular usage. It helps that it has only had about 170 full cycles (information obtained using coconut battery for mac).
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I totally agree ... my mid-2010 macbook pro still holds about 89% of the original charge and lasts about 6 hours on battery in regular usage. It helps that it has only had about 170 full cycles (information obtained using coconut battery for mac).
Not a mac zealot here, but I can confirm. My mid-2010 macbook pro has been plugged in most of the time, yet it can survive a workday on battery attached to a projector/beamer from 9 a.m. till 4 p.m. (with screen blank during three 30 minute breaks).
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Even with a Macbook, it varies on what you're doing on battery. If you're playing something like Civilization V on battery, you can drain the sucker in 90 minutes.
Battery capacity loss over time (Score:2, Interesting)
A more accurate poll would have been "I've had my laptop for X years".
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Not really. Ever since flat LiPo packs became the norm, I haven't seen a huge decline in performance over time. Long gone are the days when a two-year-old battery got half the life of a new one.
However, with current hardware, battery life varies wildly, depending on whether you're actually doing something of consequence with your laptop or merely using its screen to show a picture. The people who sit there running basic apps like Word, PowerPoint, Safari/Firefox/Chrome (with Flash disabled), etc. are li
How can it get so hot so fast? (Score:5, Funny)
I have a very old sparc based Tadpole laptop. While the thing will run off batteries, I wonder if they would have done better business by getting in the battery powered electric camp stove business since they have most of that part working fine.
Desktop FTW (Score:1)
:P
Still ~3 hours on this 5.5 year old battery (Score:2)
Missing Option (Score:2)
WTF would I want a laptop for?
I have a work PC, a home PC, a Work Android Tablet and my own Android Tablet. I think that covers every need. Android has a very nice Remote Desktop Connection app - from Microsoft. (It also exists for iThings.) This lets me remote to my work desktop the same as any laptop. I get Exchange based email on the work tablet and there are loads of apps that allow me access to network storage. I presume that iOS users will have a few as well.
What is the point of a laptop - other
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On the spectrum of watch, phone, e-reader, tablet, laptop, desktop, TV, projector, It's common to skip one size of device if you have both a bigger one and a smaller one (and also the extremes). I prefer a light laptop to a tablet because of the more traditional and flexible computing model, and the keyboard, but if it was practical I would bring both with me.
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The answe
80% after six years ... (Score:2)
When the laptop was new, the battery would last about the indicated time. It's now 6 years old, and the battery capcity is about 80% of what it was originally. Of course, I only put the battery in the laptop when I use it away from an outlet, which only happens once every few months ...
I don't care (Score:2)
This poll is really lacking an "I don't know/care" option.
My laptop is supplied by my employers and I use it for nothing else; indeed corporate policy says I can't. I don't travel for work and so for over 2 years on every working day the laptop is plugged into a mains supply during working hours. It has never had to run on battery. I guess I might find out if there is ever a power cut.
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I have graphics issues (Score:2)
I'll probably have to do some formatting soon, waiting until I get my new desktop, and I figure I'll do some upgrading to my laptop at the same time.
I only use a tablet ... (Score:2)
I don't have a laptop! (Score:2)
You insensitive clod!
AMD Vision (Score:2)
4 years ago I bought a HP laptop with AMD Vision. I believed it will work OK under FreeBSD since I had some good previous experience with both AMD processors and ATI video. I was wrong. AMD Vision was not fully supported; AMD Vision needs KMS which was not implemented in FreeBSD that time; and AMD Vision uses 2 graphic chips and unused one cannot be idled by any means. FreeBSD bug report didn't help. HP support plainly refused to talk about anything except Windows (Including their own bios).
So I use Lenovo
DOWS: Depends On Workload, Stupid! (Score:1)
Most laptops will last about what the manufacturer advertises, while using it in the manner disclosed by the manufacturer. For example Apple quotes their battery time while watching video on medium brightness. If you do that, you'll be close to the times Apple says you will be able to reach. If you're running Java applications or gaming on high quality settings, don't complain that your battery life is less than quoted by the manufacturer!
Haha (Score:1)