Battery Hours on Laptop - How Much Should I Really Expect?

witsa on 24/11/2019 - 13:38

I bought the Lenovo s740 out of this deal (https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/495170).

It says it has "up to 15 hours".

I figured well 15 is a bit crazy, but maybe 10-12 should be a reasonable expectation?

I've had it for a few days, and it seems more like 5-6 hours from what Windows is telling me - and this is just me browsing the internet on Edge.

Is this normal, or do I have a dud model or is 15 hours like when the machine is on standby?

What do they mean when the say a laptop has "x hours of battery life"?

Computing 14inch Computer Laptop Lenovo

Comments

  • Meeb on 24/11/2019 - 13:43
    +1

    Key words are "up to". Depends on a lot of factors such as screen brightness, rich-web content, graphics/wireless power management settings etc. etc.

  • funnysht on 24/11/2019 - 13:47

    mine only does 2-3hrs (around 4 years old)

  • Sage on 24/11/2019 - 13:48

    Do you need more than 5 hours on battery?

    • witsa on 24/11/2019 - 13:55
      +1

      i was thinking would be cool to be able to take it off site on day trips without the charger - looks like that's not do-able.

      Plus 5-6 hours on just browsing - more complicated tasks like video watching would deplete it faster.

      • Ghost47 on 24/11/2019 - 15:30

        It could be doable if you use a powerbank with a USB-C charging port.

        5-6 hours seems very low if it's rated at 15 hrs battery life, especially since you're just browsing. Depends on screen brightness and what you're browsing though, are you watching 1080p videos or just browsing news websites or reddit or something?

  • skid on 24/11/2019 - 13:54

    Yes, 5-6 hours is normal unfortunately. I have no idea how they reach 15 hours. Maybe they switch off wifi.

  • ozhunter on 24/11/2019 - 13:55

    Depends upon many factors. Doesn't have your exact model but gives some examples

    https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/battery-info/

  • mskeggs on 24/11/2019 - 14:24
    +1

    Sounds low to me, but I tend to take the “up to” a show long it would last at an office job, where it sleeps and does other power saving things when not being actively used.

  • outlander on 24/11/2019 - 15:46

    That figure would be for an ideal system, which yours, unless you've made serious modifications, is not.

    I'd start with this:
    https://www.howtogeek.com/241676/how-to-see-which-applicatio…

  • plmko on 24/11/2019 - 15:49
    +1

    Boggles the mind that people don't select the 'power saving' setting or attempt to tweak to their taste. Try it, I get 8-10hrs on my 4yr old Asus that was advertised as 12hrs, battery health according to Windows tool is about 90% efficiency.

  • philart on 24/11/2019 - 18:55

    I purchased a Lenovo s730 and read the same manufacturers claims, I were also hoping for ~ 10 hrs, the Acer I used before turned in 8 hrs between charges, so was astonished to find it was 5hrs and that's with the screen turned down as low as I can bear it. The window tools are indicating the screen is using the vast bulk of the power. I think it's the tiny battery they're installing into them.

    • witsa on 24/11/2019 - 19:05

      that's worrying. there's very little reviews for s740 but the ones I saw were pretty good about battery life

    • skid on 25/11/2019 - 08:20

      Yes, I agree. The batteries (my laptop has two batteries) are smaller as these laptops are the thin/lightweight ones. The fatter laptop I had 3 years ago lasted 8 hours but was definitely heavier.

  • FoxJump on 24/11/2019 - 19:58

    Running a command prompt as administrator do this:
    C:\>powercfg /batteryreport
    It'll tell you the design capacity of the battery and the measured one. If this drops too much during the first year, warranty claim.
    Also - don't charge up past 80%. My Toshiba z20c has oem provided software to cap charging to 80%. The computer is now three years old and I still have 79% battery capacity remaining. It also gives you battery life estimates, including a total whole life time estimate. For me, i'm down to 6:45 from an original 8:27.

    Toshiba claims this computer gives me 19hrs of battery life.

    So .. my .. 8 and a half hours with new batteries includes web browsing, movies, visual studio, programming, photo editing - etc. It's a real estimate.

    NB: I'm fairly sure the 79% remaining is not because of the 80% charge cap. The system knows about that.
    NB2: powercfg /energy is another good command. It'll give you a clue of what is sucking power and you can go disabling drivers, etc.

    • witsa on 24/11/2019 - 23:37

      Thanks, yeah I had a macbook previously - it all just worked. Not sure how I feel about my decision to switch over now…

      But I guess I'm learning…

      I ran powercfg /sleepstudy and it sounds like one major problem is that whenever i shut the lid, it goes into "modern standby" mode. And that's when it chews upto 12% of the battery before it goes into hibernate mode, presumably because there's some sort of cap on how battery sleep mode can consume.

      Looking at sleepstudy report, there is some sort of NoHwDRIPS problem that is eating up all the battery during sleep mode. No idea what that is but there is a 39 page thread on the lenovo site of people complaining about the exact issue on another model (https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X1-Ca…)

      • FoxJump on 25/11/2019 - 08:01

        Mebbe don't use sleep anymore.
        I use hibernate. No power usage and it's somewhat fast enough to boot from.

        Sleep for me is when I want the computer off for 5 to 10minutes.

        Another cool program is shutdown.exe
        Windows10 has the annoying, for me, feature of auto opening apps I had open when I shutdown or asking me to save my work.

        I prefer to shut down now dammit
        Shutdown.exe /f /s /t 0

        • witsa on 25/11/2019 - 08:09

          yeah that'll probably fix it, but that's crazy if that's the solution.

          I just bought the laptop. It's in its default condition - everything should work.

          Could something like this be a hardware problem? Wonder if I could make a warranty claim.

          • FoxJump on 25/11/2019 - 08:31

            @witsa: My old lenovo with win8 went crazy when I updated to win10

            Function keys wouldn't work. Screen brightness could not be changed. I couldn't Cap battery charge to 80% and the fan was always on.

            After a clean reinstall the last two remained.

            I think Lenovo laptops are crap. Not as bad as Acer. Meanwhile I'm happy with my Lenovo/Motorola phone.

  • datafellows on 24/11/2019 - 20:00

    IMO up to 15hrs means ~10 hours normal use.

    Maybe change to another browser like Firefox?

    Check what background functions take up CPU, CTRL+ALT-DEL and task manager. Some antivirus software kill battery life.

    Disable NFC and Bluetooth etc if you don't need them.

    In my laptop I can put CPU on power saving mode (what ever that means lol).

  • Melb69 on 25/11/2019 - 20:19

    Here's good thread to work out battery life before you buy

    https://www.guidingtech.com/estimate-laptop-battery-life-bef…

    The battery life however really has a lot to do with what your doing on the computer and how you use it in the end, so it's never going to be accurate compared to the manufacturers estimate.

  • kronicmacstigator on 26/11/2019 - 16:26

    Throttle your CPU… most units (the computer) are good enough these days to really not need terribly much short of playing games

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