Extremely short battery life.

I have both the four cell and the 6 cell batteries for my tx2000. With the four cell I barely get an hour off of it, my 6 cell has about an hour and a half of battery life.

If I change my power settings to the lowest processor state, brightness, and if I have as few programs running as possible, my battery life doesn't increase by more than 10-15 min for either battery.


I have had my 4 cell for about 7 months and my 6 cell for about 10 months (came with the computer). What can I do to increase my battery life? Or, is there something wrong with them?

Should I try calibrating them? Won't that reduce the overall capacity?

 

have you any background process running which stresses the CPU? Just take a look in the task manager.
There are some programs out there which are able to read the wear level of your battery, maybe they are almost dead?

 

Just double click on BatteryBar to download the software. It will tell u about ur battery wear and loads of other helpful info about your battery.
hope this helps!

 

How old are these batteries? The 4 cell runs around 2 1/2 hours while the 6 cell will run 3-4 hours.

 

I've trimmed all possible fat from my system, leaving me with essential programs, and I'm on balanced power mode. BatteryBar says my 8 month-old 6-cell lost 11.6% capacity, but I know I've abused it at college. However, it only gives me 1:46 full lifetime (which, I recall, still isn't a large drop from its original capacity, at all). I'd love 3-4 hours, but I'm far from it.

Did we just get bad batteries?

 

no, with tx series, not many people(not that i know of) have 3-4 hours of battery life for the 6 cell. the max that i have is 2.5 hours..

i'm guessing you left your batteries in the computer a lot, and left it at 100% charge when you were plugged in for a long period of time. but that's just a guess.

don't batteries 100% charged when you aren't using it for a period of time lol... otherwise there isn't much you can do to improve your batteries now.

have you tried recalibrating it? (fancy way of just saying ... draining the batteries till they have zero charge and then charging it again)

last question, how do you use the batteries?

as i said, my batteries last 2.5 hours and i've used them since november last year ... so thats about 5-6 months, given that i've done everything to optimize the battery life that are suggested in this forum.