What is the average laptop battery life? My IBM T21 (yeah, old) gets a little over 4 hours with no programs running, but hardly has enough juice to get through a 1.5 hour long film playing from the HD. Is this normal? The battery was made in 2002 I think, it is very lightly used (the IBM battery monitor program thing says 21 cycles and good condition.) So how long does everyone else's laptops last on battery?
The battery of my TravelMate lasts for about 2,5 hours on full power. If I put everything on low (brightness, CPU speed), and turn off BlueTooth and Wlan, then it lasts for about 5 hours.
It depends on the specs of the laptop, the OS running on it and the battery itself... Windows will generally use the HDD more as it swaps constantly, so that will reduce battery life as the HDD is in use when it doesn't *have* to be... that said ACPI and power - management features are coded with Windows in mind, and as such don't always work under *nix... I've got 3 Hours out of my Acer using Windows, 2 Using Linux as Linux can't throttle the CPU to save power... Using my Macbook I get 5.5 hours easily.
Just read on wikipedia that storing a Lithium Ion battery in cool temperatures (like my freezer) will really help extend it's long term life. Looking for a second opinion; does anybody do this? Im thinking that I usually use my laptop off of the AC power, so I could put the LiON battery in the freezer when I know I won't need to use it, like during the night and on most days, and take it out when I know I will use it. This may seem ridiculous, but hell, I'm paranoid about these things.
I don't own a laptop, but everything that I own and that has a Lithium Ion battery had a manual with it, saying that the battery packs life is measured in loading cycles (for my Canon Ixus 50 this number was approx. 300 loading cycles), meaning that one cycle is over once you've loaded the battery full... prob. was already in the wiki...
