Netbook battery management

[What_the]

My daughters surprised me with an HP Mini 110 for Father’s Day. For the last 10 years I had been using their hand-me-downs and they figured enough was enough. My most recent laptop didn’t even have a useable battery… I decided to get a new laptop rather than buy a battery… about three years ago. Again…enough was enough!

So far so good however the one thing that seems less than it could be is the battery life (roughly 2 hours of continual internet/email usage).

I believe, although I can’t tell for sure in the documentation or anywhere else, that it is a 3 cell battery. I plan to upgrade to a 6 cell and use the 3 cell in reserve. Can I expect twice as much life going from the three to the six?

I’m also trying to use stand-by and hibernate modes to preserve the charge as much as possible. What should I know about that method? It would seem that it might take more juice to pull it out of one of those than you save depending on the length of time.

Any other tips? It does have a switch to turn off the wi-fi … how beneficial is that and do I need to do it before putting it in stand-by or hibernate? I’m thinking that maybe it does it automatically whil in one of those modes.

[randomface]

Standby doesn’t really shut it all down, it just turns off the monitor and goes to “sleep”. Hibernate stores all the RAM and shuts all the power off. I hardly ever shut down my laptop because it would take about five minutes to boot up, but only one to come back from hibernate.

[chrisk]

@randomface

Standby doesn’t really shut it all down, it just turns off the monitor and goes to “sleep”.

I don’t think that’s accurate. As far as I know, standby is usually implemented as powering down every component except for RAM.

Sleep mode

[randomface]

Mine still has the fans running and lights blinking, so I assumed several components were on. I never got much battery saving out of it.

[JoelUpchurch]

I tested my 3 year old netbook recently and the kill-a-watt reported 12 watts usage when it was on and 0 watts on standby. I interpret 0 watts to mean less than 1. After 12 hours on standby the battery dropped to 76%. I’ve seen reports of 4 or 5 days on standby on new netbooks.

I found a review that said the battery life is subpar on the 110.

Netbook buyers must usually choose between three-cell and six-cell battery options. The smaller batteries commonly run from 2 to 3 hours, while a six-cell battery can be good for 5 hours or longer–but at the cost of added size and weight. In our video playback battery drain test, the Mini 110 ran for 2** hours and 22 minutes** using the included three-cell battery. That’s somewhat less than we’d expect, as the original Mini 1000 ran 20 minutes longer on the same test. In casual use, for Web surfing and office work, you should get closer to 3 hours (or longer) of battery life.

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-mini-110/4505-3121_7-33664859.html#reviewPage1

[BigT]

I know that, on my model of netbook, the 6 cell battery is actually rated more than double. The 3 cell that I have is rated for 4 hours, while the 6 cell is rated for 10. Of course, real life use varies: my 3 cell only gets 3 hours.

[astro]

I found the Lenovo 6 cell netbook battery modules generally gave 2.5 to 3 times the 3 cell battery life not merely 2x.

[What_the]

Sounds like a six cell is the way to go…anybody know of a trustworthy seller on the internet where I can get one and have it delivered by next Tuesday… all for a reasonable price?

I’ll have to experiment with the stand-by/hibernate situation a little myself …