Battery Life

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madmardle

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I recently bought a new laptop, I decided on an Asus as the battery usage on a full charge, according to Currys website, should be 14 hours. The first time I used it, following a full charge, the battery meter said 3 hours. Now I would never need 14 hours, as I only watch the occasional TV programme ( the sort my wife doesn't like) so probably no more than a couple of hours at any one time so it isn't really a problem, but have I set it up incorrectly as there is such a discrepancy? I haven't bothered to ask in Currys. Thanks in advance for any response.
 
With my experience of Curry's, I probably wouldn't waste my time talking to them.

Sometimes, batteries take a few cycles to reach full whack but that does seem a little far off. Go through the power settings and make sure you haven't got it on 'performance' mode.

I wonder if Curry's have taken a leaf out of electric car manufacturer's handbooks and given the absolute best for battery life while disregarding real-world conditions.

What does the Asus site say about the battery life?
 
Firstly the quoted 14 hrs might be optimistically based on low power mode - i’ve never got that on a range of machines YMMV
Second were there any battery conditioning instructions ? New batteries don’t necessarily achieve maximum performance when brand new and it may take a few cycles to reach that.

Edit: asus have a web page on battery health charging which might help
 
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Screen brightness will be the biggest cause of drain on a laptop (unless you're sitting at 100% CPU use all the time).

14 hours is a ridiculous claim, and will have been under test conditions, with the laptop in power saving mode, screen on lowest possible setting, wifi turned off etc.

As others have said, it sometimes takes a few cycles to get to normal. I'd imagine if you aren't doing anything too heavy, and the screen knocked down to 60-70% brightness, you should be able to get 4-5 hours.
 
The label on the bottom right hand side says High-capacity battery for all-day use, I think you are all right about the battery getting better, as the battery icon on the bottom of the screen is now saying 96%, remaining, 7hrs,22minutes, and I've turned the screen brighness down. Thanks to everyone who replied
 
Quoted battery life for laptops is akin to the quoted maximum range for electronic vehicles - an absolute pipe dream.

I'd suggest that on full operating power, three hours is pretty decent.
 
To get max battery life you'll need to set usage to best efficiency (via settings) when on battery, reduce screen brightness and make sure un-necessary apps are not running. Swich off wifi and bluetooth and shut down as many non-essential functions as possible. Set your browser of choice to sleep anny unused tabs.

I had a Macbook in 2009 where turning off wifi would double battery life (4 hrs vs 2 hours) and running safari used noticeably less battery than Firefox. I could get 4 hours of word processing and spreadsheets but only 2 hours max of browsing. With this current Lenovo laptop (2 1/2 years old) I get about 8 hours of word and excel or 3 hours of image editing - wifi and bluetooth make about 10% difference, and I'll use a browser with ad blocker for browsing when running on 'balanced' power..
 
yeah plus you have to have the screen brightness so low you will spend more on glasses.
I figure 3 hours from a laptop with everything turned on is ok, i have my laptop on max brightness .
 
Straight out of the box the battery performance won't be very good because the battery usually needs a few full cycles to get to full capacity but also the laptop will be extremely busy updating itself since it could have been in its box for a while.
 
Up until the start of this year, I also owned an Asus gaming laptop (32Gb RAM, 8 core, 16 threads, 2Tb NVME, 3060 graphics). Whilst the specs were good, the quoted battery life only really applied to light browser use using the on-chip GPU, instead of the discrete higher performance GPU. In reality, when faced with a demanding workload such as building 1:1 previews in Lightroom for a few thousand raw images, the battery life was just a fraction of the maximum theoretical. A few times I ran out of battery after just 35-40 minutes of intensive processing and the laptop shut down (I'd leave it unattended to do it's thing).

This year I swapped it for a Macbook Pro. It's much faster for some tasks, and slower for others. However the battery life is staggering when performing the same workload. Whereas the Asus would run out and switch itself off after say 45 minutes, the Macbook will finish the task in say 30-35 minutes and still have over 70% battery life remaining. More than enough for a few hours editing, exporting and web browsing on the same charge and still have over 50% charge available.
 
JohnStewart said:
Up until the start of this year, I also owned an Asus gaming laptop (32Gb RAM, 8 core, 16 threads, 2Tb NVME, 3060 graphics). Whilst the specs were good, the quoted battery life only really applied to light browser use using the on-chip GPU, instead of the discrete higher performance GPU. In reality, when faced with a demanding workload such as building 1:1 previews in Lightroom for a few thousand raw images, the battery life was just a fraction of the maximum theoretical. A few times I ran out of battery after just 35-40 minutes of intensive processing and the laptop shut down (I'd leave it unattended to do it's thing).

This year I swapped it for a Macbook Pro. It's much faster for some tasks, and slower for others. However the battery life is staggering when performing the same workload. Whereas the Asus would run out and switch itself off after say 45 minutes, the Macbook will finish the task in say 30-35 minutes and still have over 70% battery life remaining. More than enough for a few hours editing, exporting and web browsing on the same charge and still have over 50% charge available.
Click to expand...

and that is a thing that macs do well the tech is pretty damned good but the pricepoint is just very scary.
 
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