Laptop battery drain issue

mikee

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My laptop (HP Pavillion DV6000) battery drains excessively while powered off. Sometimes I will leave it for a week or two after fully charging and when I go to use it again the battery will be down to something like ~40%.

I have only had this laptop for a year and a half and haven't ran it on the battery more than 10 times I don't think. Does this mean my battery is wearing out or is this kind of drain normal?
 
I have never really timed it. I'm guessing something like 1.5-3 hours depending on what power plan it is on and screen brightness.
 
Ummm, HP's normally don't have that kind of issue, though many other laptop manufacturers do. If you have only used it on battery 10 times, this could be damaging it. It is bad for the battery to be plugged into AC all the time, so if you never use the battery, you should unplug it and let it run dead occasionally (once or twice a month) and it will help your battery maintain longer. IMO, it doesnt sound like its much of an issue to me if you have 1.5-3 hours run time, definitely not worth replacing the battery over.
 
today I used it on battery until it warned me to plug in. I think I
m going to do this more often rather than plugging in. Maybe that will be better for it. I have a dual boot with vista and 7 and in the vista partition the screen stays the same on battery and plugged in. In 7 though the screen goes dim when unplugged and the only options I can find in 7 are balanced and power saver which disables aero transparency when unplugged.
 
Is the computer really turned off or is it sleeping/hibernating? The latter two will drain the battery even while "off"

Something that could help the drain is removing the battery when you know it's not going to be used for a while.
 
I use the computer at least every week and a half. Sometimes I hibernate since if I leave it off for a week or so and turn it on it will act all slow and cpu will go up to 100 % since the computer will scramble to do all sorts of scans and updates for av and whatnot since they will be out of date. No matter what I did though the battery would drain.

I don't think hibernation consumes battery when the computer is off, it just writes the contents of the ram to the HDD and turns the computer off and after that it consumes no extra power.


Edit: Just noticing another problem audio wise. I had this problem in windows 7 beta and rc but what it is is my speakers will make a tiny pop sound every once in a while that doesn't happen in windows vista. It doesn't happen when I have headphones in though. I really thought this issue would be sorted.
 
The best solution to battery issues have been listed over a course of different posts and I'll repeat them just to show my concurrence.

-Fully charge the battery then unplug it.
-Avoid running it on AC for long periods of time.
-Completely drain the battery every month or so.
-Turn off rather than Hibernate/Sleep.

I can't guarantee you that these things will increase battery life, but it should significantly slow down an inevitable power drain.
 
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