laptop battery life

Okay, i got my brand new laptop yesterday.

its by no means an ultra portable super performer type deal, itsm ore liek a desktop replacement. Probly weighs 20 lbs, 3.2 ghz (although it seems to like 1.8, have not seen it move) 512 ram, 60 gb hdd, 15" screen, ect.

Now, i formatted it last night, and now it has windows 2000. (god i hate XP)

problems: Battery life is estimated at about 1 hour when i cold boot to a full charged battery. (like i did thismorning ot nab my music files and utils before school) I believe its because there was a mobil p4 driver that wouldnt install in 2000, so its not clocking down to save power. It was well over the 3 hour mark before formatting

anyone agree?

Other problems: usb drivers not installed, but usb seems to still work
no wireless (no driver yet)

Yep, you need to install all the power management stuff... go to your manufacturer's web and look there.

Bad move going back to W2k. Since XP has a lot of power saving features that W2K doesn't have. It has proper detection of AXP-M chips and P4M chips and support for advanced speedstep which automatically lowers the voltage and speed of the chip. I hear in SP2 it also brings better support for harddrive power management. With W2K you'll need to get drivers and some 3rd party support.

Also make sure it's set to portable mode in power management, so the power saving features will kick in.

yeah, with some google-foo i found that 2k and previous used something called speedstep, while xp has it built in.

and it wasnt a bad move, 2k is better than xp for my needs. (not to mention easyer to network!)

ill be looking for this speedstep now, thanks.