Low battery life?

Hi, I just recently bought a notebook. Acer, 15`6, i5 520m, 6gb ram, 640hdd, ati 5650. Performance wise no complaints as it runs like the clappers, some light gaming, etc...
Was just wondering if its normal to have such low battery life. It seens the battery wont last more than 2,5 hours... its 6 cell li-ion. Ive adjusted the windows power savibgs such low brightness, but it doesnt change battery life too much... I have charged and used till the last bit for a couple times when I got the laptop. so was just wondering if this is normal or not. Cheers.

You're not going to get much more on a 6-cell

it is all reative to the ammount of power you actually consume.
because the Mobile processors and Mobile video stuff all tries to save power when not needed much.
the level of the backlight
other output/inputs like blueteeth wireless lans any cards drawing power off it
and the BIGEE , running Full throttle 3D games that task the CPU and GPU and keep them stepped up to thier highest level.

the 6 li-ion cells provide you with about 60W of total power, a desktop can blow through 120-300Watts of power in an hour or more. so in reality if its doing great for power consumption. you just need to add in 50Lbs of battery , and then you will have a really mobile unit

add in 50 lbs of battery? what do u mean? can i get a better battery for my laptop?

Madstrike said:

add in 50 lbs of battery? what do u mean? can i get a better battery for my laptop?

Click to expand...

Haha, i think he was just being sarcastic

If you need the battery life, you could probably get a 9 cell battery for your laptop. You can also go into the advanced power settings, and limit the max CPU speed to about 60% or so on batter. That saves a ton of power, and as long as you're not doing anything CPU intensive, you won't notice it. Windows tends to ramp the CPU speed up at the slightest thing (simply rendering a web page can make my i7 shoot up to 100% clock for a few seconds). By limiting it to 60%, it will never go over that no matter what the load. If you ever need the performance back, just change the power plan to High performance while you're doing that, or just plug it in

I don't know for sure about your specific laptop, but I got a 12 cell battery for my HP nx7400 on ebay for about $40.