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I have an Acer laptop (AS4820TG, it's about 2 years old), and I recently installed Windows 8 to a partition I made on my SSD (now I'm dual booting 7 and 8). My laptop's always had pretty good battery life.
On Windows 7, fully charged, windows sometimes estimates that I'll get 8.5 hours. Of course, that never happens, but nonetheless I can still squeeze a good 5-6 out of it if I'm saving power in as many ways as possible.
However, with Windows 8, on a full charge, I only get a prediction of perhaps 1.5-2 hours. It usually lasts not much more than one, even if I keep it in power saving mode and don't do anything intensive.
The one thing I know is hurting me is that with the fresh install, I lost the ability to automatically power off the optical drive. Other than that, I can't figure out what's slashing my hours! Even if it's unsolvable, can someone suggest what else might be the culprit? Thanks!
Matt
Posted 2012-11-01T06:25:40.563
Reputation: 101
screen brightness perhaps. – Glenn Ferrie – 2012-11-01T06:32:35.927
No offense but screen brightness is pretty obvious and I definitely had that in consideration. It's something else... – Matt – 2012-11-01T07:52:11.463
Check with your manufacturer for any BIOS updates - I realised my laptop wasn't automatically dropping its CPU speed when under low load but was instead running at full speed all the time. A BIOS update cured it – Graham Wager – 2012-11-01T09:14:44.673
My BIOS is all the way updated too :/ I am looking at a 2h01m estimate with 97% battery remaining right now. Aside from the optical drive thing I mentioned, it also seems that my cooling fan is more active than it is on Windows 7. I'm not sure how much of an effect these two things can have, but I really don't think it could shave off 6+ hours... Any other ideas? I really would love to make a permanent switch to Win8 sometime soon, but if battery life's this bad, it just can't happen. – Matt – 2012-11-01T18:45:52.637
No one can suggest anything? – Matt – 2012-11-03T03:23:57.800