Toshiba Laptop poor battery life

[craigyb]

About a month ago I replaced a little HP tablet PC running XP with a shiney new Toshiba Equium U400. Nice looking laptop, very quiet which was the main consideration. (I tried a Dell 1525 and it was like using a hoover)

So all new PC's come with Vista, this was quite nice as it came with Vista Home Premium including MCE. So a bit higher than most budget laptops.

But the big downer is, the battery, first of all the laptop did not even recognise the battery as being installed. A trip back to Currys and then PC world resolved that with a BIOS update from Toshiba, apparently all stores have been told this, but they forget to tell the customers.

Next I charge the battery up overnight and use the laptop the next day, battery life is shown at around 1:10 hr/mins ( so about 70 minutes) not good. Actual usable time is around 40 mins before it decides it wants to shut down.

So this laptop has become a desktop, and is continually connected to the mains so it is useable, it seems vista is constantly doing stuff and killing the dam thing.

Another thing is Toshiba do not publish any figures for the battery life, me thinks they know it's pants.

--------------

Update, removed the 160GB internal disk and replaced with a 32GB solid state disk running XP 2005 MCE edition cloned from my own laptop.

After a few hours of updates, driver downloads, apps installations etc and I get 2 hours use and a very quiet laptop indeed. It has 10GB free on the disk and as we keep verything on NAS filers, it's not big problem.

The 32GB SATA solid state disk was £85

Edited September 15, 2008 by craigyb

[Mac]

I get 3.5 to 4 hours on my Macbook - unless I run Vista, in which case I get about 1.5 hours

[davidhodgkinson]

Thats not a good battery life!