How long should the battery run on a laptop?

Question

I just bought one and the first time i used it the battery ran out in like 2 hours. is this normal? laptop just shut off without warning. it is a gateway

Answer 1

Batteries wear out during use. Just like your cell phone battery, the more you use a battery, the shorter the length of time it will run every recharge cycle. 2 hours is fairly reasonable expectation. The battery life they advertise is in a LAB with NOTHING running. Just like MPG on your car, you are NOT going to get the advertised rate.

There are several different capacity batteries a 6 cell is going to last less than an 8 cell. I dont know if gateway offeres different size batteries, Toshiba and dell do ( just from experience) and I'm sure others do too. Battery life is greatly affected by temp, because system fans use so much energy. They are also affected by what youre doing, the more processor and ramm usage, the faster the battery wears down. If youre using P2p and youre a server, your processor and ramm are being used, ALOT. So turn off anything that is unneeded. If you dont need wifi and you've got your wifi broadcasting all the time, you wear down battery. If youve got your screen at 100% brightness you wear it down. you can change screen brightness.

You can create a power profile in control panel/power. I create one for when I am at school and work and one for the coffee shop. You can set your screen to go black instead of screensaver. You can set the system to sleep instead of running at full power.

Answer 2

It depends on the power consumption of the various hardware, CPU being number one, also the number of cell's in the battery is another factor
2 hours would be about right, make sure you have hibernation turned on, so you don't lose your work when the battery loses power, so when you plug it back in to charge/restart it your work will still be there:)
this should be turned on by default though

Answer 3

It depends on many things such as CPU, hard drive etc. It also depends on how much capacity your battery has such as 4 cell, 6 cell, etc. Usually basic notebooks have low capacity batteries that last around 1-2 hours.