Battery life new laptop low? Swift 3 SF314-42

LieMe

Hi,

Two weeks ago I bought a new Swift 3 SF314-42 R1B6. It is indicated online that the battery life should be max 12 hours. However if I have my laptop on battery saving and the brightest on the lowest setting I only get max 6-7 hours of battery with just some browsing. I have allready callibrated the battery, and acer care center tells me it is in good health. If I look at the usage of the apps there is no abnormal usage of any apps (mostly firefox and edge). Is this normal or could there be a problem with the battery?

Thread was edited to add model name to the title

Leostat

Any AV installed? That is usually a killer. To check if its a bad battery if you run from a cmd shell
powercfg /batteryreport 

it will spit out a HTML file, at the top it will tell you the expected max and current max of the battery

LieMe

I did have Norton installed but removed it this afternoon. Still running windows defender. I have just run the powercfg / batteryreport. But I'm not entirely sure if I'm looking in the right place. Is this what you mean? Thanks for your help by the way!

Leostat

That's the right bit so the batter is performing at around 104% capacity which is amazing! So it's definitely not the battery health 

Make sure there isn't any Norton stuff sticking around in process monitor but that should boost it by quite a bit. There was a Linus video on a Walmart laptop (I think ) where they tested with and wothout it . With Norton 1 hour, without like 6 !

Athwart

LieMe said:

Hi,

Two weeks ago I bought a new Swift 3 SF314-42 R1B6. It is indicated online that the battery life should be max 12 hours. However if I have my laptop on battery saving and the brightest on the lowest setting I only get max 6-7 hours of battery with just some browsing.

I think that the stated 12hrs battery life is mostly PR. Maybe you could get that in controlled conditions but in real life, 6-7hrs seems about right.

I have the SF314-57 which has a stated battery life of 11hrs. I was getting a theoretical 6-7hrs (assuming it drained to 0% charge) but in practice, about 3-3.5 hrs if I put it back on charge with 30% - 35% charge remaining.

Note that it is poor for battery health to drain it to 7%-10% regularly. Much better to keep it on AC as much as possible & only drain to 30%-50% if possible. Take a look at the cycle count near the start of your battery report. Batteries have a limited number of discharge/recharge cycles. Around 1,000 cycles stated for my SF314-57. When I was regularly draining the battery to 7%-10% before recharging, my cycle count was 100 cycles after 3 months. Since I've started limiting the drain to 30% & keeping it on AC more, the cycle count has barely increased after nearly 1 month.

I agree with @Leostat that things like anti-virus programs have a pretty big impact on power usage. My anti-virus (Comodo) is responsible for most of the power consumption on my system. You can run  "powercfg /srumutil" in an Admin Command prompt to get a more detailed report on the power that programs & services are consuming. Open the srumutil.csv report file in Excel & sort on the last "TotalEnergyConsumption" field (highest to lowest). It's a bit tricky to pull apart but look to see if there's an unexpected or un-needed power hog that may be draining the battery.