Predator Helios 300 (PH315-52 )Battery lasts just under two hours from 100%

Hi all!
So, I've had my Predator Helios 300 (PH315-52) for just over a year now and I'm loving it, but I've noticed something that may be a bit odd: the battery life is surprisingly short.

I've downloaded BatteryBar and thanks to it I've found that when charged to 100% (which I rarely do, I know it's recommended to only go up to 80%) it lasts 1 hour and 46 minutes. This is pretty odd considering I've seen reviews of the same model that claim it gets 3+ hours on battery. I've lowered the brightness right down and disabled UI animations and such to no avail. Any idea what might be going on here?

I've also downloaded BatteryInfoView and I won't even pretend to understand what half the stats mean so I've attached a screenshot below:

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated! I'm starting to get the feeling it's not a defect but rather a limitation of the device, but confirmation it is/isn't would be good.

Thread was edited to add model name to the title

Accepted answers

TheIrishNinjas

Edit to all this, either my battery calibration is way out of whack or I'm suddenly getting 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life if both BatteryBar and the Windows battery display are to be trusted.

Huh.

All comments

Leostat

Battery issues generally fall into a couple of things, some app hogging power, some hardware hogging power, or bad drivers

Tis good to start with the easy , do you have an AV installed? They wreck battery due to how they mess with program flow, and second, does task manager report anything unusual as using high or above power? Chrome is the Biggie bit it's worth checking to see if anything else is guzzeling the electrons

After that, need to check the power usage metrics, battery stats, and power report but can get to that in a bit if it's not one of AV or a misbehaving app

TheIrishNinjas

Leostat said:

Battery issues generally fall into a couple of things, some app hogging power, some hardware hogging power, or bad drivers

Tis good to start with the easy , do you have an AV installed? They wreck battery due to how they mess with program flow, and second, does task manager report anything unusual as using high or above power? Chrome is the Biggie bit it's worth checking to see if anything else is guzzeling the electrons

After that, need to check the power usage metrics, battery stats, and power report but can get to that in a bit if it's not one of AV or a misbehaving app

Thank you for the reply!

By AV I'm assuming you mean Antivirus? If so then I do have one installed, McAfee.

Also, I just checked and none of the processes in the task manager show power usage above 'Very low' (with the exception of occasionally Chrome and other things I use for game development work like Unity, Photoshop etc. when I have them open along with the task manager itself).

Leostat

Aye anti virus, that would be my bet. If you run an energy report does it report anything as odd? Run this as an admin while on battery, and it will output a HTML file after 30 mins (ish):

powercfg /energy /duration 2000

Third party AV's are super power hungry and its not unusual for it to wreck battery life due to the way it works

linus did an example on one of their videos where it cut a laptop from 5ish hours down to 2ish hours

TheIrishNinjas

Leostat said:

Aye anti virus, that would be my bet. If you run an energy report does it report anything as odd? Run this as an admin while on battery, and it will output a HTML file after 30 mins (ish):

powercfg /energy /duration 2000

Third party AV's are super power hungry and its not unusual for it to wreck battery life due to the way it works linus did an example on one of their videos where it cut a laptop from 5ish hours down to 2ish hours

I ran an energy report as you suggested and there are.. quite a few errors.

A few of them were power plan ones left over from an attempt to calibrate the battery, so safe to say those can be ignored since I've changed the plan back to normal. There are, however, a few Device Driver errors. They're all for the Intel Processor device and the Device Problem Code is 0x20.

Other than that there are a few warnings about PredatorSense having significant processor utilisation and a few 'Platform Timer Resolution:Outstanding Timer Request' warnings.

Easwar

Hi @TheIrishNinjas,

Change the Power Mode.
Reduce Screen Brightness.
Turn on 'Battery Saver'
Detect and Disable Battery-draining Apps.
Disable Background Apps to Improve Battery Life.
Change Power and Sleep Settings.
Disable UI Animations and Shadows.
Turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when not in use.

TheIrishNinjas

An update on this, I've just noticed that the laptop completely shuts down as soon as it goes below 30%. Starting to think the battery might be a lost cause, can the battery on a Predator Helios 300 be replaced by the owner or does it have to be sent off?

Leostat

Battery would have to be sent off but you can check the health yourself to see if it is a shot battery

from a cmd prompt run

powercfg /batteryreport

and open up the HTML, and have a look for this bit:

DESIGN CAPACITY	51,004 mWh
FULL CHARGE CAPACITY	46,398 mWh

This tells you the level of degregation on the battery, so on mine above ive lost around 10% of the battery designed capacity. Someimes all it needs is a recalibration / reset to bring it back

The driver ones are a bit odd , it could be a missing chipset, and the predator sense, is that with it open? its super power hungry

TheIrishNinjas

Leostat said:

Battery would have to be sent off but you can check the health yourself to see if it is a shot battery from a cmd prompt run

powercfg /batteryreport

and open up the HTML, and have a look for this bit:
DESIGN CAPACITY 51,004 mWh
FULL CHARGE CAPACITY 46,398 mWh

This tells you the level of degregation on the battery, so on mine above ive lost around 10% of the battery designed capacity. Someimes all it needs is a recalibration / reset to bring it back

The driver ones are a bit odd , it could be a missing chipset, and the predator sense, is that with it open? its super power hungry

Thank you yet again. I generated a battery report and oddly enough, both the Design capacity and Full charge capacity are the exact same, 40,517 mWh.

Side note, I've changed my browser from Chrome to Opera since I figured Chrome's resource-munching might have been part of the problem and it is a bit better, but not much.

(Also, the PredatorSense app wasn't open at the time of the energy report.)

TheIrishNinjas

Edit to all this, either my battery calibration is way out of whack or I'm suddenly getting 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life if both BatteryBar and the Windows battery display are to be trusted.

Huh.

xapim

Check your battery wear with hw info or battery bar pro those are the most trusted programs to display the real battery wear windows its not if more than 15/20% u might have to consider replacing it also try to proper calibrate it first good luck

Easwar

Hi @TheIrishNinjasm,

# Try to update the battery driver

1. Hold windows key and hit letter X.
2. Choose the device manager option.
3. Go with the option battery.
4. Under the title battery.
Update Battery Drivers in Windows EASILY - Driver Easy