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

TheIrishNinjas
TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
edited September 2021 in Predator Laptops
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

Best Answer

  • TheIrishNinjas
    TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
    Answer ✓
    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.

Answers

  • Leostat
    Leostat ACE Posts: 3,043 Pathfinder
    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
    TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
    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
    Leostat ACE Posts: 3,043 Pathfinder
    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
    TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
    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
    Easwar Member Posts: 6,727 Guru
    Hi @TheIrishNinjas,

    1. Change the Power Mode.
    2. Reduce Screen Brightness.
    3. Turn on 'Battery Saver'
    4. Detect and Disable Battery-draining Apps.
    5. Disable Background Apps to Improve Battery Life.
    6. Change Power and Sleep Settings.
    7. Disable UI Animations and Shadows.
    8. Turn off Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when not in use.
  • TheIrishNinjas
    TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
    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
    Leostat ACE Posts: 3,043 Pathfinder
    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 CAPACITY51,004 mWh
    FULL CHARGE CAPACITY46,398 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
    TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
    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 CAPACITY51,004 mWh
    FULL CHARGE CAPACITY46,398 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
    TheIrishNinjas Member Posts: 18 Troubleshooter
    Answer ✓
    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
    xapim ACE Posts: 7,257 Pathfinder
    edited September 2021
    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 :)


    https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/11532543

    UserBenchmarks: Game 43%, Desk 61%, Work 40%
    CPU: Intel Core i5-7300HQ - 63.5%
    GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050-Ti (Mobile) - 41.9%
    SSD: WDC WDS200T2B0B-00YS70 2TB - 71.4%
    HDD: WD WD10SPZX-00HKTT0 1TB - 93.7%
    RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR4 2666 C15 2x16GB - 76.8%
    MBD: Acer Predator G3-572

    I'm not an Acer employee. (just here to help in the best way i can)
    If my answer fixed you issue please accept it for any other users who search for it would find it quickly thanks :)
    If you want to learn more about undervolting/optimizing windows join the Predator fb group and youtube channel:

    Owner/Admin (HOTEL HERO/Red-Sand/Opoka Opoka)
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/PredatorHelios300
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJwGUHxSJ8FKqAhnOqQuAw
    Acer support:
    https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/service-contact
    http://www.acer.com/worldwide/support/  


  • Easwar
    Easwar Member Posts: 6,727 Guru
    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
    5. Right click on that option ----> Update all driver under the title battery.
    6. Choose "search automatically". 

    Check this T/S and post the result. ​
  • Leostat
    Leostat ACE Posts: 3,043 Pathfinder
    I guess it was chrome aha! It can be very battery hungry :D
  • xapim
    xapim ACE Posts: 7,257 Pathfinder
    @TheIrishNinjas so im guessing you got it sorted so you should accept your own answer as solved :)


    https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/11532543

    UserBenchmarks: Game 43%, Desk 61%, Work 40%
    CPU: Intel Core i5-7300HQ - 63.5%
    GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050-Ti (Mobile) - 41.9%
    SSD: WDC WDS200T2B0B-00YS70 2TB - 71.4%
    HDD: WD WD10SPZX-00HKTT0 1TB - 93.7%
    RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR4 2666 C15 2x16GB - 76.8%
    MBD: Acer Predator G3-572

    I'm not an Acer employee. (just here to help in the best way i can)
    If my answer fixed you issue please accept it for any other users who search for it would find it quickly thanks :)
    If you want to learn more about undervolting/optimizing windows join the Predator fb group and youtube channel:

    Owner/Admin (HOTEL HERO/Red-Sand/Opoka Opoka)
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/PredatorHelios300
    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJwGUHxSJ8FKqAhnOqQuAw
    Acer support:
    https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/service-contact
    http://www.acer.com/worldwide/support/