Dell XPS M1730 - Review (part 2): Power and Battery

When choosing a laptop, an important aspect battery life. For me, this is perhaps THE most important aspect, so I'll be spending quite a lot of text on this post.

Battery Life of the XPS M1730

The XPS M1730 gets much better battery life than older gaming systems, especially the original gaming rigs that used hacked-up desktop parts.

My particular XPS has:

• Core 2 Extreme at 2.8GHz


• Dual gForce 8700M video cards 


• Dual 7200 RPM hard drives

Here are some numbers from my informal tests:

• Power Saver Mode, no wireless: 2 hours 10 minutes.


• Power Saver Mode, wireless on: 1 hour 40 minutes.


• Balanced Mode, no wireless: 1 hour 50 minutes


• Balanced Mode, wireless on: 1 hour 25 minutes

 I don't test high performance mode because that shouldn't be used with battery unless you are a moron... but when I accidentally left it in high perf mode it got about 30 mins with wireless turned on.

While 1 to 2 hours is still pretty short compared to many other laptops, it is a reasonable amount of time considering how powerful the hardware is.

If you need more than about an hour and a half out of it, you'll want to buy a spare battery.

Power Management:

There have been tons of advancements in power management over the years, but prior to Vista the OS had limited ability to use those features. The hardware manufacturers were often lazy and so their drivers neglected power management.

But the XPS was built from newer hardware that heavily supports intelligent power management, and most of the drivers are designed to give control of those features to Vista.

The result for the M1730 is a system that can scale from very low power states to very high states in very small increments as demand increases. It has amazingly fine control over how much power is being used, when, and where.

Most impressive are the power management improvements in the newer gForce 8700M video cards.

The XPS M1730 can balance power usage against performance much more aggressively and intelligently than with any other system I've ever used before.

Tweaking for more Battery Life:

Other than turning off wireless, almost nothing else seems to matter much to battery life on the M1730. Turning off the numerous LEDs, keyboard light, and lowering the screen brightness didn't help at all. The difference between the "balanced mode" and "power saver mode" in Vista also didn't push the time out much.

So basically, just put the thing in the dell recommended power scheme (balanced) and turn off wireless when you don't need it.  The system will do about as good as it can all by itself.

The Bad.

• Longer Recharge Time: 
   
  Most Dell laptop models have a rapid recharger build-in which allows them to recharge very fast (under an hour on my old Inspiron). Sadly, the XPS lacks this rapid charger. The battery will charge to about 90% rather quickly (45 minutes to an hour), but capping off that last 10% can take another 30 to 45 minutes more.


• No Secondary Battery:  Having a secondary battery gives you more time, but it also allows you to swap out the primary battery without fully shutting down or hibernating. With 4GB of RAM hibernating and restarting can cost you 5 to 10 minutes.
   
  If it had a secondary battery, even a small one, it would save me quite a lot of time.


• No External Charger:
   
  This has been true for almost all laptops for years now, but it still annoys me.  

Minor points:

• The Battery for the XPS M1730 is shaped funny which makes it hard to fit the battery into most pouches on most laptop bags.
      
• The battery release latch is placed exactly in front of the finger hold making it difficult to swap the battery without turning the system completely over and using both hands.
   
• The Power Supply for the XPS M1730 is huge... like X-Box big! It's about the same size as an external USB hard drive, and a tad heavier. It is so large that carrying it with you is very cumbersome and adds a lot of weight to an already very heavy package.
   
• The power cord is very thick and heavy. It also doesn't fit very well into the power socket on the laptop. Sometimes I've noticed that the weight of the cord alone can unplug your laptop... which is VERY annoying indeed!

Bottom line:

The XPS M1730 has VERY aggressive power management features. Battery life is shorter than most laptops, but it still can get enough time to be usable for most people. It certainly does better than the rumors would have you believe.

Gaming will run batteries dry significantly faster, but compared to older gaming models the XPS still does quite well.