Acer aspire 5532 - short battery life

melb

seasons greetings everyone and hope you've all had a good un. I'm typing this on the above notebook which was a fantastic surprise present from my OH. Apparently it is a 6 cell battery but the battery life only seems to be 2.5 hours from reading up on it and by looking at the icon on the notebook itself. he said he'd deliberately bought a 6 cell battery as as we'd been discussing previously about the fact they were supposed to have 5 - 6 hours battery. Have we got the wrong end of the stick or have we bought the only 6 cell battery notebook that lasts only 2.5 hours. thanks for any help

b33r

Doing a quick google one of the first results is this which says it has a 2.5 hour battery life. What did the description on the place you bought it from state? To be honest if you are actually getting that I am very impressed, you often have to run them with the brightness right down and barely be actually doing anything on it to get the quoted battery life. That ACER is a full blown PC in laptop form running Windows 7, not a netbook, which is about the only type of mobile PC you can get more than 4 hours out of.

melb

do you think it's a good choice then? I had been doing some research myself the last few weeks as I was thinking of buying a netbook for our daughter and one of the things I'd decided was a necessity was a 6 cell batter which I'd also discussed with OH due to 3 cell battery having short life which is why he purchased this one with 6 cell battery. does 6 cell not mean longer battery life then? I will read the link you have posted - thanks - i googled acer short battery life and there were quite a few people complaining about the rapid deterioration of the batter life some saying that after only 6 months the netbook only lasted 15 minutes.

b33r

If a desktop replacement was what you needed then yes I would say you've got a good laptop there. If it was battery life you needed probably not, a netbook like the asus eee or samsung nc10 would have been a wiser choice but they aren't capable of running the software that yours can (games, video processing etc) and also don't have an optical drive.

6 cell battery will, obviously, mean a longer battery life than a 3 cell if used in the same device. A 6 cell battery in a netbook like the asus eee would probably last around 8 hours at a guess but they use very little power. Your Acer will be very power hungry, dedicated graphics, large disk drive, big bright screen and a (relatively) powerful processer.

Battery technology is, sadly, pretty rubbish and doesn't seem to improve much. It has only really seemed to have got better recently by the production of less power hungry processors etc.

I have a sony vaio, its a few years old now but the battery is useless now ~20 mins tops.