Personal Projects

The Barracks
#1005

Site housekeeping is done, and I had to do surprisingly little. Unfortunately I discovered that pretty much all of my gifs are totally bricked and I don’t want to go back making all of them again. So I’ve decided to leave the ones in my update threads as is (broken) and I’ve removed the ones from the main project pages.

I only really messed with a few of the pages in Banshee’s section. I added an extra diagram under ‘transformation’, updated the specs table, updated the setup sheet and added the Mod V9 photos.

#1006

Just taken a look, looks organised and structured. You should try to promote the site somehow, to increase traffic in your forum section for example. There should be lots of similar projects around on the internet right? Maybe on Reddit?

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#1007

The site is actually more a place where I can point future employers, because I can’t fit the projects in my CV. As for Reddit, the UI and layout of that site is a headache I don’t want to deal with.

#1008

I can see. Either way, that’s a smart tactic. I’ve been doing that too and I think it actually works.

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#1009

I’m finally starting battery testing today. I’ll try and stick as closely as possible to the original parameters. The only thing I’m doing differently is that I’m not including the ‘power saver’ and ‘high performance’ pre-set power plans, because the first set of tests showed that they were broadly the same as my ‘potato’ and ‘absolute power’ power plans. One other difference is that I’ll be using my bluetooth buds as opposed to my HiFi over a jack for sound, because my sound drivers are on strike yet again.

On another note, I changed the ‘forums’ heading in the top menu of my site to ‘project progress’ because that’s what I’m actually using the forums for. People can still post in them, but their purpose was never meant to be a traditional forum, it’s where I post updates and people can respond to those.

2 Likes
#1010

Right, battery testing (or rather the tests I want to do) are on hold. I went to run userbenchmark (not for the results, but for consistency’s sake) and the laptop died in 4 mins. It went from 100% to 1% almost instnatly. Ran UB twice and it did the same thing twice at exactly the same time. Battery log shows as much as well.

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My main focus now is finding out if I got sent a bad battery (likely the case) and to get in touch with whoever it was that I bought it from (can’t even remember, have to dig out my emails). My testing plan now is to hit it with a few other hard benchmark loads and observe its behaviour. Then give it a gaming load, and a simulation load and observe the behaviour. After all that, I’m going to use it for internet browsing and see what happens.

My hypothesis as of now is that the benchmark is pushing the CPU and GPU (obviously) which is causing a larger power draw. With that power draw it’s either the battery controller circuit thinking I’m drawing too much power and cutting the battery to protect it. Or, the more likely case, crappy cells were used where the voltage drops significantly under load when it really shouldn’t.

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#1011

Update:

I’m going to keep posting regularly about this, because I want it logged in multiple places for when I go to contact them, so expect a lot of posts over the next day or two.

It has been about an hour and the battery is fully charged (it was estiamting just over 3h initially). Something is definitely wrong. I’m still going to carry out my planned tests though.

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#1012

Another update:

I hit it with UB twice more, I hit it with Cinebench R20 once and it was fine. I then hit it with a CPU Blender render of the BMW on stock settings and I hit the 5% warning about 7.5 mins into the render. I started it at around 75% battery. Currently on the recharge cycle, going to see how long it takes it this time. Once it’s back to 100% I’ll give it a couple of games and see what happens.

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#1013

Update 3:

This time the recharge took about 105 mins. Fired up Tomb Raider 2013 and got about 10 mins before the low battery alert. When I did the gaming tests with the original battery, I got 45 mins. At first I thought the battery might need a few cycles to get broken in, but this behaviour is not normal at all. When I finish this set of tests, I’m going to put the old one back in and do them again, just to make absolutely sure it’s the new battery, even though I’m certain it is.

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#1014

Update 4:

Last recharge took ~65 mins. Going to do one last test with general use. I.e. mainly youtube and web browsing. I’ll report back when it dies.

EDIT:

That lasted about 50 mins before it gave me a low battery alert. I was glancing at the percentage every so often and I last remember seeing it being around the 50% mark, that was maybe 5-10 mins before it piped up. I didn’t even watch any videos, I was browsing the web with spotify open in the back.

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#1015

Did I get it right, you bought a new battery a while back and didn’t test it’s functionality till now?

#1016

I got the battery about 2.5 months ago. When I installed it it seemed fine, the charging behaviour was normal and the use I got on it (granted it wasn’t much) didn’t suggest anything was wrong. Looking back now, I should have tested it more thoroughly, which is rather unlike me. My proper battery tests (the ones I started yesterday) were supposed to take place days after I installed it, but I got swamped with uni (as usual).

To answer your question in fewer words: Pretty much. :man_facepalming:

I’m going to install my old battery in a few mins, I’ll report back when it charges fully and I start running the same tests.

Also, the last recharge on the new one took about just under 3h this time.

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On a slightly different note, if anyone’s interested in how I got the battery reports. Opened command prompt as admin and enter “powercfg /batteryreport” (without the speech marks). It spits out an HTML. Copy the file path it gives you into file explorer. That should open the file in your browser, then just bookmark it. Now every time you run the powercfg /batteryreport command in command prompt, the new data gets appended to the file.

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#1017

I installed the original battery, ran Userbenchmark twice, ran Cinebench R20 once and ran the BWM CPU Blender render. UB took a total of 14% battery, Cinebench took 10% and Blender took 25%, that makes a total battery drop of 49%. I’m currently on the recharge cycle, when it reaches 100%, I’m going to run Tomb Raider 2013 again to see what happens.

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#1018

Ran Tomb Raider, battery lasted about 45 mins as expected. I’m currenlty doing the general use run, I’ll report back when I get the low battery alert.

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EDIT:

I was actually looking at the battery log again, when I noticed that the original wasn’t actually charging to 56WH, but around 39.5WH, that would explain the oddly short battery life. I also noticed that the new battery is actually 52WH, not the claimed 56.

I recalculated one of the tables from my initial battery tests because I’ve got time to kill.

Power plan: Average life at 39.5WH (mins): Estimated life at 56WH (mins): Estimated life at 97WH (mins):
Absolute Power 118 167 290
Potato 170 241 417
High Performance 128 181 314
Balanced / Dell 167 237 410
Power Saver 182 258 447
Average of Averages (not a power plan) 153 217 375
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#1019

The battery lasted about 90 mins with general use, which is what I’ve roughly come to expect from it. I’ll be getting in touch with the shop that sold me the other one later today.

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#1020

Right, I sent the shop an email explaining the problem and asking for a refund. Now let’s see if they reply. In the mean time, I’m back on my original battery.

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#1021

Got a reply. I feel like none of these tech support people actually read what I send them initially, because they all always send some generic copied and pasted response. There’s a reason I take the time to give you a detailed recount of all the troubleshooting I’ve done so far.

Anyway, they defaulted to the very Apple-esque excuse of “you’re using it wrong.” By telling me that it had apparently been tested at the factory before being sent to me (which I’m 99% sure is nonsense) and that they deemed it fine and then giving me a very generic troublshooting list. I told them I still want my refund.

I’ll report back when they respond again.

3 Likes
#1022

They said they would give me a refund, but didn’t say whether I should send the battery back. I’ve replied asking if they want it back, now I just need to wait for the money to be back into my account and for a response from them.

2 Likes
#1023

Got my money back yesterday. They’re yet to reply about me returning that battery. However, I doubt they will because it’s too much faff, they’d lose money getting it back. I also found out that they’re not actually based in Portsmouth like they claim, they’re based in China. So I’m considering myself very lucky with how this entire situation went down.

3 Likes
#1024

Congrats on solving it and getting your money back! :grin:

1 Like