I have an HP G62 with windows 7.

After fully charged, the battery sometimes goes on a slow drain lasting me 2 full hours plus. Other times, it abruptly drops down down to 94% after a couple of minutes of being on, then next couple of minutes is down to 78% like it's on a rush to die. And I'm not even running flash applications.

I do noticed that it's got a @#$%load of procecess going on all the time, ipod update, this and that that I am not even using but still run in the background.

Battery decay with age is unavoidable, but is there anything else I can do, mostly regarding the amount of procecess running on the background?

Other than that I do not run multiple programs at once and try to keep low the number of tabs in my browser. Plus keep the display's brightness usually at second from lowest.

Any other ideas? Thank you!

Oh by the way, I majored in computer science so any ideas that aren't... "regular user" friendly are welcome as well.

I think this is a common problem with HP's. I own an HP G42 running Win7 HP and in less than a year, it's battery life is less than 10 mins. My brother also have an HP laptop and his original battery had the same problem. He bought a new battery, the extended ones. I believe life of the battery that came in with the laptop is not of the best quality. As for the programs/processes running in the background, try to limit them from running at startup. I had to edit some of the processes that runns on my computer during startup (msconfig) just to prolong the battery life. I also don't have a lot of icons/programs running on the notification area (system tray).

I'm planning on getting a new battery for my laptop and see if it will have a longer life this time.

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