Vista and battery life -connection?

Hello,
I recently purchased a Toshiba Satellite p105-s6217 notebook computer from the local Circuit City, and the salesperson said that the battery should last 6 hours, i'm currently only getting 2.1-2.2 hours of battery life when fully charged. Does this have anything to do with me having Vista on my system? I know that Vista is a resource hog, just wondering if reformatting my hdd with XP will get it up to that 6 hours of battery life.
 
One thing that can be killing your battery life is your screen brightness. If you have your screen brightness set to the highest it goes it will drain your battery life.
 
Don't listen to sales people. Most all of them don't know squat, or are just tell you what you want to hear.

Now I've heard vista does pretty well with battery life, but I'm sure cutting down on the effects will help improve it. Also, things like running wifi, your screen brightness, and processor speed will hurt as well. Some people complain they only get around 1 hour out of my laptop, but with the brightness all the way down, processor locked at 800MHz(plenty for surfing) and wifi on, I can get over 2 hours easilly.
 
I already have the screen brightness set to the lowest, I've turned off all of vista's special effects, but i'm seriously puzzled. The power option is set to balanced right now, if I set it to power saver, performance goes down the hill fast...
 
screen brightness is sometimes an issue, but a real problem can be hd usage and ram usage along with CPU... those will drain your battery life faster then anything
 
I'm not sure what to say, but battery rating are almost always horribly wrong. My roommate has a newer Toshiba laptop and I think it's got some DVD player function(where you don't have to boot to use it) Could this be what they were referring to?

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I found a review on the laptop...
The P105 is a desktop replacement notebook and not really designed for straying too far from an outlet. The battery life of only 1 hour that I got should convince you of this fact. That's right, leave wireless on and screen brightness at medium and you're talking just a hair over 1 hour before the battery is drained
 
2-3 hours is all you can realistically expect from a laptop without an external battery.....

They ALL claim ridiculous battery life.

Vista does use a lot more ram, and has a lot more hard drive activity than xp, tho. So that could be contributing.
 
I've actually noticed that I get longer battery life in Vista then I do in XP (which is a promised improvement in Vista). A few things may be killing your battery life, such as having the brightness on high, having Intel's SpeedStep (AMD's Cool n' Quiet) disabled, running a processor/video intensive app at the time, or having wireless enabled.

Usually when it says up to 6 hours of battery life, thats when the brightness is all the way down, all wireless devices are off, and the computer is just sitting there idling.
 
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