Maximizing T410s battery life

Hello guys, could anyone share some tips to maximize the battery life of my T410s? Is the power manager any good? I have an SSD and the optical drive battery but I can't match the ~6 hours on my T400 undervolted.

 

Well that's to be expected. The T400 uses a 57wHr battery while the T410s has a 44wHr battery. Can't pull power outta thin air . The battery is just smaller so nothing you can do about that...

.... other than getting an ultrabay battery.

 

1. What BIOS version are you on?
2. What are your Config | Power setting in the BIOS?
3. What Power Manager version are you on?
4. What power plan are you using in the Lenovo Power Manager?

 

I get 4-6 out of lenovo's advertised 9 hours on my T420+6 cell.

I've never seen it go above 7 even with battery extender on, lowest brightness, radios off, and everything idle.

 

The T420 is a very different beast from a T410s.

 

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Run Process Monitor, let the system idle for about 30 seconds, stop the capture, go to Tools > Process Activity Summary.

Sort first by CPU and look for anything that uses any CPU cycles. Everything should ideally be idling at 0% CPU. Try to reduce CPU usage as much as possible (i.e. disabling the numerical icon for TPFC made it go from 2.5% CPU usage to 0.2% CPU usage on my T400).

Second, go for file activity. At idle, ideally, no file activity should take place so reconsider using certain software on battery if it constantly makes file accesses.

Registry is less important, and network/IO bytes even less so, although they do indicate if a process is doing something.

 

Alternatively, add the CPU time column and then sort it from high to low (also select Show processes from all users). This shows the cumulative CPU time for each process since the last reboot.

You should also reduce your display brightness further and consider changing the power setting for the wireless card. Bluetooth can increase the power consumption as can USB devices.

Note also that if you have a web browser open then Flash can use a lot of CPU time. I use Firefox with FlashBlock to stop unnecessary Flash activity.

John

 

In other words: read a paper book by the window during the day.

What's the point of buying a thin, light, premium notebook if it cannot be used normally? Why all the restraints?

 

It's an unfortunate fact of life that backlit displays use power, so the dimmer they are then the longer the batter will last. I read that AMOLED is more efficient than backlit LCD but notebook-sized AMOLED displays have yet to become mainstream.

However, if you look at the OPs screen dump of their power settings then you will see that they have the same brightness on both mains and battery. My brightness when on mains is higher so I get the best appearance while on battery it is less, but still usable. IMO one of those settings needs adjusting.

John