My battery life started to suck all of a sudden.

Last week, when my battery was at 100% it would last for about 3.5 hrs (according to power manager). Earlier this week, it lasted for about 2 hours. Apparently I've been through 45 cycles in about 11 weeks. Is there any reason why my battery life would cut in half? I realize that rechargeable batteries lose capacity over time, but that drastic of a change seems odd to me. Is this something to call Lenovo about? In power manager I have the charge thresholds set to optimize for battery lifespan. During the time it took to write this post, power manager said time left was anywhere between 1:53 and 1:14 min. Something is messed up I think.

It's a T61p with a 9cell.

Cliffnotes: Battery life all of a sudden cut in half for unknown reason.

 

try recalibrating it, just to make sure (it's one of the options of the power manager if I remember well). Otherwise I have no idea why this happens. Sorry!

 

Thats the first thing I did. I thought that it would fix it. It helped a little, but not that much.

 

my t60 is doing the exact same thing. i bought it used, so its possible that it's just an old battery. But when I bought it a month ago, I got over 3 hrs w/ mild power conservation (bt off, abg on, screen 1/2 way up). Now, it's about an hour and fading fast.

i'm new to thinkpads. how do i 'calibrate' the battery?

 

There is an option in the ThinkVantage Power Manager. Open it up, click on the Battery Information tab and then click on Batter Maintenance...

In there, perform a battery reset. Do this about every 30 cycles. Check out the Battery Guide.

 

you know.. i feel like a similar thing happened to me, but it was quite a while ago, so maybe i am just confused.

there are a lot of confounding factors, though, cuz i was upgrading from xp to vista, and i was recalibrating my battery quite often.

 

fyi, my battery totally died this week. luckily it was still under warranty. called yesterday, had a new battery today.

props to the ATL office

 

Are batteries under warranty? Are they under extended warranty?

 

one year, i believe.

 

Has the battery been repeatedly deep-discharged? If so, that's one of the best known ways to quickly kill a Li-ion battery dead.

Li-ion battery chemistry doesn't have the memory effect of Ni-Cd and really shouldn't be deep-discharged if at all possible. Repeatedly "recalibrating" the battery by deep-discharging it will only kill it quicker.