New x201 9 cell battery has a short life

I've had my new 9 cell battery directly from lenovo for a week and it's only giving me 4 hours max on my laptop. I have my laptop on 0 brightness and I've only got chrome open with several tabs and AVG Obviously wifi brings the max life down slightly but this is ridiculous. What max did you get with your new 9 cells?

 

How many watts is the laptop using during this? Should be checkable using the Lenovo Power Manager software.

 

The wattage is 29.27 W.

 

Something you're running is eating up battery life, or you're not using the max battery life power profile. You should be able to get sub 10W usage. Sub 10W should get you 9+ hours according to the review I read on the X201. So if you can knock that number down to sub 20W you should be pretty good.

 

Uhh my X201 (i5-560M, 4 GB, Intel HD graphics, 1280x800 LED) before I traded it easily hit 9 hours with the 9 cell battery.

 

Sub 10W!? I'm running the bare minimum as it is with power saver. I don't know how I'm going to decrease my usage again by a third. 29 watts is on the lower end of power consumption as it is.

And my x201 has the same specs as Tsunade.

 

What BIOS version are you running?

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/6quj16uc.txt

 

29 W? I've never seen that kind of power drain even when playing SCII on battery... and that's with my W520.

 

Sandybridge is considerably more efficient than arrandale. For the sake of comparison, though, I can get 32W with PS2 emulation (PCSX2), max performance on battery, max brightness on my X220T. Otherwise with lowish brightness, wlan active ~11.5-12W and sub 9.5W with wlan disabled and running stuff like onenote (11.5W inking) + acrobat + windjview.

On my old X201i I would have sub 12W browsing and sub 10W with low brightness. Something is very obviously wrong.

 

Yeah, my T500 on Balanced power plan and near max display brightness still idles around 12-14W, so something's wrong here. Do you have Power Manager and the power management driver installed?

 

My BIOS version is 1.05. Do you have to update the BIOS manually?

 

I always use the bootable CD method, because I believe it to be safer. There is an update utility, though.

Drivers and software - ThinkPad X201 Tablet & X201i Tablet

BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), Vista (32-bit, 64-bit), XP - ThinkPad

BIOS Update Utility for Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), Vista (32-bit, 64-bit), XP - ThinkPad

 

Neither method is completely risk free. However, I've always followed the bootable CD instructions to the letter on my T61, and I've never had an issue.

Note to moderators: Sorry for the double post, but I didn't want the OP to miss an edit on my previous post; therefore, the new post.

 

Thank you ConnectDon. So I've updated the BIOS to 1.38 but battery max is still 4 hours.

 

What are your Power Manager settings (go to Advanced mode and run down the current power plan's options)?

Are there any processes that persistently consume a lot of CPU usage? Take a look in Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc) or use Process Explorer.

 

Yeah, I have a custom power setting. Roughly 4 out of 7 dots for the battery settings.

Then I went to battery stretch. Disabled bluetooth and selected minimise refresh rate and now the max has jumped to about 7 hours! Is that reasonable or should I be expecting more? Also, setting everything to minimum power usage only gives me an extra hour and the wattage is now 30.6.

 

That's still about three times as high as it should be, so Battery Stretch is clearly disabling something that's accounting for a lot of your power usage.

 

Ya light use for me with a mechanical HDD was ~10 watts (91/93 WHr battery -> 9 hours battery life). Arrandale should drop to low levels on light use, but of course Sandy Bridge drops the idle power even lower.