T400 Windows 7 Battery Life

I just installed windows 7 RTM on my T400 (specs in sig) and I noticed that my batter life is considerably lower than what it is in Vista. I already installed all of the drivers from Lenovo's website and everything seems to be working fine.
There is one exception though, when I resume from sleep, it seems like both graphics cards are on and I need to switch from the Intel graphics to Ati and back again to get power consumption down again. (it's around 24W when resuming from sleep)

After i get the ATi card off again, power consumption hovers around 12-14W. (firefox open, word open), computer idle, max battery life plan at min. screen brightness. I used to get 8-9 W in vista under these conditions. Does anyone have any suggestion on what I can do to try and get my power consumption down?

 

How do you know the power consumption and is it accurate?

 

I got it off of Lenovo's Power Manager tool and I physically notice my battery draining faster.

 

I just noticed the same thing. I also downloaded another program to monitor battery usage, because for some reason when the power manager is open it uses an insane amount of the cpu, which makes the power usage go up.

In W7 avg usage is ~14w, ~10w min. in vista it was ~13w avg, and ~8w min.

Its kind of annoying because I always use w7.

 

Maybe the profiles are slightly different in Windows 7 vs Vista? On clean systems, I don't see a difference. Power Manager has a lot more tweaks in it, so maybe that's why it seems longer.

Actually, my battery last much longer with Windows 7, as the sleep/resume works perfectly, so I can stretch the battery much longer than I could with Vista.

 

does the swicthable graphics work in win 7?
i thought you had to restart and go into bios to change it

 

I found that the wireless cards drain a lot of power on W7 (Intel 5100), and resuming from S3 standby also exhibits the same problem of both graphics card being on and resulting in a high power draw.

 

Well I have installed W7 RTM yesterday and still regretting it. May be it is too early should wait for official drivers. Now I am getting more than an hour less battery life 3 to 3 1/2 in place of 4 1/2 to 5 in vista in my T400s. Luckily have a vista back up will put it back when I have time.
No stability issue so far though.

 

try looking for any process in the Task Manager, maybe some program is causing CPU spikes. Try looking at the power settings you have on. That's about all I can say.

 

Lenovo released a ThinkPad Switchable graphics driver for Windows 7 just this week. It can be found along other W7 drivers (beta drivers) here: http://www.lenovo.com/windows7beta

 

I installed that driver already, and both graphics cards still seem to hang.

 

Hi sr1650nx,

I seem to have this problem as well, took me quite a while to figure this one out as well. At first I thought it would be indexing, or my antivirus software, but yes the current version of the graphics driver seems to be the issue.

I hope Lenovo would test their drivers better before they release it. Then again, it's a beta version. What one person in another forum said to do was to just disable the ATI card until a new version of this driver comes out.

 

yeah, whats up with the manufacturers and their timely win7 support?


HP also still doesn't have Win7 drivers for their Tx2, well not all of them anyways..

and that after an entire week after launch..

I mean, they had enough time (Win 7 RC, ehmehm)

but anyways, ATi drivers usually improve with later versions, same with Nokia Firmenwares, when they come out they're still missing some optimization, but thats gonna change in the near future.

you can always download the latest ati drivers directly from ATi/AMD, i usually tend to go to the hardware OEM's driver page, instead of the laptop manufactures download page, those are often outdated.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx


tell us your results with the drivers from AMD directly..

 

I am getting around 8-9w under w7 x64
Turn the ati card off in bios, and on desktop right click>graphic properties>display settings>power settings> modify settings, and set all of them to best battery life.

open up the resource monitor(start>type resource monitor) and see which process uses the most cpu on average, if there is anything above 1-2 %, try to get rid of it

proof, to give people hope... (wifi on(maximum power saving), brightness low, cpu-adaptive)