T400 with Extremely LOW battery life

I've had my computer for a little more than half a year. But lately when I have been using it there's never much battery left. It lasts for about an hour max with casual surfing and using word.
I have the latest BIOS and thinkpad power manager.
It is set to 'Power Sourced Optimized'
Hovers around 2-4% CPU usuage when idle.
Power manager says 15.19v, 24.22w, 1.65A, with 57 cycle counts.
I have a 4-cell battery and P8400 w/ LED screen
For the whole year I've kept the maintain battery life function in the power manager. And this morning I did a battery reset and it still doesn't last for a very long time. Before I would get around 2:30 hours. It is set to integrated graphics. I notice that in the beginning when I first turn on the computer there is alot of hardrive activity for about 10min. even after everything is done loading. What could be the problem?
I think it's a software problem, what do you guys think?

 

24.22 watts is entirely too high. With a P8400, LED display, and integrated graphics it should be closer to 10 watts and 0.70 amps (possibly lower).

The problem is most likely software related. I would start with the simple tasks of uninstalling and re-installing power manager. However, you may need to do a full format and re-install of Windows to fix the problem (24 watts is way too high).

 

Thanks for the quick response. My wattage is always around 24-28w when i'm using it. What could be the problem? I've tried disabling power manager and it still only lasts for around an hour.

 

I took a screenshot of it. cn_habs help me
This is set to "Maximum Battery Life" Default settings

 

im not sure what programs you are running in the background but i think 1.73Gb of ram being used is a lot. However, ram only uses like 1.5watts max so I am not sure why its at 29W being used. What kind of harddrive do you have and do you have anything else plugged in? external hard drive, thumbdrive.....?

Your battery should still be good considering it only has 57 cycle counts. My has 112 and I have also had it for half a year and it still holds its charge.

 

At the time of the screenshot above. I just had chrome and power manager opened. Took a new screenshot with programs i have opened.
Specs:
P8600
160gb 7200rpm
4gb ram
turbo memory
vista business 64-bit

 

power source optimized is not the setting you want i think. you should use maximum battery life.

but even then, your battery life is way too low.

 

Even with Maximum Battery it's around the same.

 

Not really sure what could be the problem, but 24W is very high for running on integrated graphics. What brightness is your screen at?

 

My screen is the LED option. On battery I set it to a little under a half.

 

check your bios settings. maybe an option prevents the cpu from entering power saving states

 

I just checked, everything seems to be fine reading the description it has on the right.

 

I believe its pretty hard to use 1.7GB+ ram and not be working the CPU pretty hard.

 

He has 4GB of RAM. Using around half is quite normal - Vista tends to cache as much frequently-accessed data in RAM as possible.

 

yeh as midnightsun just said, vista used around 1.7 to 1.9 idle for me as well.

 

Finally, problem solved. Turned out to be a service that was disabled. ATI External Utility. Once I enabled it, it went from 29w to 10w. Back to 3:30hr battery life. Thanks guys

 

Glad you figured it out.

From the name of the service it sounds like the ATI GPU was running at full power even when you weren't gaming; however, 29w still sounds high even for this.

 

how the hell do you get 3:30 hrs on a 4-cell?

i can barely get 2:30 hrs on a 6-cell (integrated graphics, xp, T9400)

 

3:30hrs when I had 80% battery life on my 4-cell.

No Wireless, Plugged in internet, Integrated Graphics, Vista business 64, P8600, Battery Stretch, Aero off, was running the occasional Google Chrome and Powerpoint with 25% brightness LED screen.

Maybe you have more stuff running. I pretty much removed all the Thinkvantage software except 'Active Protection' and 'Power Manager' and Disabled all startup program except the above and Norton with TuneUp Utilities.

 

Im using vista business 32 and I have ~25 things open and with 3GB of ram and all this open Im at 1.3GB usage and ~30-75% CPU usage constantly. Not to mention the spikes and such.

 

I only have Chrome and Powerpoint opened. What then, do you think can cause the high rise in ram usage?

 

You may just have a lot of background processes going on for that kind of ram usage. I was just stating my situation, thats all.

 

Alright. Thanks everyone for helping me out.