T400s battery question

Is it normal that I only get 3 hours of battery life out of my new T400s? It's a 6 cell battery and I have only used it for less than 3 weeks. I bought the machine from MSStore, so should I check with them or Lenovo if this is a problem?

 

depends on various factors

if you have everything on (wifi, bluetooth, etc) and have the screen very bright, doing cpu-intensive stuff, 3-ish hours sounds right.

if you've turned of everything you can and left the screen as dim as possible, and not doing much, you should get more than 3 hours

also, if you've been emptying the battery (i.e. down to 0% or some very very low percentage) whenever you can in, then the capacity would also be slightly reduced in those 3 weeks

 

So I guess it's normal. I have everything wireless turn off, screen brightness set at 70%, and do normal web browsing and typing.

 

its roughly similar to what i gel

well close enough anyway

 

Mess around with some of the power settings. I use "low" and get around ~4hs 10/15 brightness on wifi

 

Launch Lenovo Power Meter and switch to Basic view. How much is your power consumption? To see the wattage you have to be unplugged.

I run 13/15 brightness with adaptive CPU clocking, internal graphics and WiFi on moderate power savings and get 8 - 9 W on idle. Most I've seen was maybe a bit more than 25W but that was with the discrete graphic card active, full brightness and running the CPU @ 3GHz. I have the T400.

Once you have the watts from the Power Meter and you know your battery capacity you can calculate your "unplugged" time. ( battery capacity / consumption = hours)