T410s with Two batteries at 82% = 59 Minutes?

I am sitting in a coffee shop working on the "Maximum Battery Life" Power Plan with brightness at level 10/15 and on the motherboard graphics card and have 82% left combined on the TWO BATTERIES I have in this machine (I have the battery in the ultrabay as well) and it says I only have only 59 minutes left. Am I missing something here or is this normal. Driving me nuts.....

See below:

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Your battery seems to be in good condition. Therefore, your power usage (wattage) must be way too high.

Try restarting and see if it goes down (should be <= 9 watts at idle).

 

Do you have the NVIDIA GPU? Just curious.

 

This would be normal if your CPU is running at 100%.

 

Yes, I do. It is not being used right now though.

 

Thank you for replying. My CPU usage seems very low, at least to me. Se screen shot below. Right now I am at 95% left on both batteries and 2:05 of time estimated.

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As an update to this 4.5 hours later I am still chugging along. The meter went all the way down to like 10 minutes and then reset to a full gauge. Almost like it ran down one battery and the meter reported on just that one battery and then when the second battery kicked in the meter started reflecting that battery.

Is there a way to fix this?

Thanks,

Matt

 

I wonder if on a clean Windows 7 install without Lenovo Power Manager, if you would get an accurate display.

I know that in the case of some of their other apps, I would never install them. For instance, their update application.

 

Matt, I don't have any idea on how to fix your battery status display problem, but I am impressed with the "4.5 hours" detail. Very handy if you can get that kind of battery life on a T410s with an extra Ultrabay battery.

But maybe I'm imagining things. Please confirm.

Hope your "problem" turns out to be unreliable software.

 

Isn't that the way power manager is supposed to work? It uses one battery then switches to the second? It's been a long time since I've used one, I forget.

 

With a second battery in Ultrabay, the T410s BIOS always fully drains it before switching to the main battery. There have been complaints about this fixed behavior of the BIOS (the Ultrabay battery will become "bad" quickly), but currently Lenovo has no plan to provide user-selectable battery options.

 

Can you elaborate? I'm about to get a T520, my first experience with Windows 7, and I want to do everything possible to avoid anything running that's not 100% essential.

In XP it seems there's an endless profusion of updaters and other crap that hogs CPU and RAM no matter how many times you disable auto-updates and unnecessary startup processes. I know it's not malware/etc because I have protection for that and update them myself every week.

 

Yep, I believe that Power Manager works this way when two batteries are installed. I had both a X300 and X301 and they behaved like this. The laptop will always use the ultrabay battery first.

There is no way to drain the batteries simultaneously due to simple physics and user convienence. Putting the batteries in a parallel circuit would require that both batteries have the exact same voltages, otherwise they would 'fight' each other. There is no user friendly way to insure both batteries are the exact same voltages (what if you wanted to plug in a battery that was at half capacity with one that was fully charged for example?). Since batts have different capacities, that would further complicate matters.

 

That's not exactly right. All the Lenovo battery packs consist of cells in series/parallel. For example, a 9 cell battery pack is 3 cells in series, in parallel with 2 other strings of 3. Since each cell is 3.5-4.2 volts you get a voltage range of about 10.5 to 12.6 volts. Lithium Ion cells in parallel will balance themselves (if the voltage on one drops, the others will actually flow current into it and bring it back up). The only time this is a problem is if the voltage is dramatically different. This would produce a current flow that's too high. There is no fighting against each other. The cells also need to be properly charged with a charging circuit that uses a balancing circuit to monitor each individual cell and make sure the whole pack is healthy.

There are plenty of ways to implement dual battery supplies that are better than Lenovo's implementation. Even if it's to simply switch back and forth every 5 or 10%.