T420 Battery

So my very first Thinkpad is coming tomorrow and I got a 9cell battery! I am so excited, but I want to know some information I want to know some tips and tricks about the battery life, I want to keep the battery as long as possible do you guys know of any tips that would help out? And what about your guys Powermanager configurations for the battery?

What has the average life of your batterys been about? I'm a University Student and I'll be having my laptop on about 4-5 hours a day so I just want to get the best life I can out of it.

Thanks I really appreciate your help!

 

depending on your usage while on battery power, your battery life can differ. if you're going to be doing simple things like internet browsing, taking notes, excel/word/ppt, viewing pdfs, etc. and you're doing it with a relatively low brightness, you should get a fairly good runtime (i'm not sure how much) with a 9-cell. if you do much more than that, you'll get a big drop.

you also definitely want to use the thinkpad power manager, as it gives you charge settings that you can play with to extend the life of your battery (charging thresholds, parameters, etc.)

i've been using an r61 (3-year-old laptop with P8600 processor, discrete graphics, and a 7-cell battery) and when taking notes and light browsing, it lasts me roughly 2:40 before going into hibernate. since the t420 has sandy bridge and 9-cell vs. 7-cell battery, you'll definitely get a bit more than that.

 

When just browsing, writing etc. I get between 8,5-10 hours out of the 9 cell battery on my T420, but as soon as I use it to watch video or editing raw files it drops to around 5 hours.

 

Continuous Youtube music videos, Photoshop work and forum browsing under the Power Sourced Optimised Power Plan and 10/15 LCD brightness got me almost 7 hours with my 9 cell battery so I can imagine it will meet or probably exceed your daily 4-5 hours usage quite easily.

 

On my 9-cell with IGP, Intel 320 SSD and using the 'energy saver' profile with the brightness set to 10 when not dimmed and 2 when dim, I get an easy 8+ hours every time.

During that time I'll be browsing, running java apps (our internal DB systems), Outlook, etc etc. So reasonable 'office' class use, but no 'multimedia' or 'game' use.

 

One note on battery life. Some people have mentioned "throttling" issues if you keep the battery out while using the laptop. IMO, this is unnecessary.

Using the included software can more than manage your battery effectively, so don't do silly things like that to try to maximize your battery's life span.