T430 with Optimus power usage

About a month ago i bought a new t430 with a 6 cell battery, an i5 (2.8 GHz) and an Nvidia 5200M graphics card. After using the laptop for a while now i've noticed that at full charge, i only get about 4 hours of battery life.
I was a bit disappointed at this since i've read of people getting 9 hours of battery life out of their six-cells. Granted, the graphics card is going to effect that a bit but even when i have Optimus set to the Integrated Intel card i barely get 4.5 hours of battery life.

I always have the brightness low and i almost never have the back-light keyboard on so why is there such a short batter life?
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Anthony

 

Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

It's all about what processes you have going in the background and your usage habits. I could imagine the battery life hitting nine hours for a computer with non-flash websites open and a few other basic programs running. But once you start doing something as basic as typing or browsing a website with flash (like this one, the advertisements), the battery life will probably go down.

I think something like 6 hours out a 6 cell could be realistically attained; you just have to be aware of what uses processor time and therefore prevents your processor from entering idle states.

 

To completely disable the NVS you'll have to go into BIOS to switch it to integrated graphics mode.

 

I disabled Nvidia from Bios but i still got the same battery life. However, i did notice that their were several background processes running but i couldn't figure out what to end. Are there certain vital processes to watch out for?

 

I'm curious about this whole thing and tested it yesterday, with NVS disabled my i5-3210M equipped 430 lasted 5 hours 15 minutes before it hit the 3% mark. That's with Wifi on, BT connected to mouse, a combination of web browsing, netflix watching, music, and screen brightness at 30%. I have Crucial M4 mSATA so its power consumption should be the same or more compare to the standard HDD.

 

When i disabled NVS i was only able to get 4 hours of battery life, and that with wifi turned off. Could it be that the Power Manager is not getting accurate readings?

 

My power manager never gave accurate readings. The time portion of it fluctuated a lot.

 

Did you actually time it or you are going with the PM indication? I think if I leave Wifi and BT off and use the laptop to type an essay or something it'll last 7 hours without breaking a sweat.

 

Have you tried turning off the auto-brightness feature in the integrated graphics settings? Optimus goes into a deep sleep state that is very frugal in its power consumption so I doubt it's the nVidia graphics -- and disabling it in the BIOS hasn't helped you because of that. The biggest power drain on any laptop tends to be the screen so you may want to start with that and fiddle with the settings. Bear in mind the estimated battery life is dynamic and fluctuates based on a variety of factors that can change instantaneously depending on what you're doing. You might hit your peak turbo for a millisecond and it would cut your battery life estimate by 2 hours but bounce right back up as your processor goes back to its lower P-states. Thus the reading you get on your screen doesn't necessarily mean that's how much battery life you have. Your best bet is to do what you normally do on your laptop and see how quickly it drops then guesstimate the remaining time based on how much % is left.

 

I went with what the PM indicator was saying. In regards to you getting 7 hours while typing an essay, was the PM saying you have 7 hours or did you time it? Based on what i heard, it seams like you'd be better off setting the PM as a percentage scale rather than giving an actual time.

In regards to the screen settings, i haven't messed with them... they are still at factory defaults. Is there a specific setting i should watch out for?

 

PM indication is not an accurate gauge of battery life, it'll fluctuate based on power usage, when I got the 5 hour usage PM displaced different readings ranging from three to six hours. It's more like an guesstimation of what your projected battery life will be, overtime you'll learn the actual battery life through experience.

 

Ok, so i should use PM more like a reference point.
Thank you for your help.

 

screen brightness is a big factor in battery life.

 

Typically i have the screen brightness between 0-3