T61p Thinkpad Is 3.9 hours battery life possible?

I'm not sure how they test their battery life, but lenovo claims that there is 3.9 hours on a 6 cell t61p thinkpad. So far, my T61p can only manage 2.5 hours with the highest battery management settings. I'm wondering where on earth did the 1.4 hours go?? Were they testing the battery with the conditions of the laptops turned on and LCD display off. 2.5 hours is too short IMO.

 

Well most manufactures test buy turning everything off except what is needed for the laptop to run and let it sit no internet, no word, nothing just sitting.

 

Lenovo benchmarks their laptops' battery life while in standby.

 

If it was on standby the battery would last several days.

 

i actually get higher than 3.9 hours...around 4.2, which allows me to fly from the east coast of the US to the west coast while watching movies the whole time/gaming/listening to music. It's possible. Just turn off all the extraneous stuff.

 

I was kidding. Only Apple does that.

 

I wish I got 3.9 hours with my 9 Cell.

 

Jesus, I'm with you there....


I bought the 9-cell hoping for a little more than the 3ish hours it gives me all said and done (that's with wireless on, 50% brightness...maybe some music playing, doing normal things like surfing the web/word/AIM).

I start to get annoyed but then remember how much faster and more efficient my T61p is than anything I've used, and I start to love it again haha.

 

I guess you guys can try undervolting the cpu.
I am using T61 w/ nvidia 140m+7cell and could boost from 3:15 to 3:45 battery life on average (w/ wifi but no bluetooth)
I know nvidia 570m uses more, but undervolting should be able to sqeeze a little bit juice ...

 

Should start a poll/thread and grab general battery life of a t61p from users in the forum. Actually I think I will do that right now....

 

bump, just wanna see if others have achieved longer battery life.
I have windows vista basic with most of the extra options turned off as according to the tweak your laptop guide. I still get 2.5 hours.

 

With a 9cell battery with an NVS140M 128mb, if i use my t61 for microsoft word or youtube, i pull four hours and twenty minutes, more or less.

If i play games, it drops to two hours

 

2.5 hours is about what I get. I doubt you can extend it to 3.9 hours (what an arbitrary number too). The NVS140m is the T61, not the T61p.

 

Hi Everyone,

I have a T61 with T8300 C2D (undervolted to 1.00v @ 12x multiplier and 0.925v @ 6x multiplier), also have the Nvidia 140m discrete, 160GB Hitachi 5400rpm, 14.1" WXGA+ (LG-Philips), Intel wireless card, and 9-cell battery (Sanyo).

I get about 4.0-4.5 hours w/ wireless and watching movie on HDD w/ 40-50% brightness.

I guess a 6-cell battery should be able to get about 3.0 hrs of batt. life if you use a discrete card with some undervolting. It helps to lower the cpu heat, lowers the fan usage, and helps to draw less voltage. Overall, it should be able to add another 15-30 minutes.

And a 7-cell should hit about 3.5 hrs to 3hrs 45mins of battery life. Obviously a 7200rpm hdd will draw more power and create more heat. Furthermore, you can tweak your Wireless settings to Maximize battery life... That should help too. And removing bloatware + turning off spyware/adware/anti-virus programs should also increase battery life.

Cheers!

 

That would be a feat because you have the T61p, hehe... You sacrifice battery life for graphics + your laptop has the 15.4" screen which also draws more power... I think 3 hrs of battery life would be a more realistic goal, lol

 

When I travel cross country, I turn off wifi and stop all unnecessary tasks, and I manage to squeeze at least 4 to 4.5 hours out of my 9-cell. Sometimes I'll dim the screen a bit to squeeze some more, but usually (with take-off and landing limitations on electronics), 4.5 hours is enough, and I don't find that dimming the screen saves a ton of power. I'm usually only watching anime or movies on hard disk or DVD. Once I loaded up half-life 2 for some in-air gaming, but my T61p started overheating after about 45 minutes (started getting graphics anomalies that made the game unplayable). I've never had too much luck with my T61p and FPS gaming though...it overheats pretty easily, even on AC power.

Here's the MS-DOS batch file I use to disable unnecessary tasks on my T61p...just save it to a .bat file and it's ready to run. Before you run it, you'd probably want to edit this to suit your own software configuration, it should be fairly obvious how (please don't ask me how). Also, you might not want to use this unless you're willing to reboot your system after you're done with low-power consumption usage. It's probably fine to write a similar script to restart the services, but I just find it easier to reboot. I don't know how some of those windows services respond to being stopped, then started, in arbitrary order.

Code:

REM 1) Disable wifi, LAN, sound (if not needed), and reduce LCD screen brightness.
REM 2) Run this file to stop services that aren't needed while in transit.
REM 3) Enjoy up to twice the battery life!

REM -------------------- Automatic Updates
net stop wuauserv
REM -------------------- Background Intelligent Transfer Service
net stop BITS
REM -------------------- Bluetooth Support Service
REM net stop BthServ
REM -------------------- Computer Browser
net stop Browser
REM -------------------- DHCP Client
net stop Dhcp
REM -------------------- DNS Client
net stop Dnscache
REM -------------------- Error Reporting Service
net stop ERSvc
REM -------------------- Help and Support
net stop helpsvc
REM -------------------- IIS Admin
REM net stop IISADMIN
REM -------------------- Machine Debug Manager
net stop MDM
REM -------------------- Microsoft Exchange Management
REM net stop MSExchangeMGMT
REM -------------------- Lotus Notes Multi-user Cleanup Service
net stop "Multi-user Cleanup Service"
REM -------------------- Print Spooler
net stop Spooler
REM -------------------- Remote Access Connection Manager (Creates a network connection.)
REM Stopping doesn't work.
REM net stop RasMan
REM -------------------- Remote Registry
REM net stop RemoteRegistry
REM -------------------- Security Center
REM net stop wscsvc
REM -------------------- Shell Hardware Detection (Provides notifications for AutoPlay hardware events)
net stop ShellHWDetection
REM -------------------- SoundMAX Agent Service
REM net stop "SoundMAX Agent Service (default)"
REM -------------------- SSDP Discovery Service (Enables discovery of UPnP devices on your home network.)
REM net stop SSDPSRV
REM -------------------- Symantec AntiVirus
net stop "Symantec AntiVirus"
REM -------------------- Symantec AntiVirus Definition Watcher (Monitors and maintains virus definitions.)
net stop DefWatch
REM -------------------- Symantec Event Manager
net stop ccEvtMgr
REM -------------------- Symantec Settings Manager
net stop ccSetMgr
REM -------------------- System Update (Lenovo)
net stop SUService
REM -------------------- Task Scheduler
REM net stop Schedule
REM -------------------- TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper (Enables support for NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) service and NetBIOS name resolution)
REM net stop LmHosts
REM -------------------- Telephony (Provides Telephony API (TAPI) support for programs that control telephony devices and IP based voice connections on the 

local computer and, through the LAN, on servers that are also running the service.)
REM Can't stop, RasMan depends on it.
REM net stop TapiSrv
REM -------------------- Themes
REM net stop Themes
REM -------------------- Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
net stop SharedAccess
REM -------------------- Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) (Provides image acquisition services for scanners and cameras.)
net stop stisvc
REM -------------------- Windows Time
net stop W32Time
REM -------------------- Wireless Zero Configuration
net stop WZCSVC
REM -------------------- World Wide Web Publishing
REM net stop W3SVC
REM -------------------- Infrared Monitor
REM net stop Irmon

pause

 

I forgot to add, to minimize capacity loss and keep my battery healthy, I keep it charged only 40-50% almost all the time (using Power Manager). See this wikipedia entry for more information on Li-Ion battery capacity loss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery#Storage_temperature_and_charge. I only fully charge the battery just before traveling.

One more tip for air travelers...when you've got a layover, bring along a small three-way electrical socket adapter. People are generally quite happy to share their airport power socket if you've got a splitter and you're in an airport where they are scarce.

 

Good point! I 'm going to buy two (one for US and for EU)...

 

4.3 hours 7 cell while on the net Wi-Fi on brightness @ 50%.

 

So if you run this, it disables all the features that you have listed in the batch file. But to get everything back to normal you simply restart? (Aside from the option of re-writing a batch file to re-enable everything)

 

Right, all that batch script does is stop a bunch of Windows services. It does not permanently disable them, so restarting Windows will return your laptop to "normal". Depending on what software you have installed, you may have more services that you can stop, which you would have to find on your own.

 

Sounds good, thanks for the heads up. (+rep )

 

I've found a few things work. Underclocking the video card and lowering the resolution.

 

How do you underclock the NVIDIA card? Is it risky and hard?

 

There is a bit to it. You have to use 3rd party drivers. There's instructions on how to do it somewhere around here.

The worst you can do by underclocking is bluescreen.

 

I found that nVidia's "PowerMizer" feature automatically underclocks the GPU and GPU memory admirably, dropping GPU to as low as 168 MHz and GPU memory to 99 MHz when they aren't being fully utilized. You can use the nVidia "Monitor" utility to see how fast they are running while idle and under load. No need for 3rd party drivers, unless they perhaps clock them even lower? It's nice to have it done automatically and not worry about it.

 

Where do you download powermizer?

 

PowerMizer is not a seperate download, it is a feature/functionality included in nVidia's driver package. It was included with the Lenovo drivers for my T61p's Quadro FX 570M, I'm not sure if it's included for other models, or with other driver packages, but I would assume so, at least for T61p's with discrete nVidia graphics.

 

Fignuts, thank you very much for your advice. I will think about doing it when I get home.