W520 Battery Life...Only 4 hrs

I'm only getting 4 hrs of battery life on my W520. Several reviews stating that you can get 6.5 to 7 hrs. Below are my setting

BIOS
-Battery optimal

Adaptive Power management
-Balanced

CPU power management
-Enabled

Nvidia Optimus



Power Options
Intel Graphics

 

well it all depends on what you are doing with the CPU

 

What's your screen brightness? The screen is one of the major power consumers in any laptop, and reducing the brightness usually nets you a large difference in battery life.

 

What OS? Linux or Windows? I'm not positive about Linux but Windows will over ride all your BIOS power settings once it's booted. You need to look in the power manager and report those settings. What's set in the BIOS is irrelevant other than the Nvidia Optimus setting.

 

You have to compare the battery settings (in Windows) to those of the reviews and what you're doing to what the reviewer did for the time period. Then you'll get an accurate comparison.

 

I use my W520 quite frequently for working from home which means I'm using a VPN connection to my work network and I usually use Remote Desktop to remote into my PC at work (which means my work PC is doing all the *real* work.)

Doing this, I can usually get close to 8 hours on one charge. Granted, I don't think that using Remote Desktop all day uses much processor power, so if I was watching movies all day, I'd suspect that I wouldn't get anywhere near 8 hours.

BTW, I have the i7-2720 processor, Q1000M graphics card, Windows 7, and I haven't messed with the power settings since I got the machine.

 

Does OP have a 6-cell or a 9-cell?

 

I got the 9 Cell. Screen brightness is on 11 with Max Battery Life set. I was just browsing the Internet with not CPU intensive tasks at all. Puzzling.

 

make sure you have SP1 and all the updates. Also check resource monitor (resmon) and make sure you don't have any background task/IO running that you're not aware of (i.e Antivirus, etc)

 

There are various options in the Lenovo Power Manager and it is best to experiment with these while checking the power consumption.

You may also have some animated Flash running on some open web pages and that will help drain the battery. I use Firefox with Flashblock to control this problem. You can also check the Processes tab in Task Manager to see which processes are utilising the CPU.

John

 

Yeah, anything running flash will kill battery life. even a simple chat app takes my T420 from 6 hours to 3-4.

 

Do you happen to be running Chrome or Skype?

 

Well, I have my machine for a while now and I can say that by only running it with a single SSD active (a 300GB Intel 320) I was able to get a couple of times over 8 hours of development and office work.

Like with every computer out there, it is needed to to play around and tweak it for the best possible performance and battery times. A clean Windows install is a must, than reduce the number of running processes and services to the min required, than tweak the power options themselves, disable all devices you don't need etc. etc.

4 hours doesn't sound like much, but if you really use the power of this machine, it's actually great.

As a side note, while developing I could go for hours without having the fan spin not even once. TPFC is a must though, because the BIOS tries to keep a very low temp, so it spins the darn fan quite a bit by default.

 

you are spot on sir.

SSD will give you 1 hour extra battery time no question about it. TPFAN is MUST on thinkpad. In fact lenovo should consider such service...

 

Under these conditions, are you using the machine on your lap? How warm is the machine getting?

One of the things I like about the W520 is its ability to stay cool.

 

I use it on my lap from time to time, the bottom gets a bit warm and strangely enough, it's not directly below the place where I assume the processor is, but rather in the center.

The key part is "a bit warm", nothing uncomfortable, quite the opposite it rather feels like cozy, but you have to keep in mind that it's not high summer over here, still spring, and the outside temperatures are below 20C most of the time. I'm quite sure this "a bit warm" thing will become something more once the environment temperature is higher.

An important thing, this is only with SSDs (3 in total). A HDD should put a bit more heat out.

 

Also.... what processor do you have?

Renee

 

I have the 2720QM...not really doing any flash browsing. I downloaded TPFAN and it does quiet down the fan but still only seeing 4 just over hours.

 

And my idle CPU Temps are @ 60C when just browsing the web.

 

That sounds about right to be honest. Are you using an SSD?

 

Eh, it should be capable of better. I normally sit in the 7-8 hour range. If you have power manager open, tell me a few things. What does it report for battery capacity remaining (from the advanced tab where it gives battery details) when fully charged? When in use, what numbers do you typically see for wattage used?

I typically sit around 10-12 watts while reading/typing. Briefs jumps up to 20 watts while loading web pages, or opening programs.

The reason I ask on actual capacity in the battery is to be sure you aren't in battery lifespan mode. In battery lifespan mode the battery will only charge to like 80% or so (even though the taskbar says 100%).

 

No...just the 320GB 7200rpm factory drive...I don't understand how alot of users are getting 6-7 hours when I'm just browsing the web and can't get over 4.

 

Start up power manager, switch to advanced, and look at your wattage (under the battery tab) for real-time battery consumption numbers.

Use the power source optimized battery plan. Set CPU speed to lowest, enable automatic optical drive power off, and adjust other power/fan settings to the power saving options.

Go into the task manager and take a look at your CPU consumption. What's using up your CPU? I believe that many times, poor battery life is due to processes that are preventing the CPU from entering a deeper sleep mode, since the processor has the most variable power consumption. Try to shut down whatever processes are using up CPU time. Yes, websites with flash (including this one) will negatively affect your battery life.

Maximizing battery life is a matter of minimizing processor usage.

 

And next turn down the display brightness.

John

 

Ah, I mean, that's easy to control though.

 

Depending on your browsing habits, using a browser with a flash blocking plug-in can help to reduce the impact that flash has on battery life while browsing the web.

 

No matter what i do i can barely get over 4 hours. My system is never using less then 17 watts even with display mode set to 0 and power stretch active.

How on earth is your system using 12-13 watts? How are people getting 7-8 hours?

 

My system idles at 8.5W-ish (+- 0.5W), and I'm on a balanced profile which isn't all that power frugal. I got no clue what your system is doing. Are you on a clean install or the factory image?

 

You might have the discrete NVidia chip stuck in active mode. Try forcing integrated in the BIOS and seeing if that helps. Otherwise, you probably have a renegade CPU-consuming process.

 

What is your battery life with TPFanControl removed and you are using pretty miserly settings with Lenovo Power Manager?

 

Its a factory image on a mini ssd in the msata port.

There are not any processes using the CPU that show up in task manager.

I will test to see if the Nvidia 2000 is stuck on but im pretty sure its not.

I cant believe its supposed to go into single digit wattage, thats amazing!

 

Actually, yes, that sounds plausible that your dGPU is stuck on, as 4 hours is about the battery life that the W520 has when the dGPU is always on.