X200s battery life on XP and Vista

Hi,

Can anyone with an X200s and the 6-cell battery post up their battery life experiences?

I played with the laptop a bit when I first got it using Vista. I believe it was estimating almost 6 hours of runtime on a charge. Then later on I did the XP downgrade using the CDs Lenovo provided. It wasn't pretty, but it does appear to be running faster. I also had to call Lenovo support to get the drivers for the Intel 5350 WiMax card. The WiMax side was not working. I had to install the X301 drivers for this card to get it to work.

Anyway, now with XP running I am seeing more like under 5 hours of battery life on a charge...

I thought that XP would have better battery life than Vista, given that Lenovo puts that in their datasheets. Can anyone comment? Should I go back to Vista to get better battery life?

I also wonder if the software and drivers are not as polished for XP on the X200(s) than they are on Vista. The laptop seemed to work a bit more reliably (shocking, I know) on Vista... Thoughts?

Thanks!

 

b.t.w. runtime is estimated with 8/15 brightness, WiFi and bluetooth on, WiMax off.

128 GB SSD, 4gb of RAM, 1.86 GHz processor...

 

X200s, 9-cell battery, 13 hours estimate with Windows 7

:3 crazy

X200s, 6-cell battery, 8 hours estimate with Windows 7

 

that is crazy... ok. running on battery again now... i'm seeing ~6 hours with the 6-cell...

 

I get about 4.5-5.0 hours on the 6-cell with Vista Business 32bit (Lenovo install), the standard 7200rpm hard drive, 1.86ghz processor, about 1/2 brightness, wireless on, windows media player playing music, and my normal business apps running (office, visual studio, firefox).

 

I have both Vista and XP on my x200 Tablet. I get better battery life in Vista (not really sure why).

Test settings - 6/15 brightness, Wi-Fi on but not transmitting, bluetooth off, processor (1.86GHz) at slowest, no apps open.

Vista ≈ 6 watts and 10 hours
XP ≈ 7.5 watts and 8 hours
Ubuntu ≈ 11 watts and 5.5 hours

I am not really sure why there is this discrepancy, but I have found Vista (and 7) to be more power efficient than XP/Ubuntu. Vista is also very fast and reliable (as long as it's been running 15+ minutes to fill its caches and settle down).

 

I believe that Vista has a few additional power saving features that XP doesn't have. Similarly, the built-in power manager of Windows 7 has even more power saving option than Vista.

 

Yep. Linux's power management in general is pretty lackluster, at least the distros I've tried. I'm not surprised to see Linux + XP consume more power than Vista.

 

hmm... now I am considering going back to Vista to get the better battery life.. hmm... I'm seeing about 5.5-6 hours now in XP.

 

According to the data sheet: on Vista,
4-cell battery life up to 4.3 hrs
6-cell battery life up to 8.7 hrs
9-cell battery life up to 13 hrs

If 6 cell actually lasts only 5-6 hours, then wouldn't 4 cell only last 2 hours or so? Has anyone tried the 4-cell?

 

I can get 8 to 9 hours on the X200s 6-cell. Brightness is at 50%, Lowest processor speed, along with some other battery saving options available in Power Manager. This time around, I actually get close to the given figures for battery life. 9-cell with X200 is actually 9-hours, as advertised.
I would guess that it is possible to get 4 hours with the 4-cell with my settings.

 

May I wonder if that was on Windows Vista or XP?

 

Haha, my bad
Every battery rating is on Vista. Vista has more power management options than XP, so you are able to get at least an hour more (at least in my experience, anyway)

 

I get about 6hours and 15minutes consistently with my X200s w/6 cell. I generally run at the lowest brightness level in the "Battery Life Optimized" setting in Thinkvantage power manager. My bluetooth and turbo cache don't work (I have to do the Vista to turn on bluetooth then run win7 hack for bluetooth, and TC is stupid anyway). I'm running Windows 7 build 7057. I must say, though, that this machine is awesome. I've never had such great battery life on a computer before. I love it. Right now I'm at 80% with 4:16 remaining according to the Thinkvantage battery icon.

 

I believe those are the quoted numbers for the x200. The x200 s is able to get superior battery life due to the use of a low voltage CPU and LED backlit display.

The tabook quotes the x200s at the following:

4-cell battery (sits flush) - 2.43 lb, up to 4.4 hr.
6-cell battery (raises up) - 2.71 lb, up to 8.8 hr.
9-cell battery (raises up & sticks out) - 3.05 lb, up to 13.2 hr.

 

Sorry, jonlumpkin, I just deleted my post--I just found out I was looking at the wrong part of the data sheet: it was for x200, not x200s. You are absolutely right! [thumb up]

By the way, any info on the weight of x200s without any battery? Or whether a 9 cell is heavier or lighter than 4 cell plus 6 cell?

 

I'm pretty sure the x200s without battery is about 2.20 pounds, although someone with an x200s and a precision scale will have to verify it for you.

A 9 cell should weigh almost identical to a 4+6 cell (and also provide identical life as the 4 cell has only half the WHr of the 6 cell).

I've made this recommendation before, and shall repeat it now. If you buy only one battery, I would recommend the 6 cell as it provides a good balance of life, weight, and size.

However, if you are going to buy two batteries, I would recommend a 4 cell AND a 9 cell. On days you expect to have power available (or only need a short burst), take the 4 cell and/or the AC adapter. Conversely, if you can't count on AC power and need a fair bit of uptime take the 9 cell without the AC adapter as it should provide enough life for almost any situation. The 9 cell w/o adapter should be about the same size/weight as a 4 cell w/ adapter.

 

Regarding battery on XP vs. Vista: from the posts above, it seems the reason Vista gives longer life is due to its more power management options, i.e. you have ways to set the power to prolong battery life. But what if comparing XP and Vista both on the SAME power settings? Which will last longer then?

 

Vista. It isn't necessarily all about settings. The more updated OSes can interact with the power management features of hardware a bit better and run with less resource use, to obtain higher efficiency.

 

Thanks jaredy. If only doing wifi and office works, the difference shouldn't be too big?

 

Ya you wouldn't think it would be that big of a deal, but still vista and win7 can be tweaked to pretty much always yield better battery life. That of course is a good thing .

 

I got only less than 2.5 hours with 4 cell doing only web browsing . Could watching youtube be consuming too much power? When it's 11% power (18 min) left, the web pages wouldn't even load fully.

 

Flash eats CPU so it will definitely raise the wattage being used...

 

Sorry for reviving a semi-old thread. I'm trying to find comparisons on Windows 7 battery life for the X200s.

I currently have the x200s:
- Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (Retail, fresh install a month ago)
- 4-cell, 6-cell, 9-cell (all roughly 92-95% of original capacity)
- not too many processes running at startup (subjective)
- ram at about 800-900mb at startup (I haven't researched why this is, since my XP installs usually are around 200-250MB at startup)
- SU9300, 1.2Ghz
- 4GB ram, 3GB usable
- Seagate 500GB, 7200rpm hdd
- brightness usually at 3 out of 15 (I've noticed windows 7 brightness levels are generally higher than Windows XP and Windows Vista on my test installs, don't know why)
- generally Wifi on, BT off
- Power settings I have a balanced/adaptive CPU setting enabled

Startup processes that I think take CPU time:
- Avast
- Lenovo HDD protect
- Windows Defender

My Battery life:
- 9-cell = approx 6.5 hours
- 6-cell = approx 4.5-5 hours
- 4-cell = approx 2.5-3 hours

Current wattage while idle:
- approx 10-12Whr

Does anyone else have a similar 7200rpm HDD configuration with Windows 7 have any suggestions on improving battery life?

Does anyone else have numbers to share?

Thank you.

 

Having had 2 x X200 P8600 and 1 x X200s SL9400, my experience is that there is hardly a noticeable difference between the X200s and the X200 when it comes to battery life. With the 6-cell battery I typically got around 4.5 hours with about 1/3 brightness, running office apps and and surfing via WLAN. Power Management would typically be Energy Star mode.

The difference between the X61 T7300 and X61s L7500 would be much greater.

 

I find this very hard to believe unless you are doing nothing but idling. But even then I think it is not possible in real life.