X201 Battery Life Issue

I got a new extended battery(84Whr) for my X201 about a year ago. It's worked well and I;ve mostly gotten a full workday out of it. Recently though the life seems to have pretty dramatically shortened. When it is at a 100% charge it still reports ~6 hours of use, but in reality I'm only getting about 3 (this is with screen dimmed to 2 bars, and mostly light web or email). Battery manager reports my battery is in good condition.

What is particularly frustrating is that I don't get any noticeable warning before the computer just shuts down due to a critical low battery. I almost always have my speakers muted, but I feel like on other computers I've owned I'd get a visual popup warning when I hit 10% of the battery. Here I'm just working along and all of a sudden the screen goes dark and the battery LED starts flashing orange.

It would be great if I could figure out what is going on, and get something closer to the battery life I used to get, but I'd settle for some kind of visual warning so that I at least had a couple of minutes to try to plug in.

Edit: Low battery notification is turned on under both the Power Manager settings and in Windows Power Options for when the battery gets to 10%

 

You should re-calibrate your battery using the power manager tool if you haven't recently

 

Thanks, will try that over Thanksgiving when I'll be away from my computer for awhile.

One other maybe interesting fact I just noticed when I went to see how to recalibrate my battery. Windows is reporting 6hr and 40 minutes of estimated battery life, and Lenovo's Power Manager is reporting 5hrs and 20 minutes.

 

If it happens *that* suddenly (the battery LED should be solid orange for quite some time before it starts blinking) you likely have one or more blown cells in there...and you should start shopping for a replacement.

Good luck.

 

check for battery firmware. if not, then 1 or couple elements are faulty.