X201 not lasting very long on battery power anymore

I've had an x201 for about 8 months, and the last month or so my battery life has just dropped off a cliff. I went from getting 6+ hours on the 6 cell and now I'm getting barely an hour and a half. I'm on the "energy saver" power mode, with screen brightness turned to 2.

The power manager reports that my battery is in good condition, and I have a 142 cycles on it. So is this normal? I've had a number of laptops over the years, and it has usually taken me closer to 4 years before I've seen this kind of decrease in performance.

 

Unless you have something running which is using a lot of power (check the battery Wattage when running on battery - it should be around 10W) it is time to a battery reset (aka recalibration) you can get to this on the Battery Maintenance menu. The reset will either fix the problem or should reveal a major loss in capacity.

John

 

I forgot to mention, I did a battery reset a few days back, and no change in battery life. I'll check the wattage tonight.

 

Do you know the manufacturer of the battery? It should Sanyo or Sony or Panasonic in Power Manager. Most ThinkPads for the main battery should be Sanyo. It is generally accepted Sanyo batteries wear out faster and die faster than other manufacturers. Your battery may genuinely be worn out if you've already done a calibration. Lenovo covers the battery for the 1st year, and only during the balance of the warranty if you purchased the battery warranty which is quite pricey.

 

I'll need to double-check, but I believe the battery is an LG. I was going to call Lenovo and check on the warranty status, as I did remember that there was supposed to be a 1 year warranty...but I haven't been able to find online policies on this describing under what scenarios they would consider the battery replaceable.

 

This happened to me on my x200s at around 6 months. I got a new battery under warranty and things were back to normal.

 

I just called and said battery life had dropped to about half of what it was new. They replaced it no-questions-asked.

 

Thanks. Good to know. I'll give a call today and see what they say.

 

So got home and checked the wattage, and saw that I was using ~30W on battery power. Checked the task manager and saw that a process called presentationfontcache.exe was using a lot of CPU cycles (around 30%). I searched Google and saw other people had the same problem, and disabling the service from starting up seemed to be OK. I did that, and things seemed to be OK for a bit, my wattage went down to around 7W and my predicted battery life went up to 5 hours...but after a bit I'm back up to ~25W again...but this time no obvious culprits in task manager. Any other ideas?

 

Use Resource Monitor. It gives you CPU, Disk, and Network usage graphs.

 

HWiNFO may also be helpful in debugging the power consumption problem. You can not only see the CPU speed (it should spend most of its time at 800MHz) but also if you enable Sensors you can also see an estimate of the CPU power consumption.

Before you do that, however, check your settings in Lenovo Power Manager. I use Balanced Performance and have CPU Deeper Sleep enabled.

John