X220 9-cell battery life is sucking

Hey all,

My X220 with 9-cell has been dying very prematurely the past month or so. After about 4 or 5 hours of usage, it will die. (despite saying it has over 6 hours left). I haven't tweaked any of the power settings.

What could be going on? It says my battery still is in great condition, etc.

Any help is appreciated! I've had this die too many times in class and it's starting to get old.

 

Calibrate it using Power Manager. You may have weak or dying cells.

 

^ agreed worked wonders for me don't go overboard though too many calibrations can actually hurt your battery

 

Is the calibration that you're referring to the "battery gauge reset" on the power manager??

 

Can anyone answer that?

 

Yes.

10 char.

 

I would strongly advise monitoring power usage first, before that calibration.
If you haven't played with any of the power settings, time to start digging in.

Open Power Manager, go to the Battery tab, and scroll down one notch to where you can see the wattage.
Take the battery's total capacity (Wh), divide that with the Wattage, and that's the number of hours you'll get on battery. In fact, you'll most certainly get less than that, since the laptop will hybernate or shut down at 5%.

The wattage will never stay constant, but it is a good indicator of whether you're going full blast, or whether you're being thrifty with it.

My old T420 was mostly at <10W. If you're at 16+ while not doing much (no video, games, etc) then select the power plan (first tab) called Power Source Optimized and see how that works (with the wattage).

Your wattage will stay high, if you're asking your laptop to perform battery-consuming tasks, like using the DVD drive, running CPU-intensive tasks, or having the screen on at high brightness levels.

If you have poor battery life WITH high consumption, this is as it should be. If your consumption is low and the above-mentioned math does not add up, then, and only then I'd maybe do a recalibration. And speaking for myself, I'd rather send the battery back than recalibrate.

 

If it's a sudden drop in charge (instantaneously), then it's generally a fault within the battery. If it drains faster than normal, then it is likely high power consumption.

 

Thanks for the responses guys.

So looking at my battery settings, everything is low and battery life enabled and my screen brightness is normally around 8 or 9. With just browsing on my wattage reads around 12W.

To me that seems unnecessarily high for doing hardly anything.

I'm still experiencing the sudden battery drainage also after about 5 hours.

Should I just send in the battery?

 

What is your CPU speed set to?

Which browser are you using?

 

12w is ok if you're browsing with screen at 8-9
I don't know about the sudden drop, though

 

Maybe the best idea now is to have a new, or known to be long lasting 9cell battery to compare with your current one. You may borrow one from your friends or colleague.

Test and compare the result with your battery, then you will know if the problem is in your battery or in the laptop body.

You can also put your battery on another x220 and test.

 

I'm using Mozilla as my browser.

I would test my battery on someone else's laptop however i'm probably the only student at the University of Iowa with a X220 haha.

And my CPU speed is set to low while on battery.

 

Start a campaign and suggest other students go for x220

 

Make sure that you are running FlashBlock to stop any unwanted animated Flash content from running. AdBlock Plus is another recommended add-on.

John

 

How about not install Adobe Flash at all, when you need flash just use Chrome, it has build-in flash support.

 

That's one option. However, Flash is used on many web pages. FlashBlock shows an icon which the user clicks on if they want to see the content. I find it convenient.

And from my past experience, another thing that can leak power is Bluetooth. Not from the power used by the hardware but from triggering increased CPU activity.

John

 

Which is essentially the same thing. Plus Chrome consumes more power, so you're kinda working against the goal there.

Consider NoScript as well; it blocks rogue scripts as well as flash by default. It does break some sites at first, but you can easily define permissions.

Load up Resource Monitor and go to the Overview tab while it's idling with it's usual programs running. See if there's any unwarranted CPU or Disk activity.

Furthermore, go to Command Prompt and run powercfg -energy.
It should produce a energy-report.html in your user account profile. See if it pinpoints any causes of excess power consumption. (It'll list some unrelated stuff like no sleep timeout and other stuff.)

 

Loaded up the resource monitor with my browser open and whatnot. Got a CPU reading of 2-5%.

I also couldn't find anything that was increasing the power consumption.

 

2-5% could prevent the cpu from going to its lower state. but what you should really watch and report on is the wattage. then do the math, figure out if the battery life is (much) shorter than expected, and go from there

 

This is consistent with my experience as well. If you're idling with and without a browser open, the latter situation only consumes about half a watt more power at that CPU load, though.

 

2-5% sounds about right using Resource Monitor.

Was there also any unruly disk activity?