X230T battery life?

Okay, I have the 6-cell for the X230T, 320gb hard drive, 128gb mSATA SSD (mydigital BP3), i7 processor, power plan is Energy Saver and pretty much everything else is at the factory default settings. I did a "reset battery gauge" last night and I'm at 97% battery power now and it reads 5:12 time remaining. The only program running is Internet Explorer (only to type this). Fingerprint reader and USB are set to on. Brightness is set to 7.

Are there any tweaks I can do to increase battery time/life without reducing too much performance?

I'm now at 96% with 5:15 left. I thought the 6-cell would provide at least 6 hours with light usage, so I'm only getting about 5 1/4 hours. I've been deliberately not using the power adaptor because I read that keeping it plugged in a lot will affect overall battery life. Or should I just keep it plugged in whenever convenient? Or am I being OCD about this? As I end this, I'm at 94% with 5:00 remaining.

Edit: I'm noticing a difference between the Lenovo Power Manager toolbar battery gauage (the green one) and the icon one in taskbar. I'm at 88% and the green gauge says 4:39 left, but the other gauge says 5:04 left. Which one should I trust?

 

Removing the mechanical drive should yield you better battery life. For reference my X220 tablet hits about 9 hours on Wifi, screen brightness turned down to 0-1.

 

I know the mechanical drive eats up more power, but my program/system files are on my mSATA SSD. Besides, I read that the X220T gets a bit more battery life than the X230T. Part of me wonders if I got a bum battery or if there's something that I'm not adjusting or if 5 hours is typical for a fully charged 6-cell battery for the X230T.

 

I find that hard to believe, IB CPU's introduce 1st generation 3D transistors which use less power than SB CPU's. What does Power Manager say about how much WHr your battery is? Commander Wolf has owned both X230t and X220t, you might want to ask his opinion on the matter.

 

I think that if you stop working and walk away for a moment, you will see the battery meter move up. The 6 hour plus time you are seeking is under normal use. If you are actually sitting there and surfing the web for 6 solid hours non stop, the battery time will reflect that.

For example, I'm working on something here and I need to access the internet for some service manuals. While I am surfing multiple sites, the battery meter is dropping, but if I stop for a while, it creeps back up--think of it as a running average. Work 10 straight minutes and it give you a time as if you were to work like that until the battery is dead; work 10 minutes and sit back for 10 minutes and you will find that it averages those estimated time left numbers up.

 

The readings on duration may not be totally accurate depending on the way you use it. It tends to estimate based on your current power consumption and remaining capacity. What are you doing on the system under those conditions? If you're checking while downloading, etc. it will lower the estimated times. When you idle, the estimates go up. In real world usage, it's an average of all those little things. Brightness also tends to have a huge impact on battery life. What's your average and idle wattage? That's how much power you're currently consuming. You can check it in Power Manager under battery if you're in advanced.

As for the part where you're not plugging it in, I don't see why you would run on battery if you don't need to. By using the battery more often, you'll just use more charge cycles which is what usually wears down battery longevity. I would plug it in and just use the Power Manager's settings to control the thresholds when it charges the battery. For example, you can set it to only recharge once you are below 50% and to stop charging at 90%.

 

I did a full reboot and battery gauge said I had 3 hours, then it bounced around and finally settled around 5 hours and now it reads 6 hours with 94% left and I only have IE and Word running.

Sure I understand the battery gauge will bounce around depending on what's running on the laptop.

First, I'm getting different readings from the two different battery gauges (Lenovo's and Window's). Which is the more accurate? The green Lenovo say's I have 6 hours left and Window's says I have 6 & 1/2 hours left.

Second, I read about users getting 6+ hours of battery life on their 6-cell, but what sort of power schema are we talking about? Is the 6+ hours of battery life when Battery Stretch is activated and the power plan is set for Max Battery Life? Right now I'm at 94% with 5:15 left -- make that 5:34 left while Window's battery gauge says I have 6 & 1/2 hours left.

I don't know, maybe there's something on my computer that's sucking power and I can't find it.

The only programs I had running while writing the above were Internet Explorer, Word, and Power Manager. Attached is from my Power Manager.

 

I mean, here's the attachment.

 

Having Power Manager's interface running takes up a fair bit of power itself.

Go to Command Prompt, run powercfg -energy. Check the report for things you can tweak. It lists a lot of random things that you probably don't want to change (settings on AC, etc.)

Also, try the following:
Run C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ngen.exe executequeueditems
Go to Windows' Power Options, Change Plan settings, Change advanced power settings. Under Minimum processor state, lower this from 5% to 0%. Cap Maximum processor state to 50%.
Consider disabling some of your TSR programs, and some of Windows' services that you don't need.

 

Thanks for tellling me how to generate a Energy Report, but how do I interpret it?? It's attached. All I can make out is that the processor is utilization is high. I guess everything looks okay. I don't know what I can tweak from reading it.

 

Forgot to attach the Energy Report. I only attached the Error ones.

 

Generally browsing on my 6 cell x220 I get around 7.5 hrs. The intel 310 uses like a 1/4w when active or something around there. But I spin down the HDD in power manager after 30 seconds of non use. This can drop your overall watt usage about 2-3w.

Try going into power manager, going to the desired profile and clicking "Idle Timers" drop down. Then change "Stop hard disk rotation" to 30 seconds. This will help when you are just browsing or using things that don't access the HDD.

 

Thanks. I just took your advice and I also turned off my Bluetooth radio, makes no sense having it on since I don't have any Bluetooth devices.

Yesterday, I ran the X230T strictly off the battery. I got about 6 1/2 hours of battery life only when I was working strictly from my hard drive (mSATA SSD). I was only running Word, BUT I noticed a drop of about 30 minutes when I was running Freecell or Minesweeper. The 30 minutes came back once I turned them off.

When web surfing, I lost about 30 to 40 minutes especially when visiting a webpage that has multimedia video in it. Lost only 15 to 20 mnutes when visiting a webpage that was only text based.

Conclusions: I can get 6 1/2 hours running basic office documents off my SSD. My battery will probably only get about 5 to 5 3/4 hours websurfing, depending on the type of webpages

If anyone knows of any other simple tweak I can do to extend the battery will be welcomed.

 

Looking at your values, I'm sure you can still trim a lot of stuff down to get your power consumption lower.

Most of the settings can be done in Power Manager. Limiting CPU, lowering brightness, disabling unused ports, etc. all add up. For example, you can be more aggressive with your timings to dim sooner. Definitely disable bluetooth or other wireless if you're not using it.

Then there's the software side. Processes that run in the background can zap more CPU cycles. If you're up to it, look under msconfig to see if you can disable some start up stuff. Personally, I also went to disable unused Windows Services that won't be used. You need to be careful with those kinds of settings though if you haven't done it before.

 

Thanks for the tips. I'm from the old school of always plugging in a laptop, even when on the road. Now, I usually running on battery power because I heard it's good to exercise the battery. Or should I run on AC power (& uninstall the battery) and only use the battery when I'm on the road? Then again, does it even matter with L-ion batteries?

I didn't disable bluetooth by going to msconfig, but I did turn it off by going to Fn+F5. The only port I probably won't ever use is the Expresscard slot, but didn't know where it is when I went to the Device Manager. As for limiting CPU, I'd rather leave it alone, since I have no idea what I'm doing nor what will happen if I start playing around with it.

Oh man, another learning opportunity. At least I know I can disable everything that deals with networking, since this is a stand alone system. I'm surprised that quite a few things are already disabled in Windows Services. I suppose even if I disable a couple of things, it'll help.

 

Some people like to unplug the battery when the AC is connected. The idea is the heat will wear down the battery faster, which is true. But you may lose performance A lot of ThinkPads cap the performance when the battery is not plugged in. The rationale is that you could use more power than the AC can supply. You also risk data loss if power is interrupted. Personally, I'd just leave the battery in. Batteries have a limited lifespan anyways in both time since manufacturing and number of charge cycles.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant bluetooth as a separate point. For CPU, you can throttle it down under your Power Manager profiles in system settings and put system performance to low. With just web browsing and word processing, you generally shouldn't need it to go full throttle.

This is a good reference for what each service is and does, but if you're not sure, leave it the way it is:
Black Viper’s Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Service Configurations | Black Viper | www.blackviper.com
For msconfig, the idea is similar. For example, I disabled things like Adobe updates, etc. Which I prefer be done manually.

Are you running from a factory setup or clean install? There a lot of other hidden areas where you can tweak or change settings. Like with the Intel video drivers -- right click on your desktop -> Graphics Properties -> Power.

 

I've been to blackviper and to other websites to figure out which service is safe to disable. I'm just confused now if I should disable services by going through msconfig or through services from Computer Managment.

I'm running factory setup.

 

Pertaining the battery.

Tweak the Lenovo Power manager threshold settings to your advantage. There is a setting called "Charge Thresholds" that will start charging the battery at a certain percentage and stop as well. This automates your action of unplugging and replugging.

Last I heard cycling the battery to almost zero and charging to 100% was not good.

 

I have it set for "Automatically optimize for battery lifespan."

Regarding cycling the battery to almost zero and charging to 100%. I heard it's different depending on the chemistry of the battery. Right now I have 28% battery power and it says I have 1:10 left. I don't know if 1:10 left at 28% is what everyone else has.

 

That's good. If you're not sure about something, just ask or leave it alone. Use services to disable features/functions. MSConfig should be used to disable start up services that you don't want. Those are the things done by other programs which won't show up under the Windows services mentioned above.

It's still not good. Deep discharges all the way down should generally be avoided if possible, unless you're recalibrating the gauge.