t400 max battery life

ok i know some people have post about max battery but i just cant seem to get 9 hours of battery life on my t400. i have the same config as the review except a 320 5200rpm hdd. i have tried everything, power managment, battery stretch, and etc, the most i can get is 7 hours to 7:30 when fully charged with everything at its lowest. so i would really like to know the how to config my machine to be more like the one in the review.
thank you

 

Same here man, im getting more like 6hr and 30 min on 9 cell

i have the lower wattage processor too, the P8400

 

Are you using a 9-cell or 6-cell?

 

Similar disappointing results for me on the 9 cell.

 

I have the T9400, 7200rpm drives and the 9 cell battery. I could go full bore for 4-5 hours, or over 10 hours with battery strech and minimal use.

If you use suspend every time you leave the computer time you leave the computer for 5 minutes, it can go even longer.

Again, I am not going by the power meter/util readings; those are only estimates. I ran a couple tests to see what would happen.

So things are not practical (for me); i.e. turning the brightness down to the lowest level is hard on my eyes, unless I was in a pitch black room.

I came from a 12 cell from another laptop brand, and the 9 cell is decent enough. I would not go below this. I need a laptop that will last the day.)

Suspending when I grab some lunch, or am on a long call (that does not need computer) and even a long trip to the crapper helps stretch the battery.

 

I have a 80gb 5400rpm, 1 GB of ram, P8400 and 6-cell. I get about 4-5 hours with the brightness at 50%. I can't push that to 6. This is with wi-fi on the whole time

 

LOL! Good one man, I guess this is your secret to getting such great battery life out of your T400.

 

Try winxp system, it will give you extra 1 hour comparing with vista

 

Hi all,
I am thinking about buy new T400. How much time I got from 4 cell with integrated graphic card on sufring and programming in linux, procesor 8400, hard drive 5400rpm . ? approximated thank you very much

 

Try installing the registry patches at the bottom of the T400 driver matrix:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70439

Many of them are power management related. I noticed my power consumption dropped after installing them.

 

DONOT mess with registries!....Your Lenovo comes pre-configured for your system!, If you want to increase battery life, try the following:

Close Gadgets bar (approx: 30 mins difference)
Close all tools except: Access Connections and Hard drive protection.
Adjust screen brightness to 60%
Processor speed to BALANCED, (Do NOT set it to lowest, you will waste more energy this way!)
Mute volume
Turn Microphone off (originally ON from factory)
Set wireless to conserve (usually automatic if you set the battery life to balanced)
and finally DONOT Hibernate!, you will conserve energy by putting the computer to sleep, more than having it in Hibernation.

Post back your results after you try this and PM me if you have any questions.

 

Sorry, but I believe you are wrong about a couple things.... first off, I assume bill12 is talking about installing those patches for people that did a clean install and found out their power consumption went up... I personally did a clean install with vista and I found reinstalling those patches helped out a bit. Also, I don't understand why you would think hibernation uses more power than sleep.... sleep saves data to ram and puts the computer in low power state, while hibernation saves to disk and completely shuts off the computer. For long periods of time, hibernation uses no energy while sleep does. I'm also not quite sure why having the cpu on lowest power mode would use more energy than on balanced... but maybe you've tested power consumption at load/idle for both settings and know some more details.

 

you are right about the patches and hibernation. Keep in mind i'm talking about realistic use of the computer. As a student, I turn my laptop on and off maybe 5-6 times a day, and it robs more power to put the computer to Hibernate than to put it in standby mode.

However, here is my theory on helping the battery by CPU in Balanced mode:

- CPU is set to adaptive settings, which means it will clock itself to full speed when needed. (usually in the lowest mode CPU is locked to a certain frequency, and it will take longer to perform a task due to this)
- Having the CPU on lowest setting will increase heat for performance intensive tasks, which in turn affects efficiency.
- If you look under advanced setting, all of the other hardware is adjusted in the same manner, so overall, your computer is being more efficient for everyday computing, which requires at-least a little below normal power to execute.


- Another thing I forgot to mention was saving battery life by ejecting the CD-ROM (software eject ONLY)

 

Yes, the patches on the driver matrix are for clean installs.

 

Agreed on sleep vs. hibernate. Sleep uses so little power, there really is not reason to hibernate save battery life in a regular day.

I can put a computer in sleep mode for days. Depending on the laptop, you can get about 12 hours in sleep for every 20% of battery life. So that's about 3 days of sleep mode, assuming it doesn't hibernate. I've had laptops stay in sleep mode for 4 days before.

 

Hi,

Can anyone with the T400 9 cell battery confirm battery life with wireless off and MS powerpoint on. I plan to use my T400 for class which will be a 7-8 hour day. Thanks.

 

My god 10 hours!!!!? Who wants to trade for my U330??

 

I can. I just got mine yesterday and have been using it all day today to finish up an assignment I have. We pretty much used Excel the whole time with a little bit of web browsing for info. Started at 1pm, its now 6, and this thing has another 3 hours. So essentially its at 8 hours now and i could probably get more out of it if i tweak the settings a bit. Oh, and I'm downloading HD video from the school hub right now and this thing is still beastin.

 

Thanks MaX PL. What things have you and will you tweak to gain battery life?

 

well theres a ton i can do as far as battery optimization in the battery manager. the program is kinda confusing right now and i'm still trying to get used to vista. within the next few days i should have things straightened out.

 

How long does the t400 take to charge? Or what is the charge rate in watts?

 

Depens on how far the battery is charged. The last few percent take the longest. At least with the T61 I have (I assume T400 is equal on that part).

 

My friend is getting 7:30 hrs on his T400 with 9-cell (60% brightness, wifi on, bluetooth off, integrated graphics) doing Excel and surfing the web. Battery was at 90% and he stopped when it was 15% (all of this was done in one sitting + some bathroom breaks).

Edit: I'm getting about 7 hours of battery life with the exact same settings as above (it seems like I'm losing 30 minutes somewhere).

 

Hate to revive an old thread, but I didn't want to start a new one either.

I recently purchased a T400 with a 9 cell battery with the following basic specs:
T9400
3GB of RAM
160GB 7200RPM
Intel 5300
LED Backlit display

When I set the power scheme to Max Battery Life in Power Manager, I can only get about 3:45 of battery life. That is with wireless on some of the time when I need it and brightness all the way down to where I can barely see it. I also enabled all of the battery stretch features except for disabling Aero. All I was doing, was just typing up some notes in my school library and I had just charged the battery up the night before.

What else do you guys do to enable you so much battery life? I feel as though there is something wrong with mine. :|

 

Sometimes it takes Vista a couple days and a few cycles to settle down (finish indexing, work out superfetch, etc). I wouldn't panic about your battery life just yet.

 

Okay, thanks for the help. I stopped indexing the first day that I got it. I'll give it some time like you said.

 

It's been 3 weeks now and still terrible battery life compared to what is at least expected. I can barely get out 3 hours now. I am unsure as to what is going on. Is there some way I can see how much power my laptop is using?

 

yes, launch power mngr, go to batt. tab, it reports the wattage, if you scroll down
then, you will probably realize you're burning at full power, and will want to create a scheme that burns less, like adaptive cpu, etc.

 

The Wattage is 25.75 on average...that seems really high and I am on the Maximum Battery Life power scheme by Lenovo.

Edit: And that is with me only running FireFox with 3 tabs. :O

 

You are running high performance.
Create a new scheme with adaptive cpu (definitely not Low), fan speed balanced, cpu and pci bus automatically managed (these two are bios settings). and of course, integrated graphics. also I set my CD-ROM to silent, but then again, I hardly ever use it.

with these, you should be able to drop below 10W running Firefox (dunno about YouTube etc.)

 

my .02:

with 9-cell battery, using intel graphics, screen on 20% brightness and all wireless turned off it had 15% after 4 hours watching video from hdd and reported another hour left. i assume my numbers are not that typical 'cause i swapped hdd for wd 320gb 7200rpm and i run win xp from my old laptop, i.e. it's not clean install. i shudder at the prospect of reinstalling all that software so i'll better live with laptop that holds for half an hour less. immediately after turning on with fully charged battery and switching to power saving it said 8:52 which i personally find more than impressive.

oh, and it was rather noisy in the airplane so i had to put the sound level at highest. i suppose it's not a big deal in terms of power consumption but still.

 

For anyone interested, the ThinkPad SuperGuide features a section to optimize battery life.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=333677#Link13

 

I made your power scheme as well as the power settings in the BIOS. It still stayed around 25W.

I then used the ThinkPad SuperGuide that Arkit3kt posted and I had the same results...

 

first off, I will assume you went into Task Manager and saw that you are not running anything that kicks the CPU above 10%. simple browsing likely won't. sitting around idle (how I'd report minimum wattage) will result in ~5%. I am running the wireless adapter and Bluetooth with 3 FF windows open, and mine is 5%

check the following:
run Power Options (start menu, type in or Control Panel)
it will display which scheme you're running (radio button)
click on Change Plan Settings under that scheme
click on Change Advanced Power Settings
you will see a dropdown list. make sure it is set to the scheme you're using
and you will see a scrollable menu
in there scroll down to Processor Power Management, and note what the Minimum and the Maximum percentages are. when running Adaptive CPU, they should be 5%-100%
then check PCI Express - Link State Power Management, note setting
then check Wireless Adapter Settings - Power Saving Mode, note setting

report these three.

you are either running on very high cpu, and it is set to not go lower
and/or your PCIx bus is running on full blast
and/or your wireless adapter is running on full blast (you can check if this is a problem by using the switch to the left at the front that turns the radio(s) off, the mechanical switch, and by observing the change in wattage)

 

Processor Power Management (tried running on Lowest just to see if I could get any change, none so far)
-Min: On battery 5%
-Max: On battery 33%

PCI Express Link State
-On battery: Moderate power savings

Wireless Adapter
-On battery: Maximum power savings

Noticed I had 66 processes running, by the way, with only FF open. Would a reformat be a last resort?

 

okay, again, you did check Task Manager CPU utilization, right? The wattage will be below 10 if the usage is 5-10%, regardless of the number of processes running.

Also, how's your HDD activity?
In any case, your results indicate an abnormality.



Did you run system update? It could be that you're missing a driver or something that makes you "bleed".

Also, do you have anything connected to the Firewire and USB ports?

Still, I am at a loss...

 

Whoops, forgot to add that in my last post. The CPU Usage jumps anywhere from 3%-44% when it is on idle for 5 minutes. All I have open is FireFox and Windows Task Manager. :O

As for the HDD activity, it's usually not too active but now that I am actually observing it. It seems abnormally active now...

I ran System Update and still no luck.

I have nothing plugged into any ports.

 

I dont mean to bump months old threads.. But I am thinking of getting a thinkpad t400 or t500 for schooling and personal needs. I also like to play games..mostly MMORPGs i used to play Lineage 2 and right now im waiting for www.aiononline.com <- Aion to come out in Q3 2009. My wonder is the battery life but also the ATI radeon mobility 3470 (14.1") vs the ATI radeon mobility 3560 (on the 15.4") for graphics capabilities. Will playing MMORPGs be that difficult? Is it worth paying more for the WXGA+ ? I do like hi res! And i was planning on keeping the default config 2.53 GHz processor.



I know its the wrong thread but id appreciate an answer please?

 

i can play like halo 1 nicely, unreal gold well, and call of duty sub-par on my t400. (hybrid, T9400)

i do wish i had gotten the t500 instead for school; simply b/c of the 3650 and video. it has HDMI, better graphics, bigger screen + LED, and other screens (fonts and such) look pleasantly big compared to my screen.