x200's battery life for 4/6/9-cell

I've read many reviews on x200's superior battery life. However, I'm rather afraid that real-life usage might differ as is with the case of my previous laptop. And, even if I do get the x200, I'm also unsure of which batteries to get.

So, I hope u'll can provide me your inputs on the following...

1. Type of Battery used (4/6/9-cell):
2. Brightness levels:
3. Wifi, Bluetooth on/off:
4. What were u doing at that time (surfing net, videos)?:

Thanks!

 

On a 9cell with brightness at about half way with wifi on (i dont have BT)...surfing the net, typing, (without videos) it gets about 9hrs. I also have my power settings on to throttle the CPU. When watching youtube that amount of time would probably go to about 5-6hrs with CPU usage. However you won't be watching for that length...or would you? I realistically can get a lot of life doing light tasks such as notes, email, reading articles.

 

wow.. that's really superb for a 9-cell!

I'm confirm getting a 9-cell! But i'm not sure whether to get a 4/6-cell battery for the times when i want it to be lighter.

So could anyone tell me ur real-time battery usage of 4 or 6-cell?

Thanks!

 

I have the 9 cell and the battery life does vary substantially depending on the application.

With minimum brightness, no wi-fi, and basically an idle word processor you are looking at like 12 hours.

With moderate brightness 6/15, wi-fi, and firefox I get between 8 and 9.

With low brightness 3/15, wi-fi, and a video player (VLC w/ 624x352 xVids), I get about 7.5 hours.

With low brightness 3/15, wi-fi, and HD videos (Revision 3, 720P h264) I get about 6 hours.

Max brightness, CPU at max, while playing a game or doing an encoding task, and just trying to run the battery down, you may only get about 3 hours.

All these cases were run with an adaptive processor in Vista Business 64. FYI I play my videos off a 8GB SDHC card in the slot (this reduces HD noise and prevents the skip that the active protection system causes if the laptop moves, it MAY also affect battery life [although it doesn't seem to])

 

sorry for bringing this thread back up... but...

I'll see the battery life getting better after a couple cycles.. is that correct?

 

I don't think that is the case. I have cycled my x200 battery about 15 times, and the battery life is the same as it was initially. I don't think Li-Ion batteries need to be broken in, although anything is possible. The one thing that will improve over time is Vista's Superfetch. The first 2 weeks I had my system my hard drive was thrashing like crazy. Vista has now learned my general patterns (preferred applications), and does a better job of predicitng the superfetch settings. This lets my drive stay in a low power mode (although I have never heard it spin down in Vista, despite a 5 minute setting), and should improve battery life.

Long term, Li-Ion batteries do degrade. They still work, but get much worse capacity over time. The 6cell battery that came with my T40 dropped from a designed capacity of 44WHr, down to about 10WHr after 5 years and 500+ cycles (naturally I bought some spares). I did drain this battery to ZERO several times though, and this probably didn't help.

 

how accurate is the time shown on the taskbar? i'm getting straight of the bat... like.. roughly 5 hours... after a charge running on maximum battery life profile

 

Lenovo's utility can be readjusted to show the "corrected" capacity after it loses some of its life. So you want to do that from time to time after you do a lot of battery cycles. I've cycled mine 16 times according to the utility.

 

The utility is usually very accurate. However, on my T40 it eventually became highly inaccurate (only if using my original battery), and it caused me to largely ignore it. After about 500 cycles, including many full discharges (laptop just died, not standby/hibernate), the stated capacity was only about 10 WHr (versus design of 44 WHr), but it would run for about 30 minutes once it hit 0%. I really think this was just because I cycled it so many times that its calibration got really messed up.

The time remaining is based on simple math. WHr left in battery/(amps*volts). The thing to look at is the actual power usage of your laptop. On battery the x200 should use between 9 and 14 watts, depending on disk access, wireless usage, brightness, etc. If your wattage is much above that and you aren't running a complex task (compiling, compressing, rendering, etc.), then something may be wrong, although I would wait a week to see if Vista figures itself out and lowers the wattage.