x201 battery life problems

Hi everyone,

I was recently given a thinkpad x201 as a present and I had a question about it's battery life. I looked online and on this forum and most people report about 8-10 hours of battery life with a 9 cell battery. Well I have a 9 cell and I am only getting 5 hours on minimal settings. I installed batterybar and it says I have about 6% battery wear (see below)

http://tinypic.com/r/11aweqf/7

I could be wrong but I don't think 6% would cause this much battery life loss.This is a lenovo brand 9 cell by the way. Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

Thanks.

 

Do you have Lenovo Power Manager installed?
If not, install it and see whether it reports the same wear level.

Also, if you set battery maintenance at auto with Power Manager, it typically charges to around 80% of the actual capacity (depending on the usage pattern) even though the charge level shows 100%.
You can change this to custom level like 100% (if you need the maximum battery life).

Finally, you might try calibration of battery to reset the chip on the battery.

 

It's not a battery issue, but rather a software/driver issue. You're simply consuming too much power than you would like to at any given moment.

Open an elevated command prompt and type powercfg -energy. It'll tell you what's wrong with your Power settings and what you can do to fix them.

 

First of all thank you both for your replies.

I do have Lenovo Power Manager installed, it says the same amount of wear as batterybar. I also turned it off automatic and it still charged the same. Also would calibration be the same as the battery gauge reset in the Power Manager? I've done some research and many people say that it kills battery life. Should I still try it?

I did what you said but I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I uploaded to pastebin.
Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report Computer Name -X201 Scan Time 2011-08-15 - Pastebin.com
Do you see anything? Thanks again.

I'm thinking about just formatting and reinstall my operating system.

 

Hold off from that. Use the processes tab in Task Manager to see the CPU usage of the various running processes. If, for example, you have any animated Flash adverts in Firefox then your battery life will be substantially reduced (you can use the FlashBlock add-on to stop unwanted Flash). If you add the CPU Time column on the Processes tab then you can see, and sort by, cumulative CPU time which makes it easier to see what is keeping the CPU from sleeping.

Having USB devices connected can increase the power drain because the hub cannot power down even if the connected devices are not using power. Bluetooth can cause significant power drain if enabled even if there is no connection while WiFi will use power, particularly if some distance from the router. The power consumed by the display will vary by several watts between maximum and minimum brightness. None of the above will be fixed by reinstalling Windows.

What power drain are you seeing? Good battery life depends on getting the power drain down between 7 and 10W.

John

 

I've noticed it's between 12-15w on average. I should be getting at least 7 hours with this battery, would that difference in discharge rate make that much of a difference? Also I have wifi constantly disabled and I have no bluetooth. I only have 75 processes running and none of them really take up any cpu.

 

@terlane17,
Your WWAN module is running, which might explain it.
A Flash plugin is holding platform timer resolution down too.

 

Would you happen to know how to disable to wwan? I've been looking all over and can't seem to find an option to disable it. Google came back with nothing as well.

 

Never mind I disabled wwan. It didn't add any time to my battery life, although it did reduce the discharge rate.

Should I reformat or buy a new battery?

 

That's a contradictory statement right there...

Download Process Hacker, and let it idle at an empty desktop. Watch the CPU consumption per process. Anything above 1% should be tweaked.

Furthermore, in Resource Monitor's Disk tab, let it idle again and see if any processes are hitting the disk unnecessarily.

Also remember to defrag on a platter drive to minimize power consumption from seeks.

 

Do your own sums: Battery run time = capacity (less whatever you has the critical battery threshold) / discharge rate. Windows and Lenovo's Power Manager take measurements over a period which may give a better overall estimate but is slow to respond to changes.

John

 

Sorry, I should of phrased that differently. What I mean to say is I only got a 10-15 minute increase since disabling wwan, which didn't seem like much last night. I did as you said and process hacker showed that one of my programs was using way too many resources. But for some reason the program didn't show up at all in the windows task manager. Weird. I think that might of done it though because I saw about a increase of about 30 minutes in battery life. So now I'm up to around 6 hours and 15 minutes on a full charge. Which I'm entirely satisfied with. Thanks again for all the help!

 

That's a good idea. I'll be sure to do that tonight and report back tomorrow. Thanks.