x220 Bluetooth/RF mouse HUGE battery drain

Hi,

I have an X220 i5, 6 cell, 8 gb ram, 7200 rpm 320 gb HD, factory installed 64bit Win7 system.

When I keep it in "Energy Saver" and unplugging the charger, my power manager shows a solid 6 hours remaining.

BUT: If I use turn on bluetooth and activate my thinkpad bluetooth laser mouse, hours remaining drop to a staggering 3.5-4 hours.

I bought a Logitech M325 USB wireless mouse instead, but this thing also cuts hours left from 6 to 5:20~15.

Should wireless mice really use this much power? Those 40-45 minutes with the RF mouse are a lot when I need it the whole day, and the bluetooth is just completely worthless with its 2 hour battery carnage.

Have you guys experienced anything similar? My good old retractable wired mouse didn't really impact power consumption at all.

 

I discovered years ago (see my Samsung Q35 review) that Bluetooth can cause a lot of power drain. At that time the problem was that it increased the CPU activity. Perhaps nothing has improved.

As for the USB wireless mice, they don't normally cause a significant increase in power consumption. Just make sure that you have not plugged your mouse dongle into the USB 3.0 port (the one with the blue tab). USB 3.0 uses a lot more power (I had the same problem with my T420s).

John

 

I found the same behavior with the builtin bluetooth. Quite a shame, really.

I hypothesize it is because the bluetooth is integrated into the motherboard via usb. So its the same as having a usb device plugged in, if you keep it enabled.

Any usb device you plug into the computer is gonna add, at minimum, an extra watt of drain to the battery. that's quite a lot, when you realize how low these sandy bridge cpu's idle.

 

Yeah, going from 7-8 watts up to 9-10 makes a big difference. I think the 6-cell makes the watts more obvious, since the battery life really depends on having ultra-low wattage all the time. Going to 10 watts from 8 watts is a 25% increase.

But anyways, any other mouse you can recommend? I actually found setting power to "low" in power manager improved battery life with bluetooth since it keeps the CPU from going too crazy. But it's still not as good as without it.

 

I'm sticking to the builtin touchpad/point at the moment, when I'm away from my desk.

After doing the research on the bluetooth, I think I'll get one of the travel, wired mice. Kinda sucks, because I got the bluetooth thinking I'd be using it for when I was away from my desk.

 

Run "powercfg -energy" (without the quotes) in a command prompt when the BT is on and the mouse is paired.

My W520 claims it won't go into power saving mode, taking the USB hub it's apparently attached to with it, and chewing up a fair bit of power.

 

The dongle for my Logitech mouse is rated at 5V, 55mA, which is 0.275W. However, as already noted, the penalty of using any USB devices is that the hub stays active when it could otherwise be sleeping.

I've seen my T420s get down to about 6.5W under light usage (main + bay battery, Intel 320 SSD, no USB, not internet, display brightness on about 6). Potentially that's over 10 hours of run time (but 8 is more realistic because of occasional bursts of greater activity). Adding something that increases the power consumption by 0.5W will reduce the potential run time by around 3/4 hour.

So, for maximum battery time, learn to use the touchpad and/or trackpoint.

John