Thinkpads Forum

the subject is basically the question... on maximum battery i get just above 4 hour with 9-cell battery and no optional batteries.

Hmm, good question. I just got my T43 (with a 9 cell), I just haven't done an extensive battery test. I know it really depends on your setup and what your running. The first thing I did when I got my laptop was do the basic tweaks (turn off the XP eye candy and disabled a few system services) and enable everything on the laptop for best battery life. I've gone over 5 hours with 25% juice remaining (wi-fi on), and I assume I can hit the 6 maybe even 7 hours.

I'm wondering if it's possible to get 8 or 9 hours with extensive tweaking.

The battery life of your machine depends on a lot of factors: what kinds of applications you are running, brightness settings of the display, whether WiFi is on or not, whether CD-ROM or speakers are being used, etc.

If you have the screen at maximum brightness and WiFi on, 4 hours is not unsurprising. Do you have a 14" or 15" display? The 15" IPS displays consume a lot more power than the 14" displays.

You can improve battery life by running the display at half brightness, and making sure in IBM Access connections that WiFi is set to run in power saving mode.