Battery Hygiene Question re my T42 2379DXU

[Jeremy31]

Hi,

I had some questions re: "battery hygiene".. I bought a T42 2379DXU last July - I absolutely love it, with one complaint: the battery it comes with doesn't last long at all - significantly less than reports I've heard/read... When using the brightest screen, with wifi turned on, I get MAYBE 2:15 in a charge. One of the IBM technical support agents told me that one possible problem is the fact that I use a docking station at work, and as such, my laptop is charging for a good 8 hours every day. He suggested I take the battery out when it's in the docking station, but another technician strong recommended against this, saying that having my battery case exposed to dust, etc. would be even worse... This second technician suggested that I buy a new high capacity battery, use it whenever I travel or need to work in battery mode, and then put in the old 6 cell whenever I'm working with AC power (that is, "sacrifice" the old battery by using it to simply keep the battery case protected when I'm using electric power).

Does this make any sense? I bought a new high capacity LI-ION battery from IBM, and I'm about to put it in the machine and charge it, but I don't know if it makes sense to keep switching them back and forth...

Given that I have an old 6-cell and a new 9-cell, any opinions re: what makes the most sense to preserve the life and endurance of the 9-cell?

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks,


Jeremy

[K. Eng]

What's your power consumption according to the Battery Maximizer gauge? 2 hrs 15 mins on a 48 watt/hr battery would put your average usage at somewhere around 19 watts, which seems a bit high for a T4x.

My current settings are: CPU set to dynamically scale (600 MHz most of the time, full speed only when needed), wireless set to max power save, and screen brightness to full.

In light use (web surfing, documents, spreadsheets) my power consumption ranges from 9 to 15 watts (average is about 12-13), or good for about 3.5-4 hrs on a full battery. If I turn WiFi off and lower the screen brightness I can get 5-5.5.

Doing anything CPU intensive or HDD intensive will reduce runtime a lot.

I don't know anything about getting dust on the battery case. I don't see how getting dust on it would hurt it (unless tons of dust built up on the battery contacts).