T43P extremely high current draw

[IBMT43Puser]

I have an IBM Thinkpad T43P that is drawing between 20 to 30 Wh on idle. I have tried turning off everything from bluetooth to floppy drives, infrared, parallel ports etc. I've also turned the CPU down to the lowest performance possible. I've tried everything I can think of. I need suggestions. What could possibly be causing this high draw. What did I miss?

Thanks in advance for any input!

[RealBlackStuff]

Can you measure again with the hard disk and CD/DVD drive removed?
You could have a rogue program running in the background.
Alternatively, get any Linux Life-CD and boot from that (without installing it). Any improvements?

[IBMT43Puser]

Can you measure again with the hard disk and CD/DVD drive removed?
You could have a rogue program running in the background.
Alternatively, get any Linux Life-CD and boot from that (without installing it). Any improvements?

Thank you for your suggestion, but I am already running Linux - OpenSUSE 11.3. I have the exact same OS on my Acer netbook, and with the help of powertop I can get the consumption down to 7.1wh. But whatever I do on the thinkpad, it refuses to go below 22wh. As for removing the hard disc and CD/DVD drive, I haven't gotten to the point of pulling the whole thing apart yet

[poshgeordie]

Welcome to the forums.

Really silly question - are you running off the AC Adapter with the battery connected, and if so could it be due to the battery being charged?

How are you monitoring the current?

[IBMT43Puser]

Welcome to the forums.

Really silly question - are you running off the AC Adapter with the battery connected, and if so could it be due to the battery being charged?

How are you monitoring the current?

Thank you. To answer your questions: AC adapter is not plugged in, and I am using Intel's powertop program in Linux to monitor the current. The reason I have started investigating this is because I have just bought a new nine cell extended battery (6600mAh, 71wh), and I am only getting about 2.5 hours. I tested the current draw with the old battery, just to be sure, and I read the same current draw. I am baffled, nothing I do seems to make a difference.

[RealBlackStuff]

To boot from CD would inhibit any rogue programs on the hard disk.
And you could also have a bad (going) hard disk!
Your laptop would just run from RAM, that's why I asked.
It's not the same running Linux from a hard disk and running Linux from a CD!

[poshgeordie]

Interesting program - I've just installed it on this T30 running ubuntu with the following results:

Code: Select all

Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        (47.0%)         2.00 Ghz     9.1%
polling           0.0ms ( 0.0%)         1200 Mhz    90.9%
C1                0.0ms ( 0.0%)
C2                3.5ms (21.3%)
C3                3.0ms (31.7%)

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 165.3    interval: 15.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available

Top causes for wakeups:
  57.3% ( 60.1)           firefox : futex_wait (hrtimer_wakeup) 
  12.4% ( 13.0)       <interrupt> : ata_piix 
   9.5% ( 10.0)           gkrellm : schedule_timeout (process_timeout) 
   9.2% (  9.6)    ktpacpi_nvramd : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
   3.4% (  3.6)       <interrupt> : acpi
   1.6% (  1.7)    gnome-terminal : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)

Suggestion: Disable 'hal' from polling your cdrom with:
hal-disable-polling --device /dev/cdrom 'hal' is the component that auto-opens a
window if you plug in a CD but disables SATA power saving from kicking in.

Have you looked at the LessWatts Known Issues Tricks and Tips section?

Taking a step back, there are a lot of variables which will affect battery life, typcially:
Screen brightness
How clean the Heatsink Assembly is, which means that the more dirt and fluff etc the more and for longer the fan will run.

[ajkula66]

Along with everything else that has been stated/suggested, let me just point out the obvious: in terms of power consumption, T43p is an equivalent of a Hummer...not the most efficient vehicle around, shall we say...

I'm not anywhere near my "babies" at the moment, but if I recall correctly the current draw on my VQ7 while idle in XP was something like 19-20, and it could only get worse in Linux...

A brand new (although officially "scratch and dent") 9-cell battery got me 3h 45 minutes with wireless on, screen about half way lit. That's nothing to write home about, given that my "daily beater" T42 (PM 735/Radeon 9600) gets about the same amount of time on a 6-cell that holds 80% of its design capacity...

I'm only a casual Linux user and would not know how to go about undervolting the CPU and/or underclocking the GPU in the *nix environment, but would strongly suggest looking into that...

Good luck.

[IBMT43Puser]

I'm not sure about the Hummer comparison, I have read plenty of others who have gotten their T43Ps down to 13wh. And they seemed to complain that that was a lot. I know it is not one of the new and extremely efficient laptops, but there is something extremely odd about this high consumption. I tried pulling the CD/DVD drive out, no difference. I also tried running it from a live CD, as RealBlackStuff suggested. No difference. Turning down screen brightness does nothing, either. I then tried to see if maybe the fan was drawing a lot of power, so I let it cool down and then started it up and checked before the fan had started. Still no lower than 20wh. There is no dust on either the fan or heatsink, it's squeaky clean.

[RealBlackStuff]

Are you using a 56W AC adapter by any chance instead of the required 72W?
Or have you tried another (known good) adapter?

[ajkula66]

IBMT43PUser wrote:

I'm not sure about the Hummer comparison, I have read plenty of others who have gotten their T43Ps down to 13wh.

Not to sound rude, but I've likely owned three times the amount of T43p units as all of those "others" put together. These machines are hungry beasts, period. Are there tweaks? Of course. Are there variables? No doubt about it. But even with all of that said, you'll never be able to get it as low as you would a T42, or the netbook that you were referring to in one of your previous posts.

I do find the fact that lowering the screen brightness does nothing quite odd to say the very least, though.

What are the temperatures you're seeing...CPU, GPU..?

Good luck.