Best Battery Life Settings?

[donking!]

For people who say they're getting five hours of battery life (6 cell or 9 cell?), what settings do you use when you're running on battery?

Do you set the CPU at adaptive or force it to run a slow clock speed?

What level of screen brightness do you use?

Does the fan setting make that much of a difference (maximum performance vs. balance all parameters)?

What about the display refresh rate setting, important?

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Also how much do these settings really effect peformance? Does the adaptive CPU setting matter so much or does it just mean it will take an extra second for the CPU to clock up when it needs to? Similarly, does the balance all parameters fan setting mean that it just takes an extra second to spin up the fan and let the CPU clock up when it needs to?

I'm bugged by that little meter that shows how good of performance you're getting for your settings in the power manager. When it's not at the top, does that mean you just can't get the best performance that you would out of the laptop (it caps off at some point)? Or, again, does it mean it will just take a second for the CPU and fan to clock up, but you're not ultimately wasting, as it were, any peformance capacity.

Thanks.

[donking!]

Here's a couple threads from the T4x forum that deal with my questions, though not all of them and not to the level of detail that I'd like to know.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=23459
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=11988

I've also noticed that when you fiddle with the settings in the Power Manager, the only thing that effects the meter for expected battery life is the screen brightness. This leads me to the question: Are all of the other parameters really just splitting hairs?