T61 battery life horrible!

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mtbiac · #1 Post by **mtbiac** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 3:02 pm

Just got my T61 (2.0ghz, 14.1" WXGA+, 2gb RAM, 160gb HD, turbo cache, bluetooth, wireless 4695, dvd-rw, 6 cell). I did a clean install with XP and installed all the drivers, service pack 2, windows updates, and the thinkpad utilities. I'm getting just under 2hrs of battery life with this setup though, with the 6cell battery! With my old T41 I was getting 5+hrs with the 9cell! I though the T61 was supposed to get great battery life too?!? I have the power saver settings on, brightness about 1/2, I'm using wifi, but have bluetooth off, and only have a handful of programs running.

any ideas? is this normal or a bad battery perhaps?

thanks!

sugo · #2 Post by **sugo** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 3:35 pm

What graphics does your T61 have?

My 14.1" T61 with intel graphics can go for 4+ hours with medium brightness, WiFi on with a 6 cell.

mtbiac · #3 Post by **mtbiac** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 3:42 pm

sugo wrote:What graphics does your T61 have?

My 14.1" T61 with intel graphics can go for 4+ hours with medium brightness, WiFi on with a 6 cell.

I have the nvidia 140m, is that why? there's no way I should be getting 50% of your battery life just because I have a slightly better video card!! right?

I dont have the T61p....

suikoden2003 · #4 Post by **suikoden2003** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 9:39 pm

i have the T61p and i'm only getting 5hrs with a 9cell.

mtbiac · #5 Post by **mtbiac** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 10:03 pm

suikoden2003 wrote:i have the T61p and i'm only getting 5hrs with a 9cell.

So shouldn't I be getting atleast 3.5hrs of battery life, considering I have a non-P and the 6 cell??

is it possible I have a defective battery? any other ideas?

thanks!

#6 Post by **ryengineer** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 10:03 pm

mtbiac wrote: I have the nvidia 140m, is that why? there's no way I should be getting 50% of your battery life just because I have a slightly better video card!! right?........snip

Better GPU comes with a price i.e. it's conumption of more power.

This thread will give you some details:

Integrated vs discrete graphics on T61?

#7 Post by **bill bolton** » Sun Oct 07, 2007 11:13 pm

mtbiac wrote:With my old T41 I was getting 5+hrs with the 9cell!

Did your T41 have a 160Gb drive, DVDRW, higher end graphics, etc etc in it?

mtbiac wrote:There's no way I should be getting 50% of your battery life just because I have a slightly better video card!! right?

Basically, given the spec you have shown above, wrong!

There are no free lunches when it comes to the power consumption of graphics performance and other higher end specs.

That's one reasons why a lot of corporate Thinkpad special builds often have relatively lower end specs.... the duration on battery power is much better for basic commercial functions!

Cheers,

Bill B.

vince_wonk · #8 Post by **vince_wonk** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 5:42 am

i got 4,5 hours with my T61. office and browsing. maximum battery life profile. my specification : T7300,2GB DDR II, 120GB HDD 5400rpm, Quadro nVS140M, Intel 4965AGN. i think this is a very good result for a notebook that equipped with discrete graphics. you should upgrade your bios to the latest one (1.22) and set your powermizer to the lowest performance. i even clock down my graphics clock frequency. sorry for my bad english thank you

casperkid · #9 Post by **casperkid** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 5:49 am

vince_wonk, how did you optimize your machine. The longest battery life I can get is about 3.5 hours with haft bright screen, wireless on, running NIS 2007 and firefox.

kenyee · #10 Post by **kenyee** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 9:09 am

mtbiac wrote:
sugo wrote:I have the nvidia 140m, is that why? there's no way I should be getting 50% of your battery life just because I have a slightly better video card!! right?

The 2-2.5hrs is correct. I was a bit hesitant about this as well when I decided on the nVidia vs. integrated graphics. It's roughly a 2x different in runtime...

mtbiac · #11 Post by **mtbiac** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 9:41 am

kenyee wrote:
mtbiac wrote: The 2-2.5hrs is correct. I was a bit hesitant about this as well when I decided on the nVidia vs. integrated graphics. It's roughly a 2x different in runtime...

wow I thought this would be maybe a 30min difference or so, I'm dissapointed. Hope I can fix this to make the battery life more usable so I dont have to sell this for an integrated chip...

can I disable some NVIDIA features to increase battery life? I have powermizer enabled and have disabled the nview options. How can I "clock down" the GPU??

Thanks!

Razzle · #12 Post by **Razzle** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 10:54 am

mtbiac wrote:How can I "clock down" the GPU??

Thanks!

you could try RivaTuner
I've heard reports that underclocking increases battery life but I haven't tried myself yet

paOol · #13 Post by **paOol** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 11:14 am

i have a 9cell, T61 standard screen.
2.0 ghz
140M

and i can get about 3-4 hours of usage with wifi on,
and about 5+ hours with wifi off

since your machine is brand new, it could be that its so new that its not at full capacity yet. it takes a couple cycles before you get your maximum battery life.

Pascal_TTH · #14 Post by **Pascal_TTH** » Mon Oct 08, 2007 12:53 pm

mtbiac wrote:Just got my T61 (2.0ghz, 14.1" WXGA+, 2gb RAM, 160gb HD, turbo cache, bluetooth, wireless 4695, dvd-rw, 6 cell). I did a clean install with XP and installed all the drivers, service pack 2, windows updates, and the thinkpad utilities. I'm getting just under 2hrs of battery life with this setup though, with the 6cell battery! With my old T41 I was getting 5+hrs with the 9cell! I though the T61 was supposed to get great battery life too?!? I have the power saver settings on, brightness about 1/2, I'm using wifi, but have bluetooth off, and only have a handful of programs running.

any ideas? is this normal or a bad battery perhaps?

thanks!

I also got a T61 with T7300, NVS 140m, 7K100, 1 GB, battery life is only form 2 to 2 1/2 hous (only web browsing). It's really a shame.
It was not really better with a mainstream T60 last year (T2300, X1300, 5K80, 1 GB) : about 2 1/2 hours... This is due to the *too few* cells battery.

Only my T41p and T60p reach more then 5 hours (all 9 cells battery).

I would like to go for a T61p but due battery life, I prefer to wait...

jcvjcvjcvjcv · #15 Post by **jcvjcvjcvjcv** » Tue Oct 09, 2007 5:14 pm

Doing nothing at a low performance profile I get 4 hours with the 6 cell + ultrabaybattery (T61 + NVS 140m, 2 GB, 120GB 5400rpm, ABGN4965)

gfolkert · #16 Post by **gfolkert** » Wed Oct 10, 2007 11:22 pm

mtbiac wrote:Just got my T61 (2.0ghz, 14.1" WXGA+, 2gb RAM, 160gb HD, turbo cache, bluetooth, wireless 4695, dvd-rw, 6 cell). I did a clean install with XP and installed all the drivers, service pack 2, windows updates, and the thinkpad utilities. I'm getting just under 2hrs of battery life with this setup though, with the 6cell battery! With my old T41 I was getting 5+hrs with the 9cell! I though the T61 was supposed to get great battery life too?!? I have the power saver settings on, brightness about 1/2, I'm using wifi, but have bluetooth off, and only have a handful of programs running.

any ideas? is this normal or a bad battery perhaps?

thanks!

Just to let you know, I have 2 - 9-cell batteries and a 6-cell.

With the 2 - 9-cell I get about 11 hours of uptime, with the WIFI on. I use only Debian Linux on the thing now. If I use my PCMCIA Cellular Broadband, I get about 9 hours total.

CPU speed scaling is an issue with WinXP. Sometimes I got about 4 hours total when using WindowsXP, but then once in a while it would eek out to 8 hours.

I've got a C2D 2.2GHz (T7500?), all Intel chipsets and it is nice.

Dead1nside · #17 Post by **Dead1nside** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 4:11 am

I don't see why Lenovo don't just bring out a 9-cell for the 14.1''W T61. It would solve the battery life problem for people who don't mind the extra weight.

Graphics chipsets in 2D mode should significantly lower their clock speeds to the bare minimum, so battery life should be as good as the Intel integrated. I don't understand why manufacturers don't squeeze the best out of their products.

MikeManley · #18 Post by **MikeManley** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 8:52 am

Have you tried using the Battery Stretch feature? I believe your machine has this as part of the new Power Manager utility.

kenyee · #19 Post by **kenyee** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 3:23 pm

mtbiac wrote: wow I thought this would be maybe a 30min difference or so, I'm dissapointed. Hope I can fix this to make the battery life more usable so I dont have to sell this for an integrated chip...

'fraid you will if you want significantly more battery life.

Only thing that might work is drop Vista for your OS. When the new laptops were released w/ Vista, I heard Vista's "aero" UI kept the GPU on, so that was a big reason for laptop battery life sucking (this was a problem w/ HP laptops).

I'm not sure if this has ever been resolved. All I know is my Vista-running T61p gets the expected 2.5hrs of battery life on a 6-cell battery running wifi, but I knew going in that it would be this bad...

You could try adding a 9-cell battery or the ultrabay battery for 1-2 hrs more battery life...

mtbiac · #20 Post by **mtbiac** » Thu Oct 11, 2007 4:53 pm

I'm getting about 2:45 now. Have powermizer enabled to clock down gpu, i'm running XP, have speedstep on, max power saving settings (with 1/2 dim though), wifi on bc I need it, bluetooth off, etc. I'm still pretty dissapointed, but oh well. I don't have too many apps open and I'm mainly just web browsing/word processing.

maybe the cpu management isnt working, like someone above suggested? any ideas how I can test this out?

Oh and I avg anywhere between 17-22Watts usage. Is this normal?

thanks

smartins · #21 Post by **smartins** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 6:46 am

mtbiac wrote:I'm getting about 2:45 now. Have powermizer enabled to clock down gpu, i'm running XP, have speedstep on, max power saving settings (with 1/2 dim though), wifi on bc I need it, bluetooth off, etc. I'm still pretty dissapointed, but oh well. I don't have too many apps open and I'm mainly just web browsing/word processing.

maybe the cpu management isnt working, like someone above suggested? any ideas how I can test this out?

Oh and I avg anywhere between 17-22Watts usage. Is this normal?

thanks

What drivers are you using that have powermizer enabled?

mtbiac · #22 Post by **mtbiac** » Fri Oct 12, 2007 11:24 am

smartins wrote:
mtbiac wrote:I'm getting about 2:45 now. Have powermizer enabled to clock down gpu, i'm running XP, have speedstep on, max power saving settings (with 1/2 dim though), wifi on bc I need it, bluetooth off, etc. I'm still pretty dissapointed, but oh well. I don't have too many apps open and I'm mainly just web browsing/word processing.

maybe the cpu management isnt working, like someone above suggested? any ideas how I can test this out?

Oh and I avg anywhere between 17-22Watts usage. Is this normal?

thanks
What drivers are you using that have powermizer enabled?

not exactly sure, I slipstreamed them into XP when I installed, but I'm pretty sure they were the latest as of last week when I installed XP (for them off lenovo website)

are there better aftermarket drivers that could yield better battery life?

thanks

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