Drawing more power?

[Miller88]

My thinkpad used to draw 10-12 watts while on battery, taking notes with the wireless on. Now, I can't get it below 17watts. Using the Power manager doesn't seem to help anymore.

I've pulled the CD drive and it doesn't help much.

Is this normal for the computer getting older? or ... how do I tweak it to use less power again?

[SHoTTa35]

Well turn off wifi and see what your usage is like, change your settings to Max Battery Life and see.

You dind't say which system you are using (unless i'm blind) but i'm using a T60 (in my sig) and i can get down to 11watts most of the time....

Right now with wifi and dim LCD i'm doing 14.66w which is about average i'd say. Then again i'm also using Vista too. If i switch to the power saver profile it dropps down to 12.12w currently with Wifi.

[Miller88]

I'm using the T60 in my sig. Which looks like it would draw less power.

I don't have any preset profiles in the power manager for some strange reason. I'll have to play around with it some - maybe I need to work more with the power manager to get it to draw less power.

Could disabling one of the cores on the CPU help? It's an option on my dell.

[meekus]

The LCD's backlight is probably the biggest power consumer save for the CPU when it's run at full bent.

On my T60 running on the battery with Power Manager set to the factory "Maximum Battery Life" profile and the both C2D cores running at under 5% activity Power Manager is reporting...

Wireless on, LCD backlight at max brightness: 24W
Wireless on, LCD backlight at min brightness: 19W
Wireless off, LCD backlight at max brightness: 23W
Wireless off, LCD backlight at min brightness: 18W

So IOW wireless radio is worth about 1W from what I see.

My T60 has a T7200 Core 2 Duo running WinXP Pro, 3GB RAM, 5400 RPM HDD, ATI X1400 discrete gfx and with the UltraBay empty for this test.

[r. aster]

My config and power numbers are similar to meekus'. I find that turning off Bluetooth is worth another watt or two.

[pae77]

How do you measure the power draw?

[Zender]

It might be worthwhile to apply this update on WinXP (not sure if it isn't installed automatically for those with Windows Update enabled):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918005

My ExpressCard memory card reader (which connects to the USB bus) basically halved the battery life until I applied this. Which I eventually did after receiving a new USB keyboard - it basically did the same, so after undocking I was left with very unpleasant sight of battery time often less than three hours. Also bluetooth seemed to have similar consequences - enable it and the battery time drops very significantly. Disabling bluetooth wouldn't get it back however. Only sleep&wakeup did.

[SHoTTa35]

How do you measure the power draw?

While we don't know how accurate it is, we're just going off Power Manager's info in the Battery Info tab. It shows a changing wattage and voltage and at the sametime estimated battery life based on those current numbers. It updates like every 3-5 seconds and all that.

These are Vista settings and Vista is supposed to be more power hungry.
s
This is the lowest i've gotten with Wifi on (LCD brightness low also):



and this is the lowest i've gotten period:



(using lowest brightness on Max Battery Life profile, WIFI OFF, BT OFF, HDD stopped spinning after 30 seconds, AERO Transparency off but AERO still running)

[AvalonXIII]

Make sure that you're not turning wifi to maximum performance and forgot to turn it back to maximum battery saving in Vista power management.
I did that once, and didn't have any idea why the wattage just shoots through the roof in no time.

[Miller88]

I use both Notebook Hardware Control and the Power Manager - they both agree.