Thinkpads Forum

last night I started checking out the battery meter and hit the "Battery details" option.

Turns out I have a sony battery, so I fully expect it to explode one day down the line. It appears to have 74.88Wh, but most intriguing was the Current/Voltage/Wattage meters - along with the cycle count.

I'm interested in seeing how low of a wattage is possible to achieve - I read something on engadget about Lenovo releasing a new bios update to meet a newer EPA power usage standard.

The lowest wattage I achieved was about 9.8 watts. This was with wireless off and the LCD at the lowest brightness level. Since receiving my X61s I've generally kept the brightness at about the 4-5th out of the 15 levels. I found that full brightness consumed about 13 watts. I wonder if we can make this somewhat scientific, like a "minimum" setting and a "maximum" setting to see how much juice can get sucked down.

I should mention that I am running windows xp. So, what are you getting?

I haven't received my X61 yet ... but my old X31 (1.6 GHz undervolted with NHC, 1.3 GB) can run at 8.6W, with the hard disk still spinning, but not active. I will be doing measurements on the X61 as soon as it arrives.

Note that the amount of memory and the type of disk will contribute to the power usage as well.

ive never noticed this feature before!

I have an x61, running vista business, 2ghz, 2gb ram, 80gb HD, and turbo mem.

doing nothing, with brightness on 3, i am seeing 8.55 watts
with mozilla running, and naturally wireless on, 9.6-9.8 watts

cant wait for undervolting software that will work with vista

kotaro77 wrote:cant wait for undervolting software that will work with vista

NHC worked in Vista on my X31 - not sure if it works for X6*/Core 2 Duo as well, though.

kotaro77 wrote:I have an x61, running vista business, 2ghz, 2gb ram, 80gb HD, and turbo mem.

doing nothing, with brightness on 3, i am seeing 8.55 watts
with mozilla running, and naturally wireless on, 9.6-9.8 watts

That's pretty good! Is that with the hard disk still spinning, or had it powered down?

kotaro77 wrote:cant wait for undervolting software that will work with vista

As qviri said, Core 2 Duo is the issue -- you just can't undervolt, at least not for the lowest multipliers (which are the ones that really matter).

On my X60s I get a low value of 6.60W - the battery manger icon shows 10:45 of battery life at this usage Of course this is without doing anything at all, so it doesn't really matter. Wireless is off, some hardware is disabled (IRDA, 2nd IDE device, firewire, modem, LAN), and screen brightness is at minimum.

With brightness on 1, and wireless on with hard drive spinning I get varying readings between 8 - 10W (usually at about 8.7W). Battery manager icon shows about 7:30 - 8:00 of battery life at this usage on a fully charged 8-cell. This is a realistic usage scenario. In fact, I could handle the brightness on minimum instead of 1 if the room is not bright.

I have a 60GB 5400RPM drive and 2GB of RAM on WinXP pro.

Does anyone know if disabling unused hardware like I have will have a small effect on battery life?