santa rosa postmortem:why is battery worse on an x61 v. x60?

[apbudha]

Ok, turbo memory turned out to be not half as useful as advertised; but also the battery life did not improve as suggested, in fact it was hurt severely, at least in this model laptop. Why?

And for the bonus: Do you think the 45nm penryn chip will push it back up to 8 hours, or even more? With led backlight still a question mark for the next revision, and Lenovo's stance that ssd disk technology isn't quite there yet (http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=96), the next major jump appears to be at least another year off.

[mrgetalife]

Marketing always comes into play. I'm sure the X61 could beat out a X60 on battery life if you turned them both on. And waited for the battery to drain. Its how they were tested. You might not be doing the workload that takes advantage of the lower watt usage while the CPU is in low usage.

Turbo memory was a gamble. Readyboost also was a gamble. I got it built in anyways just in case Vista has some update that makes better use of it. If for some reason you're using XP you just wasted your money on getting it.

[spune]

I think if you compare a X61 with XP and a X60 with XP, the X61 should get better battery life. I believe the CPU in the X61 can go into a deeper sleep state (don't quote me on that). The X61 also has a Battery Stretch feature to extend battery life.

[pibach]

spune, is this just a gues or do you have some benchmark. As far as I know, Vista is a little bit better regarding power consumtion. depends a bit on tweaking all the GUI and background services though.

Anyway I just installes Ubuntu 7.10 on my x61t and get amazingly good battery with the Intel PowerTop tool. I can Websurf at 11 Watt, a good bit better than Vista did.

[spune]

This is just based off my butt dyno. However, with Vista eyecandy enabled, I can't see it using less power than XP.

[dfumento]

I read in pcmag or pcworld or something like these mags that Vista does indeed consume more power than XP. You can run in Vista Basic mode to disable the power consuming eye candy.

[pibach]

The full answer is surely more complex than these magazines cover. Vista has some new power saving features, e.g., it can deep sleep the CPU and it can clock down the FSB. On the other hand it does some battery unfriendly things such as superfetch. If you configure it accordingly, it is a good bit better on performance and on battery than XP.

[awolfe63]

XP can clock down the FSB and I think it can deep sleep as well.

I can do real work on my X61s with decent screen brightness at 8W.

[apbudha]

I read in pcmag or pcworld or something like these mags that Vista does indeed consume more power than XP. You can run in Vista Basic mode to disable the power consuming eye candy.

which is I think what many of us are doing anyway, once we have tested the eye candy and realize how futile and non-productive it is to have enabled.

as a side note I have received notice my x61s has shipped : } my zeroshock III and shaggy mac are just waiting for it. I will try and definitely post impressions. i just hope i don't get a lemon.