Thinkpads Forum

I've had an X61 for about three months now, and I absolutely hate it.

Specs:
2ghz C2D
2GB DDR2
80GB hard drive
Intel 4965 wireless card.

Issues:
1. Battery life sucks. (Yes, I could've got the X61s, but it cost about $400 more with the low-power screen.) I get a hair over two hours using Ubuntu; Windows Vista went wonky when I partitioned the hard drive, and I hate it anyway.

2. The wireless card driver sucks. Power management is nonexistent, and it stops working at random intervals. Admittedly, I couls use Windows, but I could also try and get rid of the wart on my foot by wading in a pool of snapping turtles.

3. None of the function keys work. This is likely a Linux problem, but honestly, I'm cheesed.

4. The battery life sucks.

5. Batteries cost a small fortune.

Since I've got the 3-year "accidental damage protection" warranty, I'm stuck with the stupid thing - I spent roughly $1,800 on it. If I could get five hours out of an 8-cell, I'd be able to use this laptop....but, as it is, I'd rather just use my old Palm M100, with it's cheap collapsible keyboard.

It looks like all of your reasons are really related to the OS you are using and not the notebook itself.

I believe battery life would improve quite a bit by using a different OS (WinXP perhaps since you "hate" vista)?

Battery cost is similar or even less in my experience than other manufacturers.

I've found batteries to be quite affordable. I purchased the 8-cell for $100. It came with a 1GB USB key that I sold for $10, so I ended up paying only $90. Granted, I got it on sale from Lenovo.com, but you just have to buy when there's a sale.

As for battery life, you may be using the 4-cell slimline battery. Is this right? I've found that my 8-cell enhanced gives me an average of 7 hours, and my 4-cell enhanced gives me an average of 3 hours using Windows Vista.

Maybe it is your OS, or that you may be using the CPU on max 100% of the time + no other power management (ie. screen at brightest, wifi and bluetooth on, etc)

How many charge cycles does your battery have on it? It could also be a faulty battery, which you could return and get a replacement for under the warranty.

Since your using linux, try installing powertop to get a better idea of what is eating into your battery life.
and run as root
When running on Battery what are the number of watts being consumed? There will be recommendations of things you can do to improve your battery life.

My X61s averages around 13-15 watts and I am able to get 5+ hours of life with the screen at medium brightness.

In the Linux section of the forums in the thread titled "Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10" I have some instructions on installing ondemand CPU frequency governor which may also help improve battery life.

3. You can make the function keys work again by reinstalling Display drivers (from lenovo), hotkey drivers, Presentation Director, Power Management and Lenovo System Interface drivers.

Drivers and software - ThinkPad X61, X61s

ryengineer wrote:3. You can make the function keys work again by reinstalling Display drivers (from lenovo), hotkey drivers, Presentation Director, Power Management and Lenovo System Interface drivers.

Drivers and software - ThinkPad X61, X61s

Yay for reading with comprehension!

Try loading the official Lenovo Linux on the laptop, SLED 10. The link below has instructions. Below you'll see what I got working and the battery life.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=


On lowest brightness, the unit gets 6:40 hours and the screen is still very readable.

The following ThinkVantage features work:
Configuration
F3, F4, F5, F12, F-Home, F-End, F-PgUp
(Power manager, Suspend to RAM, Access Connections, Hibernate to disk, increase brightness, decrease brightness, Thinklight).

Bluetooth.

another good site is thinkwiki.org. they focus specifically on using linux with thinkpads. ubuntu just takes some tinkering to get it to work the way you want it to.