Battery life - Power consumption on x60

[slackie]

Hi there,

I own a x60 with the t7200 cpu (core 2 duo). I've been experiencing poor battery performance ever since I bought the machine (1 year from now). The battery time given is the same as when I bought the machine and for a while I even thought that I had gotten a bad battery so I had it exchanged.

I'm using the 4-cell battery with vista 64-bits and the Lenovo add-ons such as battery-maximizer etc. When set to the default setting "maximum battery-performance" I roughly get 1,5 hours of usage. Is it normal? What do you get?

I've noticed that cpu speed doesn't change when viewing system information in vista. Could it simply related to speedstep not functioning as supposed (it's enabled in BIOS)?

Any suggestions?

[zcacogp]

I'm watchting this one with interest - my X61s (dual core) is pretty dismal on battery life as well, and around 2 hours is as much as I can get out of it. Although I haven't really played around with the power management settings, I have to confess.

All suggestions will be adopted ...


Oli.

[slackie]

I'm watchting this one with interest - my X61s (dual core) is pretty dismal on battery life as well, and around 2 hours is as much as I can get out of it. Although I haven't really played around with the power management settings, I have to confess.

All suggestions will be adopted ...


Oli.

darn - and I thought that x61s was the answer to my problem. According to the site I bought my x60 from it should perform up to 3 hours, which means that I probably should be happy with what I'm getting?

I'm still curious about that SpeedStep thing.

[zcacogp]

Slackie,

Alas - not so. My X61s offers CONSIDERABLY less battery life than my old X31, which was a superb machine (and which has just died!) I'd get 5 hours from that with ease, and that's with WiFi on ... the X61s struggles to top 2.

Speedstep? Haven't heard of it .... must investigate. I'll let you know how I get on.


Oli.

[smartypants]

less than 3 hours? are you using the smaller battery?

[slackie]

less than 3 hours? are you using the smaller battery?

4-cell - I assume it is the smallest.

SpeedStep seems to be working when checking with CPU-Z.

[jho]

Dunno about SpeedStep but you could try turning off some of Vista's options such as Aero which consumes graphics power, Indexing which uses the hard drive and unnecessary programs.

I get a little over 3 hours on my X60s with the Windows Classic theme and some services tweaking.

[Yandar]

Hi all.

Intel Speedstep in integrated into Vista and XP by default. It allows an intel cpu to dynamically clock up and down to save power.

[slackie]

Dunno about SpeedStep but you could try turning off some of Vista's options such as Aero which consumes graphics power, Indexing which uses the hard drive and unnecessary programs.

I get a little over 3 hours on my X60s with the Windows Classic theme and some services tweaking.

Could you please explain what kind of tweaking you did.

[jho]

Dunno about SpeedStep but you could try turning off some of Vista's options such as Aero which consumes graphics power, Indexing which uses the hard drive and unnecessary programs.

I get a little over 3 hours on my X60s with the Windows Classic theme and some services tweaking.

Could you please explain what kind of tweaking you did.

Firstly I'd like to point out that I leave the display on minimum brightness on battery and the display will make a very big contribution to power usage. Wireless is left on though.

I just disabled services that I don't use though services.msc. Some services you could try disabling include:

• Fax
  Infrared monitor service
  ReadyBoost
  Smart Card
  Tablet PC Input Service
  Themes (this reverts you to the grey Windows Classic theme, think Windows 95-Windows 2000)
  Windows CardSpace
  Windows Defender
  Windows Search (this disables Indexing, if you search often then leave it on, if you only search a few times a year and don't mind waiting longer then you can disable it)

If you find you need a service you've disabled you can turn it back on at any time through services.msc (unless it's some essential service that you shouldn't be able to turn off anyway.)

You can find guides on the internet for what different services do and whether you can get away with disabling them or at least preventing them from starting automatically at logon. This guide looks pretty good.

I don't know how much of a difference these changes will make since I perform then immediately after installing Windows. Also using Windows XP should increase battery life.

[slackie]

Firstly I'd like to point out that I leave the display on minimum brightness on battery and the display will make a very big contribution to power usage. Wireless is left on though.

I just disabled services that I don't use though services.msc. Some services you could try disabling include:

• Fax
  Infrared monitor service
  ReadyBoost
  Smart Card
  Tablet PC Input Service
  Themes (this reverts you to the grey Windows Classic theme, think Windows 95-Windows 2000)
  Windows CardSpace
  Windows Defender
  Windows Search (this disables Indexing, if you search often then leave it on, if you only search a few times a year and don't mind waiting longer then you can disable it)

If you find you need a service you've disabled you can turn it back on at any time through services.msc (unless it's some essential service that you shouldn't be able to turn off anyway.)

You can find guides on the internet for what different services do and whether you can get away with disabling them or at least preventing them from starting automatically at logon. This guide looks pretty good.

I don't know how much of a difference these changes will make since I perform then immediately after installing Windows. Also using Windows XP should increase battery life.

Thanks alot! I will notify you all later on this week.