X201 Tablet - poor battery life

[ojciec]

I've bought recently an X201 Tablet, it's great, but i have problem with battery.

With OEM Lenovo 12++ battery (8-cell) i can get only around 3:00-3:30 battery life.

Battery is in exellent condition (charge capacity is almost 100% of a design capacity), it has 120 cycles, manufacture date is 01-2014 and first use date is 07-2014), everything is set to power-saving on battery (graphics, processor, brightness level around 7-9/15).

I've tried resetting battery but it's still don't good enough - is it possible somehow to make around 5-6 hours on 8-cell battery?

Specs:
i5 1,06GHz, 2x2GB Ram, HDD Hitachi 5400RPM, multitouch display, Win7 64bit.
Of course everything is updated (Power Manager, drivers, Windows etc).


Sorry for my english.

[charlesd]

Weird. Windows 7 is very power efficient on the X201 tablet and while I don't need to do 6h, I think I could do 6h without many problems.

What is your power draw in the thinkpad tools? On my i7 power draws goes down to 7 to 8W when I reading a PDF with brighness 3 notches below the maximum

What is your CPU temperature? On my i7 it's between 33 and 35 in windows in the same setting.

I would suggest hiding the taskbar (may sound stupid but it helps). Also, are you sure your battery is genuine? 2014 looks very recent. Maybe too recent to be true.

[ojciec]

Weird. Windows 7 is very power efficient on the X201 tablet and while I don't need to do 6h, I think I could do 6h without many problems.

That's why it's suspicious to me - i can easly get 6-7 hours with WiFi and 8/15 brighness on my T420 with 70++ battery.

What is your power draw in the thinkpad tools? On my i7 power draws goes down to 7 to 8W when I reading a PDF with brighness 3 notches below the maximum

13-14W with WiFi, 3/15 brightness, after few minues when LCD is dim (to 1/15) it goes down to 8-9,5w.

What is your CPU temperature? On my i7 it's between 33 and 35 in windows in the same setting.

Around 55-60 celsius degrees.

I would suggest hiding the taskbar (may sound stupid but it helps). Also, are you sure your battery is genuine? 2014 looks very recent. Maybe too recent to be true.

Yes, battery is genuine, i'm pretty sure - i know how chinesse cheap batteries are build (low quality plasic, low weight) and also i'm comparing it to battery in my T420. Computer was bought (not directly of course) from the company that was swapping hardware to newer.

Again - sorry for mistakes, english is not my native language.

[charlesd]

Your English is just fine, don't worry

You should worry about why your i5 is drawing so many watts. My 8 watts is with the screen at almost full brightness. I use a SSD but I don't think it makes a big difference. Your CPU is also quite hot.

If your windows 7 install is fresh, it will need to do some updates for a few days. If you have no programs running in the background, try to change the thermal paste.

Before that, make sure the power management options are enabled in the BIOS.

[ajkula66]

Around 55-60 celsius degrees.

That's your problem right there, or at least a good part of it.

Two things that I'd suggest:

a) Cleaning out the fan/heatsink and re-applying thermal paste

b) Checking out the number of processes that you have running on a freshly booted system, since there might be something in the background stressing out the CPU.

Good luck.

EDIT: charlesd beat me to it...

[ojciec]

Thanks for reply.

I thought about changing the thermal paste (i always changing it after buying any used laptop), just don't have time yet. Only think i've done was a fast cleaning (without disassembling computer).

I will check BIOS settings, but i think i restored settings to default after buying (and tried to update, but it's up-to-date).

BTW SSD drive increase battery life about 30 minutes (at least in my T400 few month ago when i bought SSD).

Oh, and little OT: X201T should have Active Protection System? I can't enable it (APS software tells that it don't support my TP).

Model type 3093-W9W