Thinkpads Forum

I'm curious as to what kind of power consumption and battery life everyone is averaging on ThinkPad X200 (especially the tablet model). For those of you with the ThinkPad power manager installed, what kind of wattage are you getting under the battery tab? What kind of settings and applications do you use? What kind of panel is in your machine? What kind of battery do you have and how long does it last?

I'll start:

X200 Tablet with the 285 nit frameless (wacom only) Toshiba LED-backlit LCD panel
Under moderate usage (web browsing, videos, etc.) with 50-70% screen brightness, somewhat conservative power settings, WiFi on, and Bluetooth off, I'm consuming 14-16watts and getting a bit under 2 hours of battery life with the standard (8 cell?) battery pack.

x200s 1440 can go to around 5W idle but most likely around 6W with WiFi off. In general use it rarely breaks 16W except some serious benchmarks where it hits 25-35W.

But 2 hours on 8-cell battery with 16W consumption is bad result. Calibrate it and check numeric mAh values, perhaps it's time to replace.

X20055 wrote:x200s 1440 can go to around 5W idle but most likely around 6W with WiFi off.

Wow, that's really low. What about with WiFi on?

X20055 wrote: But 2 hours on 8-cell battery with 16W consumption is bad result. Calibrate it and check numeric mAh values, perhaps it's time to replace.

Interesting. I ran the calibration wizard and now it seems to idle at closer to 11-15watts, but I'm not sure if that's what caused the change. Battery life is still about the same, maybe a little better, but that could be because I reduced the brightness a bit.

I'd be interested in finding out what other X200 users get.

I don't know the wattage used, but my X200s (SL9400, LED 1440x900) with 9-cell battery lasts about 7 1/2 hours.
The same machine with a 6-cell battery lasts almost 5 hours.
Both batteries are in great shape.

RealBlackStuff wrote:I don't know the wattage used, but my X200s (SL9400, LED 1440x900) with 9-cell battery lasts about 7 1/2 hours.
The same machine with a 6-cell battery lasts almost 5 hours.
Both batteries are in great shape.

Wow, that's a really long time. Now I've got another question - when I look at the battery tab of the power manager and see the "cycle count", is that the cycle count from the battery itself or just as reported by the operating system since Windows's installation? I'm guessing it is the latter seeing as the "manufacture date" and "first used date" are reported to be 2009. Would an older battery report higher wattage used due to inefficiency? I always assumed that any negative performance could be blamed on the age of the pack, but if the wattage is going so high, maybe something else is up.

When I look at the battery tab of the power manager and see the "cycle count", is that the cycle count from the battery itself or just as reported by the operating system since Windows's installation?

Cycle count is read from the battery. I run Linux and get the same data when querying the battery.

Would an older battery report higher wattage used due to inefficiency? I always assumed that any negative performance could be blamed on the age of the pack, but if the wattage is going so high, maybe something else is up.

Regarding high wattage, use Task Manager or Process Explorer and look for unusual CPU activity.

In one of our family's Windows machines, Recently I've seen 1 core at 100% usage due to the svchost.exe program running the netsvc service.
Since it's a system service, I can't dissect it any further.
I've run a few virus scans but found nothing unusual.

axur-delmeria wrote:

When I look at the battery tab of the power manager and see the "cycle count", is that the cycle count from the battery itself or just as reported by the operating system since Windows's installation?

Cycle count is read from the battery. I run Linux and get the same data when querying the battery.

Interesting. In that case, the number seems pretty low considering the age of the battery, first use date, and the number of cycles it's probably undergone while I've owned it.

axur-delmeria wrote:

Would an older battery report higher wattage used due to inefficiency? I always assumed that any negative performance could be blamed on the age of the pack, but if the wattage is going so high, maybe something else is up.

Regarding high wattage, use Task Manager or Process Explorer and look for unusual CPU activity.

In one of our family's Windows machines, Recently I've seen 1 core at 100% usage due to the svchost.exe program running the netsvc service.
Since it's a system service, I can't dissect it any further.
I've run a few virus scans but found nothing unusual.

I've seen odd out-of-control stuff like that on other machines (and you can feel it slow down when that happens), but this one usually stays close to 0% CPU and hard drive usage when there's not much going on. That said, I actually clocked some better numbers yesterday, when it was idling/used minimally at close to 9-13 watts on the battery and I still had at least 25% left after around 2 hours and 20 minutes of uptime. Not sure what I did different, but that was some of the best battery life I've ever clocked on the X200; very impressive.