Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,

I've got a brand new x201s that I'm very happy about. It's got the 6-cell battery. Today I tested the battery, and ended up with the following:

11:14 AM - standby, unplugged from charger
11:24 AM - resume, normal use
1:00 PM - standby, went to lunch
2:30 PM - back from lunch, normal use
4:15 PM - standby, home/errands
7:36 - resume
7:44 - hibernation kicked in with Windows 7 Pro showing 1% of battery remaining

This gives me about 209 minutes of battery life, with ~300 minutes of standby time, unless I screwed up the calculations...

During the time of usage, WiFi and Bluetooth were both on, and I had four applications open: Firefox, Thunderbird, mIRC, and TweetDeck. Brightness was set to 7/15, and my usage was pretty normal. I opened up Word a couple of times and used Firefox mainly for browsing, no Flash games, and I might've watched 2-3 YouTube videos.

Is this normal? From reviews, I thought I was supposed to be looking at 5-6 hours of battery life...at least 300 minutes, hopefully closer to 360.

Does the battery take time to adjust and get to its normal operating stats? Is there anything I can do to increase battery life, save turning off WiFi/Bluetooth? I use Bluetooth for my mouse.

Thanks!

It's impossible to tell, because we don't know, how much power your system uses.
Check it with appropriate software.
209 min. of normal, office usage (no youtube, no movies, no games, no calculation heavy software, and I'm assuming that you are using power saving plan) it definietly too short.

Well, it depends on what you're doing on the computer (and which background processes are running), what its specifications are, and what power saving options are enabled.

On the Energy Star plan on my X201 (i5-520M, SSD) the 6-cell battery gives me about four hours runtime. That's light, careful use though; web browsing, text editing, email and the like. If set to Maximum battery life that increases by about an hour.