Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I got a very high power consumption using my x200s (Core2Duo L9400 @ 1.86). I got about 10W if I type/read with maximum battery life profile, wifi on, bt off and screen 7/15. The absolute minimum that I have ever seen with sreen brightness to lowerest, wifi off is 7W. I think it is too high and it gives me only 3,5 hours of working time with 6 cell battery.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance

footech wrote:... I think it is too high ...

Too high compared to what?!! 7W-10W is not high at all ... in fact, it is quite low! Circa 10W during "normal" operation is as low as you should expect. There is nothing to be "fixed". Use a 9-cell battery if you need longer run time without AC power.

It is high compared to what I read in other forums and reviews (e.g. notebookreview). 10W is when I almost do nothing with the lowest settings. If I switch to power source optimized profile and work with outlook+word+ie (normal usgae) then I have 12-14W as average. This gives about 3 hours of battery life only.

footech wrote:It is high compared to what I read in other forums and reviews ... I have 12-14W as average.

I have no idea where "other forums and reviews" are getting their numbers, but 12-14W is perfectly normal for what you describe; it is not high. These machines run 12-14W, maybe more, when they are actually doing something other than idle, and even at idle they are right around 10W or higher.

You can believe the "other forums and reviews", or you can believe your own eyes! Your machine has perfectly normal power consumption.

That seems reasonable.

I wrote "one of those other reviews", and while I did get my X200s down to 5.6W (or thereabouts -- I can't recall exactly), I had a ULV CPU which has a considerably lower draw than the LV one in your machine.

Thanks for the answers

EOMtp wrote:

footech wrote:It is high compared to what I read in other forums and reviews ... I have 12-14W as average.

I have no idea where "other forums and reviews" are getting their numbers, but 12-14W is perfectly normal for what you describe; it is not high. These machines run 12-14W, maybe more, when they are actually doing something other than idle, and even at idle they are right around 10W or higher.

You can believe the "other forums and reviews", or you can believe your own eyes! Your machine has perfectly normal power consumption.

I'm getting about 8-9W in "reading mode" on my X200s with LV CPU and HDD. Consumption goes up as high as 13-14W when watching AVC (H.264) -encoded videos with DXVA GPU decoding. No uncommon or complicated power consumption optimizations were done.
"12-14W when they are actually doing something other than idle" seems ridiculously high. I'm getting about 8-10 hours of continuous working time (i.e. periods when i'm away from laptop are excluded) from a 9-cell battery; and i'm working with huge software projects in Visual Studio 2008+ReSharper (and Eclipse+VirtualBox before that).
However, when i've tried installing Win7 once, it did ate my battery really fast. IIRC it never went lower than 12W and when watching movies, it was more like 20W or so. I've tried to optimize its power consumption by various Windows and Power Manager settings, but with no success.
I'd recommend OP to try Vista. It seems that, for some reason, Win7 uses much more power than Vista does.