battery life and a couple of deceptions x220

[mika2]

hello,

I have my x220 for a about a month now, and no matter what I try, I can't have more than 5 hours of battery life (well, unless I let it sit idle).

Here's my best autonomy so far:
- 4 brightness
- "Maximum battery life" in power manager
- Wifi On, bluetooth off. Near access point
- Doing some very light web surfing (tried every browser)
- 6 cell battery, intel 6205 wifi, ssd.
- Latest drivers and bios
- Factory windows image


If I'm careful, I have 5 hours at best.

I've read most people reporting a solid 6-7 hours (with same setup, and higher brighness sometimes, sometimes including video and skype. On this forum and on the very long thread on notebookreview). Some reviewers claims up to 8 hours!

I must say that I am a bit disappointed by lenovo (second thinkpad, first was IBM back in 2003). A bit filmsy, backlight bleeding, bad refresh rates, jumpy touchpad, questionable battery life, etc... I mean, I am not expecting perfection and not disappointed to the point of sending it back (15% restocking anyway). But I feel that I paid a premium for a thinkpad, and I did not receive a premium. The x220 is always "on sale", I guess it's because the machine really is not worth the full 2200$ price asked by lenovo before rebates.

Anyway, past these deceptions, it is a good machine so far. Just a bit tired of fighting with these annoyances, I hope you understand.


Any Idea why I'm not getting the 6 hours reported by others? 5 hours is not bad and I guess I should be happy, but why should I have worst battery life than others?

Thank you

[penartur]

I was able to get as low as <5W on my X220 (which means up to 12hrs on a 6-cell battery). However, this is with wireless disabled and everything tuned down.
When watching HD video with DXVA acceleration, on maximum screen brightness, i'm able to get about 4.5 hours of battery life on a 6-cell battery, with a power consumption somewhere in 13-14W range.
The things you might consider (and that could get you somewhere in a 8-9hrs range), although i'm not sure it will help you, based on your post:
1) IPS screen is really power hungry, going from lowest (1/15) to highest (15/15) brightness increases consumption on about 5-6W, which is comparable to the total consumption of all the other consumers combined. If you have an IPS (and maybe TN suffers from the same problem), you should lower the brightness; otherwise, you won't get more than 5 hours even when idling.
2) It seems that Chrome reduces the Windows' ability to save the power. Internet Explorer doesn't have this problem.
3) Check that you have the wireless power set to "maximum savings" in windows power plan settings.
4) Check your CPU load and frequency with Resource Monitor (WinR, resmon). It is possible that some software loads up your CPU to 100% (even 25% is too much for your 4-thread processor) thus making it work on a full non-reduced frequency and spend less time in C-states.
5) You may also try locking the CPU in 800MHz/single core mode (set "Maximum CPU state" to 20% and "Processor performance core parking max cores" to 40% under the "Processor power management" section in windows power plan settings).
6) You may also try running `powercfg -energy' from command line (WinR, cmd), it is supposed to find some power issues and report on that.

The x220 is always "on sale", I guess it's because the machine really is not worth the full 2200$ price asked by lenovo before rebates.

It is the common thing with thinkpads at least the last couple of years (and probably the same thing was even in the times IBM produced thinkpads). They always write some ridiculous price for their laptops (be it X220, T520, non-thinkpad - anything) stroked above the actual price, making the people think it is a bargain.

[mika2]

Thank you for your reply!

I was not aware that it was the same back in the IBM days for the pricing. I'm not used to that kind of "marketing".

For some reason the powercfg diagnostic does not work, it says "The Power Efficiency Diagnostic library (energy.dll) could not be loaded.". I have Win7 x64 home premium if that matters.

I do have an IPS display.

I've tried to disable everything, set backlight to 0 and let it idle for a couple of minutes. It went down to 7 watts briefly, but was steady at 8. I'm nowere close to your 5 watts idling

Browsing with IE, I can arround 10-11 watts. Same for firefox. Chrome seems to peak a bit higher, but for short periods.
I should be seeing at least 5.5 hours with that.

Edit: With the display turned off (using a vga monitor) I get 4.5 watts when idling.