T400 w/ 6-cell Battery Questions

[elfie7x]

Hi,
I just got my new T400 for school last week and I've been somewhat disappointed with the battery life. Sometimes the battery meter will say I have 4-5 hours left, but in reality it feels like I'm getting more like 3 hours per cycle. I've mainly been using it for browsing, so the WiFi chip is always on, but I expected a little more out of the battery after reading some reviews. Right now the only thing I'm running is Firefox and it's saying 3:16 with 93% left, but sometimes it will jump to 4:30. I'm using the integrated graphics chip and the power plan is set to maximum battery life (display brightness is turned down as low as it can go). I disabled all the radios except WiFi in BIOS in hopes of saving power. So I was wondering...

Is there anything else I can do to get more battery life out of this 6-cell battery?

Also, is there any program I can use to measure my actual battery life? I don't really trust the Power Manager battery gauge.

Thanks for your help,
Eric

[NJ_Dave]

Hi Elfie,

I'm new here too (new ThinkPad owner), but I am itching to "give back" to the community, so here goes...

I understand turning off Vista's Aero 3D and Aero Glass transparency features can prolong your battery life. The transparency is reportedly more energy-consuming than the 3D, so you can stop at the transparency if you want. For maximum benefit you should turn them both off.

Right-click your screen and select "Personalize," then "Window Color and Appearance." To shut down just the transparency, click to deselect "Enable transparency" and click OK. To shut down Aero altogether (transparency and 3D), from the "Window Color and Appearance" screen, click "Open classic appearance properties for more color options." Select the Windows Vista Basic color scheme and click OK.

There's also the Battery Stretch feature in Power Manager, which allows you to turn off a host of features to get the most from every milliamp-hour.

There are some gadgets in the Vista gallery that purport to measure remaining battery life, but I can't vouch for any of them. One that came up in a search makes an estimate "if your laptop doesn't support remaining time calculation natively" -- assuming the ThinkPad does, this gadget should give you the same number that Power Manager displays. But you certainly can try it out.

Hope that helps!

[elfie7x]

Thanks for the advice, but enabling Battery Stretch (which disables Aero by default) does nothing for my battery life. While in the menu to enable it, it says "Activate Battery Stretch +1 minute (estimate)". Not really sure what's wrong here.

[elfie7x]

Could there be something wrong with my battery? I'm getting 3:30 with 95% remaining. In Power Manager, it says my battery's condition is good but I don't know what else could be wrong. Virtually all the settings are turned down to their lowest, with the exception of the WiFi radio, and I'm still getting mediocre battery life. Should I contact Lenovo?

[dr_st]

What Full Charge Capacity is shown in the Power Manager?

What is the average Wattage shown in the Power Manager under these conditions you described (i.e., everything turned down to the lowest)?

[elfie7x]

What Full Charge Capacity is shown in the Power Manager?

What is the average Wattage shown in the Power Manager under these conditions you described (i.e., everything turned down to the lowest)?

The full charge capacity is 59.24 Wh and the wattage is 13-14 W with just Firefox and Power Manager running. I've been getting a little better battery life recently--nearly 4 hours--but I'd like to know if the aforementioned power levels are normal and if there's anything I can do to get a little more life out of this battery.

Thank you,
Eric

[dr_st]

This seems normal to me (13-14Wh during idling, should last for 4+ hours on a 59.24Wh capacity battery, do the math).

But this is normal on mt T60. Dunno if it is normal for a T400, which I understand should consume even less juice. Maybe someone else with their T400 can share their experience with what is considered normal power consumption.

[Tony Chan]

My T400 consumes anywhere between 10 - 13W. ( 10W while idle or very light use of internet, shoots up to 13 when moving the eraser head pointer ).

My T400 spec
14" high res LED
Seagate 7200.3 320Gb drive
4 Gb ram ( 2sticks )
Bluetooth ( turned off ), camera ( turned off )
wifi ( intel 5300 ) on
running Vista Ultimate 64

[ljwobker]

Does anyone know of a way to capture/graph the battery usage other than manually watching the lenovo power manager application? It would be very interesting to have a background process that just grabs the power draw every ( second, ten seconds, 30 seconds, minute, whatever ) and then graph that over time....