Thinkpads Forum

I'm using a little utility called BatteryBar. When I hover the cursor over it, it display how many Watts per Hour my Thinkpad is consuming. It seems that with power saving set at maximum and a brightness level of 4, it is consuming around 18 watts per hour. That is, without me doing anything on the machine. This is with the wifi off. Anyone else experiencing similarly high power usage?

gene303 wrote:I'm using a little utility called BatteryBar. When I hover the cursor over it, it display how many Watts per Hour my Thinkpad is consuming. It seems that with power saving set at maximum and a brightness level of 4, it is consuming around 18 watts per hour. That is, without me doing anything on the machine. This is with the wifi off. Anyone else experiencing similarly high power usage?

Complete offtopic, but watts are already meaning the "speed" of power consumption, an amount of power consumption is denoted by watt-hours. "Watt per hour" is something like acceleration, and makes no sense (and it definitely has nothing to do with your context).
What about subject, make sure that CPU mode is set to "adaptive" in Thinkpad Power Manager. Also try to wait some time, it is possible that your BatteryBar outputs data with a huge delay.

I had meant to say watt-hours. My cpu setting is set to low, not adaptive. I thought adaptive might eat more juice. I've also noticed that the battery bar has a delay and have thusly tried to wait.

If you use Osiris BatteryBar, you mean watts; it gives the reading at that moment in time.

A watt-hour is a unit of capacity. A watt is the instantaneous consumption of watt-hours at a certain time. Mathematically, the derivative of a function with units of Wh with respect to time gives a function with units of W. If you were to sustain 18W for an hour, then you would use 18Wh.

And yes, 18Wh is super high. My T400 idles at 10W (which is higher than it should be already). Check for runaway CPU processes and inexplicable disk activity in Resmon.

Here are some screen shots. I was able to get it about as low as 12. Here are some screenshots:
1. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/415446/power1.png
2. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/415446/power2.png

Perhaps the difference between your t400 and my t410s is that the i5 (even in low) eats that much more?

--Gene

I have a friend with a T510 (i5-540M) whose idle wattages are about 7W. He has discrete graphics too.

The T410s should run a LOT lower on power because it's either Integrated only, Discrete with Switchable, or Optimus. All three should idle naturally (or be made to idle) on the Integrated graphics.

Your CPU frequency runs a bit high; I'd recommend setting it to lowest; most often, it is unlikely to need massive CPU power on battery. Also your disk activity looks a bit weird.

I also have a feeling Norton is to blame, but I can't be sure. Try sorting the disk table by Total (bytes per second). It'll indicate which process is constantly doing disk activity.

EDIT: Oops. It is lowest. It looks weird; lowest frequency should be about 800MHz-ish.
EDIT2: I also don't recommend charging beyond 90% on a regular basis; it tends to wear out the cells exponentially faster.

Colonel O'Neill wrote:EDIT: Oops. It is lowest. It looks weird; lowest frequency should be about 800MHz-ish.

The frequency is not only significantly higher than 800MHz (although i don't know what is the minimum for i3/i5/i7), but it is obviously changes over time. It seems that Power Manager "lowest" setting has no effect (maybe there is some bug in Power Manager?). I'd recommend to open Windows "Power Options" from "Control Panel", then "Change plan settings", "Change advanced power settings" and look what are the minimum and maximum processor states there. It is possible that minimum state is set to e.g. 80% and maximum is set to 90%, and then it is pretty reasonable for laptop to suck 12-18W.
Also, if it is a clean Windows 7 install, not preinstalled Enhanced Experience, it is possible that laptop consumes so much power because of that. I've tried clean windows 7 install on my X200s once, and with all the latest drivers installed, i never was able to get it under 15W. With clean Vista install, it is 15-16W when i'm watching 720p AVC-encoded movies, 10W during the normal work, and i'm able to get it as low as 7.5W (with wireless turned off, screen on min.brightness, CPU locked on the lowest 800MHz frequency, and doing nothing with laptop so that CPU will enter a C-something state).