Thinkpads Forum

Posted: **Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:17 am**

What kind of battery life do you all get from your W500s? I've found mine to be excellent so far. With a 9-cell, I get about 4.5 - 5 hours on dedicated graphics, 6 - 7+ on integrated. These are with brightness at 9 of 15, wifi and bluetooth on.

Posted: **Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:09 am**

I'm getting 2.5-3 hours with a 6 cell and dedicated graphics (and a T9600)

Posted: **Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:01 pm**

Ok. I've got a T9600 as well, and 4gb of ram. However, the HD never spins down, as windows creates too much hd activity

What brightness are you using, and is that on integrated or dedicated?

Posted: **Tue Oct 21, 2008 2:11 pm**

That's at 12-15 brightness with dedicated graphics.

Posted: **Wed Oct 29, 2008 2:29 pm**

I get just shy of 5 hours with a 9 cell battery and running linux with the screen at maximum brightness the entire time.

Posted: **Wed Nov 05, 2008 8:32 pm**

I'm on my second W and both have had lousy battery life.

I have the 90w battery running Vista 64, my power settings are moderate and I don't get more than 2.5 hours while using the machine the whole time. Can some of you who report the 5+ hours report your power specs.

What am I doing wrong?

thanks

Posted: **Wed Nov 05, 2008 9:40 pm**

Running Aero Glass.

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 12:02 am**

comptiger5000, what Windows version are you running on your W500?

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 6:10 am**

My W500 is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise. Seems to be one of the cleanest windows versions. Then again, I'll have new numbers in a few months if/when I move up to 2008 (for DX10 games, switchable graphics without reboot).

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 7:12 pm**

That's very strange... I can only think of an antivirus scanning your machine but I'm sure you already checked that. Is it a 7.200 or 5.400 rpm hard drive?

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 7:31 pm**

I have a similar problem on one of my desktop machines running Vista Home Premium. The disk is hit every 10 seconds or so. For the life of me, I can't figure out what's doing it. I have indexing off. McAfee is installed though.

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 8:57 pm**

3D_GuRu wrote:That's very strange... I can only think of an antivirus scanning your machine but I'm sure you already checked that. Is it a 7.200 or 5.400 rpm hard drive?

I'm not sure if this was directed at me, but I'll respond. My W500 has:

7200 rpm hard drive
3gb RAM
T9400
Bluetooth

I'm not sure if any of my other specs affect battery life.

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 9:18 pm**

Mine takes a disk hit about every 5 secs (caused by VMware server, even with no VMs running). 5400 rpm HD never spins down, but doesn't seem to hurt battery life much.

Posted: **Thu Nov 06, 2008 10:54 pm**

sorry youthink, I was commenting comptiger500's case. 7.200 rpm HDDs use more power than 5.400 rpm ones. If you want to get more life out of your battery switch to your integrated graphic card instead of the ATI FireGL if you are not doing intense 3D stuff. Other than that, I can only think about using XP instead of Vista but I'm not sure about this.

Posted: **Fri Nov 07, 2008 4:39 am**

I have the same issue as youthink, really bad battery life.

brightness to about 70% no battery streched wifi on, I get about 2.5 t o 3 hours.
I think we should try to compare when we max everything out. I get about 2hours 15 minutes then.

machine: T500
os: vista 64
harddrive: SSD
memory: 6Gig
processor T9600

Posted: **Fri Nov 07, 2008 6:18 am**

Freakwave - I am assuming that is dedicated graphics on a 6-cell, correct?

Posted: **Fri Nov 07, 2008 6:51 am**

Hi Computiger,

it is worse, it is the 9 cell on dedicated graphics

Posted: **Fri Nov 07, 2008 12:01 pm**

Wow. What OS are you running? Also, if it's Vista, is Aero on?

Also, is it the stock windows install, or did you reinstall (not from recovery media)?

Thinkpads Forum

W500 Battery Life

W500 Battery Life

Lousy battery life