The machine is the 8250U version and compared to the T480 (same cpu) I owned previously, it does pretty bad in the battery life department. I can't get W consumption digits in powertop, but according to the KDE energy info (which might very well be inaccurate, but does match to the fact that the laptop lasts around 5hrs of use with the 57Wh battery), the machine operates at around 11W on average, which seems high considering my usage (browser, word processing, sometimes video playback). It also stays around those numbers almost no matter what I do, hovering in between 7 and 12 W. That seems a little high to my liking, and people around here report idle states of 3.8W which I can't seem to get.
What can be done about that? I think I've read every X210 related topic here (+ what was covered here) and applied all the tweaks I was confident enough for - disabling the C state limit set in the bios (auto >> manuf default), setting up ASPM and L1 states for all the root ports in the bios and enabling C1&3 cpu states.
Despite that, the power consumption is what it is, also
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lspci -vvv | grep aspm
I also don't think that the package reaches lower C states (or too many wakeups occur, idk), but I can't check as the powertop output doesn't work properly. Would this, possibly as well as the non-working thinklight controls and thinkvanatge button, be fixed by the community BIOS patch to the embedded controller from the xyte.ch link above? I am a little scared about updating the bios on this machine by myself (the procedure is a lot less straightforward compared to an ordinary thinkpad), but I could probably find someone who could help me.
Any other X210 tips are well appreciated, I hope someone here could be of help. Many thanks for reading all this!