6 cell battery life

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stuka · #1 Post by **stuka** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 2:02 pm

I know that given the recent battery issues, that this might not be a good idea.

But I move around all day with my laptop at my clients, and I would really really love to use the 6 cell battery instead of the included 9 cell on my T42p.

Does anyone know of any aftermarket 6 cell that gives better battery life performance than the OEM version?

Thanks.

jsteele · #2 Post by **jsteele** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 2:38 pm

Out of curiousity what kind of usage are you seeing on the 9 cell? I have used the 6 cell on my T42p and thus far am disappointed with the battery life; a new (6 cycle) 6 cell is yielding only about 1.5 hours or less.

stuka · #3 Post by **stuka** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 3:00 pm

jsteele wrote:Out of curiousity what kind of usage are you seeing on the 9 cell? I have used the 6 cell on my T42p and thus far am disappointed with the battery life; a new (6 cycle) 6 cell is yielding only about 1.5 hours or less.

The 9 cell is only good for 2.5.

I don't understand what is so difficult about making a [censored] battery that lasts.

Maybe they should take some lessons from Nokia.

jsteele · #4 Post by **jsteele** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 3:30 pm

Thanks. I was sfraid of that.

I just got the T42p because I wanted the additional screen space but I had no idea that it would have that much impact on battery life. The 6-cell running in my T40 generally yields about 3 hours, the 9-cell over 4 /12.

christopher_wolf · #5 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Fri Sep 29, 2006 6:22 pm

I have gotten everything from 4:30 hours to 3:30 hours with my 9-Cells; they aren't bad though. It is more of how much one is expecting the battery life to hold out over a period of time versus the light/moderate/heavy usage of the battery.

I looked for a third party battery, although I couldn't find anything that had a real edge over that of the IBM OEM battery 9-cell. Certainly nothing even a tad smaller than the 6-cell.

davidspalding · #6 Post by **davidspalding** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 11:29 am

I use both a 6-cell and 9-cell with an [edit] Ultrabay Slim battery. I get anywhere from 5-6 hours run time with the biggies, and about 4 with a 6-cell and [edit] the Ultrabay Slim battery. My sigline shows an extreme example of freshly charged, new, big batteries, and a power consumption profile set at extreme miserliness.

It's important to note that battery life can be determined a lot by a) the Power Manager/Battery Maximizer profile and b) how you're using the laptop. If you put it on an Adaptive, or Power Source Optimized profile, and let the hard drives spin down and display turn off quickly, batteries will last longer.

Likewise, if you're doing something like hibernating and restarting 5-6 times throughout the day, batteries will last less. Hard drive activity and processor intensive operations will require power.

#7 Post by **archer6** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 4:09 pm

davidspalding wrote:I use both a 6-cell and 9-cell with an Ultrabay battery. I get anywhere from 5-6 hours run time with the biggies, and about 4 with a 6-cell and the Ultrabay.

It's good to hear that you are getting about 4 hrs with the 6-cell and Ultrabay battery, as that is my experience as well. Initially I was expecting to get around 5 hours with that combo. Then it occured to me that unlike the Ultrabay batteries, the 60 series use Ultrabay slim devices and the battery is quite a bit thinner than those used in the T4x series.

#8 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 6:33 pm

archer6 wrote:Then it occured to me that unlike the Ultrabay batteries, the 60 series use Ultrabay slim devices and the battery is quite a bit thinner than those used in the T4x series.

Eh? The drive bay in the T4x series is the Ultrabay Slim.

#9 Post by **dorronto** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 6:57 pm

Interesting results. I'm getting 5 hours plus a little with a fairly new 6 cell battery on my T40 PM-1.5. I'm very happy with that. I have a used 9 cell with about 166 cycles that lasts around 4 to 5 hours that I'm probably going to sell, since I ordered another new 6 cell battery.

Ron

#10 Post by **archer6** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 6:59 pm

GomJabbar wrote:
archer6 wrote:Then it occured to me that unlike the Ultrabay batteries, the 60 series use Ultrabay slim devices and the battery is quite a bit thinner than those used in the T4x series.
Eh? The drive bay in the T4x series is the Ultrabay Slim.

Oops, I was thinking T2x Ultrabay 2000 (13mm), yet I wrote T4x Ultrabay Slim (9.5mm). Thanks for picking up on my mistake....

stuka · #11 Post by **stuka** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 12:42 pm

I have 1G RAM, 15" 1600x1200 video, and 7200rpm HD.

I have to run screen at full bright because of the office environments at all my clients.

Most of the power saving mode, other than screen blanking are worthless to me because I usually have four remote desktop sessions open for work, tiled four ways, gotta love that 1600x1200 screen.

I am thinking of going to the 4.8Ah 6 cell and the 1.5Ah ultra bary battery because the 9 cell makes it annoyingly difficult to move the laptop around when I move around the office.

Perhaps I should try adding more RAM and looking into the Seagate which supposedly uses less power than the OEM Hitachi 7200rpm drive.

#12 Post by **archer6** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 1:12 pm

stuka wrote:I am thinking of going to the 4.8Ah 6 cell and the 1.5Ah ultra bary battery because the 9 cell makes it annoyingly difficult to move the laptop around when I move around the office.

I use this combination of 6 cell and Ultrabay Slim battery in my T60p and find it solves the problem quite nicely. The current configuration of my T60p is 2GB ram and the Seagate drive.

stuka wrote:Perhaps I should try adding more RAM and looking into the Seagate which supposedly uses less power than the OEM Hitachi 7200rpm drive.

I have tried both hard drives you list here and find no noticeable power savings from the Seagate drive. Interestingly, I do find the Seagate just a tiny bit quieter which is contrary to my experience with Hitachi drives which I have in some of my other ThinkPads. The Hitachi has always been my drive of choice. However when I read that the Seagate would use less power I chose to try one.

I will not use Seagate in the future even though this particular drive is a bit quieter, it's not enough to justify the difference in performance. Although very close is specs, I find the real world user experience of the Seagate to be noticeably slower than the Hitachi. Also in fairness to the OEM Hitachi, there is a software tool to optimize and reduce drive noise, which I have not used in this one yet. I'm going to change out the drives today, reinstall the Hitachi, use the software tool and simply keep the Seagate as a spare.

In addition, I feel that I may just have an exceptionally quiet unit. One of my friends did the same upgrade exactly with his ThinkPad which is an exact duplicate of mine in terms of configuration, and his drive is much noisier than the Hitachi drives.

davidspalding · #13 Post by **davidspalding** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 10:25 pm

stuka wrote:I have 1G RAM, 15" 1600x1200 video, and 7200rpm HD.

I have to run screen at full bright because of the office environments at all my clients.

Most of the power saving mode, other than screen blanking are worthless to me...

Don't lose hope. There are some other things you can do, that I do, and they DO make a diff'. Like putting the processor at low, or lowest speed. Using the TPFANCTRL utility. Having disks spin down after a short while (remote desktop oughtn't use disk caching). Screen refresh rate (I don't use it, but it's there for a reason I suppose). Finally ... power down things that aren't needed (Bluetooth, CD drive, background defrag, content indexing service).

My point is, there are many ways to conserve power other than the screen. Sorry if you think I'm lecturing to you, I'm not -- just making suggestions you perhaps hadn't thought of.

#14 Post by **archer6** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 9:44 am

davidspalding wrote:Don't lose hope. There are some other things you can do, that I do, and they DO make a diff'. Like putting the processor at low, or lowest speed. Using the TPFANCTRL utility. Having disks spin down after a short while (remote desktop oughtn't use disk caching). Screen refresh rate (I don't use it, but it's there for a reason I suppose). Finally ... power down things that aren't needed (Bluetooth, CD drive, background defrag, content indexing service).

My point is, there are many ways to conserve power other than the screen. Sorry if you think I'm lecturing to you, I'm not -- just making suggestions you perhaps hadn't thought of.

Well said,
Thanks for the the detailed outline here, as I have done all of the above, but forgot about content indexing service.

Cheers...

simms · #15 Post by **simms** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 12:57 am

My 6-cell lasts about 4:xx hours alone. I would put it accurate +- 20 minutes or so.

schmaud · #16 Post by **schmaud** » Thu Oct 05, 2006 4:55 pm

Hi,
what might make adifference is undervolting the CPU. it does make a difference, but don`t expect miracles.

r.

6 cell battery life

6 cell battery life

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