Less than 2 hours battery life with X60S . . .

[boffo]

I just got my new X60S today, replacing an old X24. I'm mostly pretty pleased with it. The only disappointment so far is the poor battery life. I am getting just less than 2 hours. This is with wireless networking turned on and used quite a lot, but with nothing particularly CPU-intensive running.

I have the 4-cell slimline battery (which I believe is the smallest available).

Is battery life this short to be expected, or does it indicate a fault? I have the Intel wireless card in case that's relevant.

If it is normal, what can I expect from either of the larger batteries, the 4 Cell Enhanced Capacity Battery and the ThinkPad X60 Series 8 Cell High Capacity Battery?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[smvp6459]

2 may be pretty reasonable, depending on what you're doing. Screen brightness eats into your time, but constant wireless activity at the highest transmission level will consume quite a bit of power. In addition, you're likely accessing the harddrive frequently if you download significant amounts of data.

One thing you can do is to watch your power consumption: set the Thinkpad Battery icon to show the "wattage when on battery".

With CPU on lowest, screen on dimmest, wifi off, and the HD spun down the machine consumes just under 6W. At 6W with a full battery, I get estimates of 4+ hours for a full slimline.

With CPU on lowest, screen bright, wifi on (used lightly), and HD spinning up and down regularly...I draw between 11-13W. So ~2 hours probably isn't unreasonable.

[boffo]

Thanks for your kind reply. I realise that I've been using it pretty heavily now - it's a new computer so I've been downloading a lot of software and of course that hits the disk pretty hard.

How do you enable the "wattage when on battery" feature? It sounds useful. I tried clicking on the battery icon in the system tray but I can't find it anywhere.

[boffo]

To answer my own question, I think I need to update Power Manager:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 074cacd466

[Spif]

I get around 3 hours with the 4-cell slim battery. I use a very low brightness setting though. When using the 8-cell, I get from 8 to 10 hours, which I pretty satisfied with :)

[CHoPSTICK89]

I just got my new X60S today, replacing an old X24. I'm mostly pretty pleased with it. The only disappointment so far is the poor battery life. I am getting just less than 2 hours. This is with wireless networking turned on and used quite a lot, but with nothing particularly CPU-intensive running.

I have the 4-cell slimline battery (which I believe is the smallest available).

Is battery life this short to be expected, or does it indicate a fault? I have the Intel wireless card in case that's relevant.

If it is normal, what can I expect from either of the larger batteries, the 4 Cell Enhanced Capacity Battery and the ThinkPad X60 Series 8 Cell High Capacity Battery?

Thanks in advance for any help.

2 hours seems right if you have wifi on and don't turn the brightness low. Turning off wifi helps a ton.

[madana]

With CPU on lowest, screen on dimmest, wifi off, and the HD spun down the machine consumes just under 6W. At 6W with a full battery, I get estimates of 4+ hours for a full slimline.

That's interesing...

I wonder how do you manage to get wattage under 6W?

I applied every possible tweak to my x60s, dimmed the screen down all the way, disabled all unnecessary ports, turned off wifi and BT, uninstalled all the software I did not need, turned off indexing and System restore -- and still I cannot get any less than 6.2W on idling.

Do you know any secret?

Also, may i ask you if you use WinXP Home or Pro (if it has any bearing on wattage at all).

Also, does your wattage on batteries surge and hover high around 8-9W after hibernation/standby? As far as I can see, so far there is no solution for this known glitch.

Regards,
Madana

x60s 170444U 1GB, 100GB 5400, XP Pro, 8-cell

[smvp6459]

I wonder how do you manage to get wattage under 6W?

It will occasionally dip below 6W but there's normally a certain amount of fluctuation. I think 5.85W may have been the lowest I've ever seen.

dimmed the screen down all the way

-Check

disabled all unnecessary ports

-Did you disable all the devices you could in the BIOS and whatever remained in the system manager (modem, ethernet, BT, parallel, serial, etc)?
-Did you also disable PCMCIA and the SD reader in XP?
-Did you set your display scheme in presentation manager so that the VGA port isn't available?
-Did you disable the ultra ATA controller in XP (I think that's for the docking port)?
-I use them, but I guess you could disable the USB ports in XP...some amount of power must go to them.

turned off wifi and BT

-You might also disable BT in BIOS and remaining BT drivers visible in the system manager. Right now I have no immediate need for BT so I leave it off.

uninstalled all the software I did not need

-More importantly, did you disable unnecesary system services and startup items? I'm talking about the bare minimum necessary for your system to operate the way you want it to. I think my base number of processes is around 44 and that includes programs I find useful but aren't strictly necessary (Acrobat distiller, googletalk, and a few others).

turned off indexing and System restore

-Check

Do you know any secret?

-You might check the Intel display settings to optimize graphics for power conservation when on batteries
-Display refresh rate of 40hz
-HD set to the best power conservation S.M.A.R.T. options.
-2 GB memory
-No virtual memory
-I'm on BIOS 1.11.
-BIOS and Thinkpad Power manager set for maximum power saving.
-Volume to 0 and muted.
-Audio input muted.
-It probably doesn't matter when it's physically off, but I keep the Intel WiFi set to lowest transmission and highest power conservation at all times.

Also, may i ask you if you use WinXP Home or Pro (if it has any bearing on wattage at all).

-XP Pro
-I also run as a power-user instead of as an admin, but I doubt that matters

Also, does your wattage on batteries surge and hover high around 8-9W after hibernation/standby? As far as I can see, so far there is no solution for this known glitch.

-I used to notice something similar but it suddenly stopped...I'm not sure if it was fixed by a Lenovo update.

[madana]

Smvp6459, many thanks for your immensely helpful text!

I am in the process of applying some of the tweaks you suggested.

I do use virtual memory, though, as I have only 1Gb RAM and am not planning to upgrade any time soon. I guess virtual memory could be a relatively big battery hog.

It is interesting that yo unoticed the same wattage glitch and then it disappeared. I guess the real reason for its disappearance was a service you disabled, and not a Lenovo patch, which there is none to the best of my knowledge.

Also, do you have NHC and Framework 2.0 installed? I found them quite useless as far as battery wattage is concerned.

[boffo]

I get around 3 hours with the 4-cell slim battery. I use a very low brightness setting though. When using the 8-cell, I get from 8 to 10 hours, which I pretty satisfied with

How do you find the 8-cell battery compared with the slimline one? To me it looks a little heavy and ugly.

[smvp6459]

I do use virtual memory, though, as I have only 1Gb RAM and am not planning to upgrade any time soon. I guess virtual memory could be a relatively big battery hog.

Yeah, ideally the less you spin the harddrive the less power you'll consume. I don't run into many problems with virtual memory disabled with 1GB on other machines and with 2GB the only program I use that complains is Photoshop...and that's just a notice at startup.

It is interesting that yo unoticed the same wattage glitch and then it disappeared. I guess the real reason for its disappearance was a service you disabled, and not a Lenovo patch, which there is none to the best of my knowledge.

I'm not so sure, I keep thinking it might have been the wireless driver update.

Also, do you have NHC and Framework 2.0 installed? I found them quite useless as far as battery wattage is concerned.

I tried them but if there is a gain I don't see it. However, it is useful for changing the HD's SMART settings.

I find that the Power Manager suits most of my needs. I set CPU at "lowest", optimize the fan to "balance all paramaters," screen at dimmest, and harddrive spin down "after 30 second."

I watched my battery drain today and doing word processing without WiFi and the wattage went as low as 5.78W. The thing is, there's a certain amount of fluctuation between 5.78-6.3W with the harddrive stopped and when the harddrive spins it can be anywhere between 6.6-9W.

[tomh009]

Full brightness (vs minimal) on the 12" XGA costs you about 1W -- more than 10%.

Undervolting the processor using NHC can save you another 0.25W to 0.5W or so, plus keep your machine cooler.

[smvp6459]

Undervolting the processor using NHC can save you another 0.25W to 0.5W or so, plus keep your machine cooler.

Are you undervolting an X60? It doesn't seem that the X60s will drop below .95V. I believe .95V is the minimum voltage allowed for the processor, and it is the default voltage for the lowest CPU multiplier (6x).

[mmmkay]

Whoa... 6W!

If my R40 drew 6W.. the battery would last 15.8 hours!

Once my new battery arrives anyway
I'm lucky to be down in the 16 to 17W with low brightness, wifi on
Then again, I am using a celeron mobile 1.8 with no speedstep.

Once I get my P4-m it should be about 2/3 that.. theoretically anyway.

[madana]

I watched my battery drain today and doing word processing without WiFi and the wattage went as low as 5.78W. The thing is, there's a certain amount of fluctuation between 5.78-6.3W with the harddrive stopped and when the harddrive spins it can be anywhere between 6.6-9W.

Thank you, I applied your suggestions. Particularly, I turned off pagefile and selected 30 sec spin down time for HDD. Now wattage periodically hits 5.75W with around 61 processes at work!

The computer now seems at times a bit sluggish or in slumber -- as it takes its time to spin HDD up again, I believe -- but that does not matter for taking notes in class.

Many thanks!

[Dimitri_P]

I played tonight with many settings that could should possibly helped with extending the battery life

These particular steps significantly helped in increasing the battery life / decreasing wattage consumption:

• 1) disable all network devices in Device manager
  2) completely dim the screen
  3) removed optical drive
  4) Set the CPU to lowest multiplier with lowest voltage
  5) Close all unnecessary applications (helped a lot)

My lowest wattage hit 7.8W, after 2 minutes idling. Normally +/- 9-10W

Other things didn't seem to help much or at all. For example disabling other devices in Device manager didn't prove anything; they are probably get disabled by ThinkPad utilities anyway

BTW, hard drive was on



Didn't do anything to tweak Video chip clocks, some other time

[tomh009]

My lowest wattage hit 7.8W, after 2 minutes idling. Normally +/- 9-10W

Other things didn't seem to help much or at all. For example disabling other devices in Device manager didn't prove anything; they are probably get disabled by ThinkPad utilities anyway

BTW, hard drive was on.

Sitting on a plane today, I turned off the wireless on my X31 and dimmed the screen all the way down. The lowest I saw was 7.1W which I was pretty satisfied with, given that the hard disk was still spinning.

I suspect that the hard disk will rarely go to sleep unless I turn off the paging file. And I'm not sure that's a great idea at 1.3 GB, especially when running Photoshop ...

[madana]

Yeah, ideally the less you spin the harddrive the less power you'll consume. I don't run into many problems with virtual memory disabled with 1GB on other machines and with 2GB the only program I use that complains is Photoshop...and that's just a notice at startup.
...

I find that the Power Manager suits most of my needs. I set CPU at "lowest", optimize the fan to "balance all paramaters," screen at dimmest, and harddrive spin down "after 30 second."

I watched my battery drain today and doing word processing without WiFi and the wattage went as low as 5.78W. The thing is, there's a certain amount of fluctuation between 5.78-6.3W with the harddrive stopped and when the harddrive spins it can be anywhere between 6.6-9W.

Interestingly enough, looks like the presence or absence of the page file does not have much say in overall wattage of the machine.

HDD spindown time seems to be the most important factor at play here. Following your advice, I set it for "after 30 sec" in PM, and lo and behold -- wattage ducked to 5.75W regardless of whether I had pagefile on or off. So I'd rather keep PF on.

Many thanks for your suggestions.

[Terrahawk]

Whoa... 6W!

If my R40 drew 6W.. the battery would last 15.8 hours!

Once my new battery arrives anyway
I'm lucky to be down in the 16 to 17W with low brightness, wifi on

If only I could get my R40 to do 6W too... the best I can get is 4.3W but the display is off so I can't see anything. If I follow the hints and tips here, I get down to 7W. Normally, my R40 sits at about 9.5W idling though.

So, you can expect to get about 2 hours with an X60? That is about the same as a Toshiba Portege R100 with the internal battery only. Do the X60 series use low voltage (LV) or ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors?

[tomh009]

So, you can expect to get about 2 hours with an X60? That is about the same as a Toshiba Portege R100 with the internal battery only. Do the X60 series use low voltage (LV) or ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors?

We haven't got an update from the OP with the battery life, but I suspect that even with 4-cell battery the X60 should do 3-4 hours. Heck, my X31 still does that even after about 700 cycles on the battery!