battery questions

[cosminarad]

Hello,

I have a ThinkPad T42 2373-NA5. It is 20 days old now.
I am concerned about my battery. I've read on this forum that in time the full charge capacity gets lower than the design capacity. For my battery the design capacity (as shown by Battery Information) is 47.52Wh and the full charge capacity is 43.99 Wh. Is this normal for a 20 days used battery? I didn't check the full time capacity when I received the notebook because I wasn't aware of this situation. Its my first notebook.

The reason I worry is beacause the battery MaxiMiser tells me that I have 2:30 hours left when the battery is fully charged, and I expected something around 4 to 6 hours, as advertised. This happens with the display brightness cut to half, processor running just at 600MHz, with the high battery performance scheme and the pci bus power management set to automatic. ATI POWERPLAY is active with automatic color depth reduction. Wireless radio is also turned off. This is the case for just regular office use, not gaming or playing movies.

Is HDD Active Protection System consuming considerable power? I remember I're read something like this on some other thread.

So my question is this: Is this situation normal and if yes how can I spot the greedy power consumers in the system (like maybe the Active Protection System)?

Thanks,
Cosmin

[lvlolvlo]

well just to give you an idea of where to start looking, try your battery maximizer information desiplay. i apologize for any inconsisticy, seeing that I am not on my thinkpad right now. if you open up battery maxizer by doing one left click and clicking on i think information detail or something like that n one of the tabs you will see the current power consumption levels, if you take your wi-fi on and full lcd brightness you will see it will be near or past 1 for the a consumption. now if you were to disable wi-fi, & set lcd brightness to the lowest you will see the a consumtion level come down a bit and your time increase. so try disabling the active hd and see if that helps. i am sorry i am not too much of help, as i am not on my thinkpad so i can't be too specific, but try doing that hopefully you'll start to see. also some members of this forum have tried using SpeedswitchXP which i think is pretty cool, b/c you can control freq of you chip.

p.s. consider purchasing a 9 cell battery from new egg.