High battery usage during normal use

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Jona · #1 Post by **Jona** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 5:41 am

I recently started to use my T60 on battery to make notes during classes. My previous T41 could easily last 4 hours during normal use. Normal use is for me wifi on with some browsing and office work. My T60 on the other hand barely lasts two hours when on battery.

I noticed two things while working. First, my hard disk led seems to be flashing every second or so some program maybe using the harddisk. Second, Notebook Hardware Control says battery discharge is at 20.5W. This is with brightness at level 5 and using profile Maximum Battery. Even turning it down to level 0 still gives over 18W discharge.

Could this be caused by a program contiunously using the harddrive? I am using only the standard installed programs and MS Office 2003.

cmarti · #2 Post by **cmarti** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 5:57 am

The batteries on both machines have the same capacity? In my previous T40 i had a 9 cell batter, how many cells the battery of your T60 have?

darrenf · #3 Post by **darrenf** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 8:21 am

Jona,

If you post your model number we can give you better guidance, but I can tell you off the cuff that yes, the T60 seems to use a lot more power than the T4x and 20.5W is not unusual for a 15" T60p on brightness 5. For comparison, some T4xs could run on less than 10W (on brightness 0), even with a good GPU.

What seems odd to me is that you appear to have a 6-cell battery (or you would be getting more time at that level of power use), yet to be drawing 20.5W you are almost certainly using a 15" flexview with V5200 or V5250 GPU. In my experience those usually come with 9-cell batteries.

Of course, you could be running Visa which blows the power use up dramatically. Get back to us with the model number for better advice.

-darren

#4 Post by **RonS** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 11:07 am

Make sure that you have "Adaptive" set as your maximum CPU speed in the Power Manager (double-click on the battery gauge near the traybar).

Also verify that you have PowerPlay enabled in the Catalyst Control Center.

sb37 · #5 Post by **sb37** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 11:59 am

you can check where the activity is coming from. go to your task manager and see if any processes are taking up a lot of CPU cycles. Also, check performance monitor (the disk monitor part) and see if any program is making excessive disk reads. hope this helps - best of luck.

perry_78 · #6 Post by **perry_78** » Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:29 pm

That's serious drain... I get 6hrs on a 9 cell on level 3 and normal usage as per your specification. I'm on XP with a 14".

Jona · #7 Post by **Jona** » Fri Apr 20, 2007 4:58 am

My specs are in my sig. It is a 2623-D6U, a 14" SXGA T60 with the standard 6-cell battery and the Radeon X1300. I am running XP btw. The cpu speed is locked at 1000MHz when on Maximum Battery and Powerplay is active and downclocking the GPU.

I already checked task manager to find out wich program is using a lot of CPU cycles but no programs seems to be overly active although their are dozens of processes active thanks to the Thinkvantage suite.

I will try to find out what difference it makes to disable all wireless devices.

darrenf · #8 Post by **darrenf** » Fri Apr 20, 2007 11:17 am

That is too high then.

Do you have any USB devices attached?

Do you have the latest BIOS and patches? (I'm thinking here of the omnibus patch that included a fix for the USB power drain issue). Note that you need not have a USB device attached for the power drain to occur in this case because some internal devices are USB.

Is XP Pro still the OS you are using?

-darren

Scratch · #9 Post by **Scratch** » Fri Apr 20, 2007 1:05 pm

What device is in the UltraBay? Do you see the same issue with the UB empty? Are you running any real time AV or disk maint apps?

I was getting a lot of "flash" HDD activity at one point because ZoneAlarm's link to Sophos to monitor AV status cycled every 5 secs and there was no way alter the cycle so I disabled the link. The activity was so brief that it was hard to capture for a time.

Is your NIC card set to power down when not connected and is it actually doing it? I have to keep mine on to maintain license mgmt functions and I know that this has a detrimental effect.

mikesugar · #10 Post by **mikesugar** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 1:15 am

Check your task manager for running tasks.

When I first got my 87414BU I was getting 5+ hours on a 9-cell.

Just today on battery it looked like I was going to go dead in less than 2 hours.

I discovered that a web page I had opened earlier in the day had a flash movie running and so IEXPLORE.exe was burning 50% of my CPU. After killing the browser task I went right back up to 5 hours for the 9-cell.

Mike

darrenf · #11 Post by **darrenf** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 1:49 am

Good call at that. Java would add about the right amount of system load to come up with that amount of power usage. Jona, do you see a steaming coffee cup in the system tray?

-darren

Jona · #12 Post by **Jona** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 4:56 am

I wasn't aware of any USB bug. The latest BIOS is installed and my last driver update using Software Installer was two months ago. Is it a recent patch and does it come from Lenovo?

CPU activity is almost zero all the time so Java or flash don't seem to be the problem. I monitor CPU activity continuously with NHC.

The UltraBay contains the DVD burner, haven't tried it yet empty. You maybe on to something with the AV though. I first thought about the Diskeeper program being active but disabling didn't help. Maybe it is AVG virusscanner wich I'm using. It is acting strangely lately complaining all the time about a restart it needs.

I will try out your suggestions. Thank you!

darrenf · #13 Post by **darrenf** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 7:59 am

The USB bug appears to have been fixed around 6 months ago and required a BIOS update (we are told) and a patch from Microsoft. If you've been installing the Windows Updates then you should have it.

Also, the USB bug only seemed to be a problem following a standby/resume -- power usage was OK prior to the first instance of placing the machine in standby.

I haven't used AVG so I don't know what the impact of that is, but since you said that CPU activity is low, it follows that CPU load and therefore programs are not related. Likewise, I haven't found that DVD or wireless is a cause of appreciable power consumption (or even the hard drive really).

Bluetooth is a pretty big power hog and I see that your model supports this. Is your Bluetooth turned on by any chance?

-darren

Dodge DeBoulet · #14 Post by **Dodge DeBoulet** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:06 am

darrenf wrote: Bluetooth is a pretty big power hog and I see that your model supports this. Is your Bluetooth turned on by any chance?

-darren

Are you serious? Bluetooth transceivers typically consume a tiny fraction of the power of 802.11a/b/g transcievers. Is Lenovo's implementation truly that awful?

darrenf · #15 Post by **darrenf** » Sat Apr 21, 2007 11:13 am

Dodge DeBoulet wrote:Is Lenovo's [Bluetooth] implementation truly that awful?

It was in the T4x. The drivers for Bluetooth on my T60 are broken so I don't know if the same holds true now that Bluetooth has been moved off the modem and onto a free-standing USB card. Has anyone tested this on the T60?

For reference, on the T4x Bluetooth took ~2W. Wi-Fi on the T60 takes ~0.5W (Intel a/b/g).

-darren

Jona · #16 Post by **Jona** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 4:45 am

I have tried two things now. First I have set the Power Save Mode of my wireless card (Intel 3945abg) to High. The original setting was apparently Low because I mainly used my T60 with the adapter. Secondly, I fixed some kind of bug with AVG making it ask for a restart all the time, but AVG is still active.

I don't know wich of the two really made a difference but now my power usage has dropped to 15W from 20W. I guess it was the Power Save setting of my wireless card, this makes most sense. Battery rumtime has now increased to close to 3 hours. Still less than the 4 hours my T41 achieved but much better than the meagre 2 hours I got before.

I also experimented with turning bluetooth on and off. Turning it on raises the power usage to 18W from 15W. So although it is designed for mobile devices it still uses a considerable amount of power. This could be caused by the way it is implemented in the T60. It is a USB device and USB devices tend to use much power.

gunston · #17 Post by **gunston** » Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:43 am

sb37 wrote:you can check where the activity is coming from. go to your task manager and see if any processes are taking up a lot of CPU cycles. Also, check performance monitor (the disk monitor part) and see if any program is making excessive disk reads. hope this helps - best of luck.

ANY good software to monitor the hard disk activities by specific program loaded, name, task manager has limited info.

High battery usage during normal use

High battery usage during normal use

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