Power use by X60s

[sxr71]

I have a power profile intended for maximum battery life on my x60s.
It puts the processor on the "lowest" speed and minimum brightness and turns off the HDD in 30 secs of non-use.

I noticed that when on battery this machine consumes 15w. That's pretty darn high IMHO. My x31 could easily go as low as 7W when Wi-Fi is turned off and everything set to low. I can never get this machine to go below 10w, and only once did I see it get to 7w.

I wonder what I'm doing wrong and if there are any tweaks to get this machine to give me good battery life with the ultraslim battery. I can barely get 2 hours with it.

I can't believe that the machine actually turns on the fan during battery operation. The x31 would never turn on the fan on battery operation unless it was wrapped in a blanket. Is the processor really on the lowest setting?

Something just doesn't seem right. I expected better power efficiency with these new processors, than the old Pentium-M.

[smvp6459]

That kind of consumption seems abnormal. Is it possible your harddrive isn't really shutting off? Maybe there's a process running that keeps it spinning. Also, do you use any external USB peripherals at the same time?

You might try disabling everything in the BIOS that you don't use regularly: infrared, bluetooth, wired ethernet, serial, parallel. In addition, you can disable some items in Windows: the SD card reader, firewire port, the ultra ATA storage controller (if you don't use the dock), and PCMCIA. I also disable all the network adapters except wireless in the device manager.

You might also try disabling wireless in the network connection menu then flip the hardware switch. At that point you could disable anti-virus and any firewalls you might have w/o risking anything since you're offline.

[sxr71]

That kind of consumption seems abnormal. Is it possible your harddrive isn't really shutting off? Maybe there's a process running that keeps it spinning. Also, do you use any external USB peripherals at the same time?

You might try disabling everything in the BIOS that you don't use regularly: infrared, bluetooth, wired ethernet, serial, parallel. In addition, you can disable some items in Windows: the SD card reader, firewire port, the ultra ATA storage controller (if you don't use the dock), and PCMCIA. I also disable all the network adapters except wireless in the device manager.

You might also try disabling wireless in the network connection menu then flip the hardware switch. At that point you could disable anti-virus and any firewalls you might have w/o risking anything since you're offline.

I usually am very good about trimming running processes and extra services for that reason exactly. I also disabled things in Windows.

However, I neglected to do it in the BIOS and after having done that I see usages as low as 6.93w again. So it worked! Thanks!