Where are my extra battery hours?

[Alexiskass]

i have a x60t with vista ultimate sp1, 120@5.4K hitachi drive, 3GB@667Mhz ram, 8cell battery, sxvga+ screen and all the msft and lenovo updates and i get only 4h wifi minimum usage (some mozilla surfing, some email writing, briteness = lowest, wifi = on, power scheme = power saver).

whats going on?

i've read reviews about 6 and 7 hours of battery!

is there a problem with my tablet, battery of is this normal?

thank you

[Alexiskass]

anyone?

[sportfreak]

well the way i see it, Vista is the hungry coyote ova here..there are so many useless processes that are pretty much running just in the back ground..and also the major battery eater is not only the display, but also the usage of the video card also..though you have set the brightness to the lowest, few apps like the vista visual interface itself requires quite an amount of video power and hence the low output of the battery..

i have an x61 with 8 cell running xp and RHEL, and it gives me close to 6 hrs of time when im just surfin net ova wifi with the lowest brightness..

My suggestion would be carry an extra battery or switch ova to a less power hungry os..

cheers!!

[patch]

Try setting the power manager gauge to display wattage instead of percentage and then toy around with different settings. On my x61s running vista I use around 11 watts under normal wifi usage, sometimes 9 or 10 on lowest brightness and very little activity.

Try to minimize hard disk usage, the power savings of keeping the hard drive idle more will help a lot.

Things that use heavy hard disk reads:
Indexing - Vista by default indexes your applications, and other programs may be scouring your system as well.
Thumbnails - They have to go.
Anti-virus - this should stay, but it does cause a battery hit while active.

Just look around for anything unnecessary, but don't look too deep. Vista has a cool utility called the Reliability and Performance Monitor which tells you what processes are consuming the most CPU, RAM, disk I/O, and network usage. Try looking for irregularities over there.