X220 battery life - 24 hours

[khtse]

T/W/L series were announced today, and according to the leaked roadmap X220 will be announced pretty soon too. Once notable features of the T420 is that it has battery life up to 30 hours with a 9-cell + 9-cell battery configuration (15 hours in a single 9-cell).

X220, on the other hand, is featured in this Lenovo video (1:00 onwards)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suCYukt82IY
and it has a claimed battery life of 24 hours (weird, in this video, the claimed battery life of T420/520 is 24 hours, not 30 hours as in the press release). Don't know what this battery configuration is, but probably also a 9-cell plus some form of extra battery.

[Summilux]

Thanks for the info!

[dr_st]

Don't know what this battery configuration is, but probably also a 9-cell plus some form of extra battery.

And a power supply.

They can claim 100 hours for all I care - no laptop to date has had anything remotely close to 15 hours on a single 9-cell in any, even loosely useful working conditions. These "lab tests" are akin to straightforward lying.

[penartur]

And a power supply.

They can claim 100 hours for all I care - no laptop to date has had anything remotely close to 15 hours on a single 9-cell in any, even loosely useful working conditions. These "lab tests" are akin to straightforward lying.

There are reports of successful power tweaks on X200s (with ULV CPU, SSD and LED-backlight LCD) with lowering power consumption as low as 5.7W in reading mode IIRC. This gives 14.7 hours of life time for a previous generation 84W*h 9-cell battery (i believe that X201 9-cell battery was 94W*h).
T400 with integrated graphics went far lower than 10W. If the new lenovo 9-cell battery is 100+W*h and they reduced power consumption a bit with that sandy bridge, then it quite possible for T420 to work 12 hours off a single charge.
And it seems that 15/30 hours claim during the presentation was just a mistype; lenovo now claims only 12/24 hours for 9-cell/9-cell+slice respectively.

[dr_st]

Heck, just turn it off - you'll get almost infinite battery life.

Like I said, all these conditions are nowhere near actual usability situations. The only way a T series laptop will average less than 10W is with everything turned down or off, nothing is running in the background and you doing absolutely nothing on the machine other than staring at the desktop.

All these mods, tweaks are quite fun in terms of setting records, but have very limited usable practical usage, unless you're the kind of person who would turn their screen off every time you look away for 5 seconds.

[penartur]

Heck, just turn it off - you'll get almost infinite battery life.

Like I said, all these conditions are nowhere near actual usability situations. The only way a T series laptop will average less than 10W is with everything turned down or off, nothing is running in the background and you doing absolutely nothing on the machine other than staring at the desktop.

All these mods, tweaks are quite fun in terms of setting records, but have very limited usable practical usage, unless you're the kind of person who would turn their screen off every time you look away for 5 seconds.

These were software tweaks like turning off unused expansion interfaces: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=84507
As you can see, it was for WiFi enabled and screen brightness on 8/14, as opposed to your suggestion to turn everything down and turn screen off constantly.
Also, "reading" or "browsing" scenarios are close to "staring at the desktop".

PS: I got about 12 to 13W on T400 with an HDD and standart-voltage CPU during its initial setup (i.e. consstantly installing software and windows updates, with the laptop at times even being unresponsible - i.e. full HDD load and significant CPU load).
I'm also getting about 12 to 13W on my X200s with LV-CPU, HDD and CCFL-AFFS mod (which is believed to eat more power than even a regular CCFL-TN screen) when watching AVC-encoded movies with screen brightness on max; and i did no power tweaks. It also can easily survive one working day (8 to 9 hours) and have some juice left in the battery, although my work is quite CPU and HDD intensive. Of course, that's with the external display (i.e. internal screen is turned off); from the other side, that's with the external keyboard, and my 9-cell battery is quite old, Power Manager reports that the full charge capacity is only 69W*h, that's more like 7-cell.

You seem to underestimate (or should we say overestimate? ) thinkpads power consumption greatly.

[dr_st]

I am talking about standard CPU T series, because this is what I have experience with.

[demian]

There are reports of successful power tweaks on X200s (with ULV CPU, SSD and LED-backlight LCD) with lowering power consumption as low as 5.7W in reading mode IIRC.

Just wanted to let you know that the X200s series can do considerably better than 5.7W. They're incredible machines. On mine, I get 3.98 W in Windows (Vista/7) and 4.6W in Linux and I know of a few people whose power consumption is in a similar range (though I haven't seen anyone beat my 3.98 ). When i turn the screen off its 2.9 W.

Some screens:
linux screen on, linux screen off,
windows vista screen on, windows vista screen off,
windows 7

Regards,
demian

P.S.: Hardware is SL9400, WXGA+ LED and Intel SSD.

[ThinkRob]

You didn't happen to take those shots shortly after waking the machine, did you?