Battery Life Tips

I'm clueless when it comes to extending battery life and/or calibrating it. Coming from a Macbook Pro, it seemed that the consensus was this:

1.) Drain the battery completely.
2.) Recharge and keep it charged a few hours after 100% before going on battery again.

Rinse, Wash, Repeat every month or so.

Is that the same case for a ThinkPad? I have a 6 cell in my T500. When I got it last week the power manager would say around 4+ hours fully charged. The other day I did the above steps and now it's reading around 3 & 1/2 hours fully charged.

Thanks.

 

From what I heard, you are suppose to set threshold around 80%. As you leave it in your charger it slowly discharges and you don't want to have to waste a charge cycle every time it goes back down to 99%. Fully drain once every two weeks and if the 'total' capacity is dropping (In PowerManager it'll show you) then do a refresher on it.

 

I was under the impression you shouldn't drain the battery completely (don't remember where I read it).

Also, set your powemanager so that it doesn't top off the battery everytime it goes under 100%. I forget what the ideal setting is, but I do something like:
Only start charging when battery is below ~40%. Obviously if you know you need more battery change it and charge to 100%, but if you're plugged in a lot, this saves some battery life. I'm plugged in all the time, so sometimes I even set it so that way it starts charging below 40, and stops at 60%.

 

Ah, good stuff. I didn't even get/see those threshold options until just now.

Keep the suggestions coming.

 

I believe its 40-95% suggested by an NBR member

 

Try keeping your brightness settings down for more battery life when you're on the go! - Tip of the day.

 

Steps, in order of likely battery life savings:

• turn down brightness of LCD
• Advanced undervolting with superlfm mode
• Use a low consumption os and application SSD, eg: OCZ Vertex and put HDD into an ebay $25US ultrabay adapter in spindown/idle mode using hdparm-for-windows. HDD and optical drive can be hotswapped using hotswap!. NOTE: If you have a PATA optical drive, likely for ICH8M or older chipsets, then there is an extra 0.8-1W overhead by sata-to-pata bridge chips.
• disable unneeded devices in Device Manager, eg: Bluetooth
• check there are no runaway processes putting unncessary CPU load on system using Window's perfmon. Want to keep the CPU in low power C3/C4 state as much as possible
• use powersaving mode of graphics/soundcard/SATA link layer/USB/wifi