Battery not lasting as long

I'm not quite sure why this is happening but when I first got my system a month ago, the Maximum Battery setting on my 9 cell would last me for almost 10 hours with about 1/3 brightness (what I usually use). Now it gets me 6-7 hours on the same settings.

All that I've done since then hardware wise is installed one more stick of 2GB ram and if I'm not mistaken, that shouldn't increase battery usage but might even help to lower it.

Any idea why this could be happening?

 

Your extra RAM will actually increase battery usage, as it takes more juice to keep twice the amt of memory active, but the amount should be rather small. And batteries do lose capacity over time, but a 30% reduction in a month seems excessive.

On my own R61, after 1.5 yrs, I've gone from maybe 3.5 hrs from my 6-cell battery to maybe 2 hrs or a bit more... at least from watching the battery meter.

Are you going by real time, or the estimates on the taskbar? Other than that, are you using your computer differently? Additional applications running now that you didn't have installed when you first got it?

Other than that, I'm stumped.

 

I'm going by the estimates on the battery meter.

 

i bought my T400 in January from the outlet and when I received it(it came with a 6 cell) was around 56 Wh. Now it is down to 50.45 with 132 cycle count. I didn't think i used it daily on just battery but i guess i do

those 6Wh loss is equivalent to like 35mins of battery life

so how often are you away from the plug? Most of the time? what is your cycle count?

 

My cycle count is at 92 and I still get 6 hours from my 6 cell (with all the battery saving features on max and wifi off) and about 5 hours with wifi on. I'm pretty impressed with the battery life so far.

 

MastahRiz,

If this is a ThinkPad, go to the power manager, click the battery information tab and compare the full charge capacity of the battery vs the design capacity. You may be able to recover some of the full charge capacity by running the battery reset tool there. This could restore some of your "lost" run time.

In any event, what is the full charge capacity shown and what is the design capacity shown? Batteries will naturally degrade over time with use.

Mark

 

Hey Mark,

thanks for the tip. Luckily my full charge capacity and design capacity are still matching up as equal at 56.16Wh.

 

If the OP's full charge capacity is at or close to the design capacity then the problem lies with new hardware or (more likely) software changes.

 

I had many similar issues.
I'd look for the new source of drain.
The new RAM, if running as it should, will not change it from 10 hours to 7.
I have 2 RAM slots filled and get ~10 hours.

It could be the apps you're running. It could be that there is something in the background that's running. It could be that the HDD is being accessed far too frequently. Any one of these will keep the system from going to a low power consumption state. Remember, the system running at full blast will drain the battery in ~3 hours (not a scientific measurement on my part, so don't hold me to it). Switching to a low power state is what makes it last, and something is holding it up.

Start Task Manager, minimize to Tray, and put the cursor on it to see the CPU usage. If not lower than 10% (wait a bit to see if it's consistent), then there is something running.
I assume you are checking the HDD light and it's not blinking like crazy.
The wireless light, when blinking, is also an indicator of higher consumption.

The good thing is, 6-7 hours means you are consuming at a higher rate, but still the system is running at lower power than max.

And did you change your settings in power manager? Check them again, especially:
Adaptive or Lowest CPU (same for all effective purposes, adaptive is better)
CPU deep sleep enabled

(Global Power Settings)
CPU Power Management and PCI Bus at Automatic

It is my guess that you installed something that keeps the system from going to low power.

 

The HDD issue is the most likely in my experience. All sort of software has logging capabilities that could potentially prevent the disc from ever spinning down by constantly accessing it.

I used Filemon and Diskmon a few months back to determine just that problem... identified them, adjusted the log settings of the relevent software and the disc now spins down occasionally. Process Explorer is another useful little app to determine which generic processes are controlling what.

 

If you have Vista and Superfetch is on, then that might explain it. It hammers the harddrive in the beginning the first few times until everything is cached, which obviously uses a lot of battery power. Maybe that is what is going on? If that is the cause then don't worry, as that will go away as you start using your machine some more.