Battery question for x200s

Hi,

I got my x200s with a 9 cell battery back in March. It was great with 12+ hours consistently. All of a sudden, about 2 or 3 weeks ago, I notice that fully charged it will only give me 6 hours at best. What happened? How can it go from 12 to 6 hours in what seems like overnight?

Thanks.....

 

Open up the advanced tab in power manager. Post the " Design Capacity", " Full Charge Capacity", and " Cycle Count".

 

Design Capacity - 84.24 Wh
Full Charge Capacity - 80.14 Wh
Cycle Count - 57

Thanks!

 

Your battery is fine (95% of design capacity). Therefore, your problem is almost certainly in software. Restart the system and see if it clears up. If not, you should start looking for runaway processes (using process explorer) that are causing your system to run at a higher wattage (6-10 watts should be average for light loads depending on brightness).

 

I looked in to that and I didn't see anything suspicious in Task manager. System Idle Process is bouncing around 94%

The notebook is rather new, so I haven't had time to get familiar with what is "normal", but it does seem to me that the fan may be staying on longer and/or louder.

You are right, I think my wattage is rather high ->

Design Capacity - 84.24 Wh
Full Charge Capacity - 80.14 Wh
Cycle Count - 57
Current - 1.24 Amp
Wattage - 15 Watts

Without doing anything except having IE open.

 

installed any new programs lately? it might be sucking away the battery life w/o you knowing... running back-end processes.

 

Oh yeah. New programs all the time. But still I don't see anything unusual in the "Processes" section of Task Manager. I'm running 12W on idle, 15W the moment I do something.

Is there anyway to stop the HD from spinning when not in use?

 

Did you try Process Explorer (not task manager)? In particular look for a process called "hardware interrupts".

 

Oh fantastic! I didn't realize process explorer was a unique program. sorry!

Okay, I ran it. The closest thing I found was a process called "interrupts" with the description "hardware interrupts". It didn't say much. PID was n/a and CPU usage was 0.

I did notice my CPU usage was 3%-6% idle, but my wattage was still 15W.

 

Well, I'm at a loss then. Your wattage is too high (should be 6-10) and I'm not sure of the cause (most likely software or drivers rather than hardware though).

 

Have you connected any external USB?

Maybe try turning off aero if your in vista?

Also do you have indexing running in the background?

 

Well that's not what I wanted to hear!! But thanks anyway.....

I've got a plan and I'll get back to you all when I've done it.

1) Gonna download and install all new updates. The x200s now has System update!! Yeah.
2) Gonna put in my original HD that came with the x200s and still has a factory installed version of the OS. Then I'll see what the Wattage Drain using that. (I replaced HDs when I got the laptop)

thanks

 

No external USBs
Running XP not Vista
? Not sure what indexing is, or how to check for it....

 

For XP, in Windows Explorer, right click your hard drive, and select properties. Then you can enable, or disable indexing in the "Allow Indexing Service..." option.

I disable indexing on my desktops and laptops drives. It takes a bit longer if you were to search for files, but, you don't get any background hard drive activity either.

BTW, I'm glad you decided to keep your X200s

 

Thanks, I'm glad I kept it too (So far!). The screen took some time to get used to, but its a great little machine. Now I just have some tweaking.

Not sure what I did, but I got my Wattage down to 11W average. Now I'm working to get it lower. ;-)

 

Did you find out any more about this?
I've just experienced the same on my x200s running Windows 7. I could easily get above 10 hours with wifi on and low display brightness, but now I can't get below 11W with minimal brightness and only wifi turned on.
This goes for both my 9-cells and my 4-cell battery, and I've really tried killing all processes/services I can think of.

Design capacity: 84.24 Wh
Full charge capacity: 85.96 Wh
Cycle count: 44 on this current battery

 

Have you recently installed or upgraded any software?

Take a look at your CPU and hard drive activity over a prolonged period (say 20 min) when you aren't using the laptop. Is there a lot of activity?

 

hey, anyone knows how I can check my battery capacity under XP?

 

Thinkvantage Power Manager works well for this.