Can;t get it below 10 watts on x201 after format

After reformatting my lenovo x201, and swapping out the old hdd for the new ssd. I can't get the wattage to drop below 10 watts during normal usage, used to be 8 wattage doing the same things, at the lowest power settings any idea's how to lower wattage or to boost battery life. I'm using w7, and disabled windows features, defender, and uac.

Trying to hit 5 watts during idle, any ideas?

 

are you using a wall outlet monitor to accurately measure power draw, or at you using hw monitor?..

 

I'm using the lenovo tool since I'm looking at watts, not exactly volts. hwmonitor doesn't show watts oddly for me.

 

no software exists that is capable of acurately recording power used to the degree you are using it for. Think +/- 5-20W accuracy

 

Then how does the battery indicator (Windows, Linux, ...) works this well if it was off by 20W? For some batteries the designed capacity is approx 40Whr, being off by 20W would result in the indicator giving either half or twice the actual run time...
The software also does not need to do the job if the battery does and tells the software...
Anyways, neither of us helped on reducing the power consumption...

 

Try BatteryBar, Lenovo's Power Manager takes up a few watts by just being on.

 

im not familar with that specific laptop, I *am* familiar with 3-4 dozen other situations where software was not able to accurately represent current power drawn versus acutal wall power drawn. The battery has an internal sensor that tells the computer how many amps are being requested and then based on how many amps are left in the battery how long it has until it reaches 0-1%, it's decently accurate however it's not to the degree you're looking to save, nor does it update nearly enough. Software normally does not use this sensor to read and instead goes by some other sensors on the mainboard, typically the 5 or 12V rails from the BIOS's internal monitor which is much less accurate since it's displaying requested amount versus acutal amount. Essentially, to the degree you're looking to save, there is no solution besides a multi-meter to accurately measure whether or not you're acutally using less power. Espically when you consider that the Battery's conversion rate of power into usable energy is not 100% (which is why the internal battery monitor isn't a good reference) The lenovo application could be reading 8W when you're acutally using 11W, or 10W when you're acutally using 8-9W, and that will lead you to believe whatever solutions you're trying are not working when they may acutally be working.

he's comparing his results using the tool, so I would say it's relevent if the tool he's using is falwed.

shutdown any devices that are not in use, ie Blue-tooth, web-cam, ect..

 

Thanks, I don't have blue tooth, webcam, and already had disabled the network dongle, mic, etc. It's odd since it's taking so much watts for such a laptop. Getting half my usual battery time, that i used to get pre format. Odd stuff.

 

If your SSD fully supports trim and you're using the proper chipset driver so that Win7 can pass the instruction through to the drive, then set your SSD to sleep after 1 minute for all power settings and profiles. If it doesn't support TRIM, then you can still do the sleep timeout for battery, but leave your AC power profile set to run it all the time so that it can do it's own garbage collection. However, even with that, you're looking at saving MAYBE another few hundred mW.

All things considered, it's highly unlikely that you're going to drop all the way to 5W. The CPU even in full idle is going to be more than half of that, and you still have a display, a chipset, a stick or two of ram, and a few USB devices (ie, your keyboard and mouse) to run. I can get my Y460 all the way down to about 7w with everything set to the lowest speed, lowest brightness, no processes, nothing running except BatteryBar. But that's a useless metric, as the machine might as well be off insofar as how much I'm using it. With Word, PowerPoint and Outlook running and me bouncing through them with the display at about 40% brightness, my power consumption is probably closer to what you're experiencing -- about 9.5 to 10 watts.