Getting around 2 hours from new 6-cell battery

Have owned my T400 with six cell battery since April -- I don't think I get more than two hours on a full charge. I met a fellow in the coffee shop yesterday who gets five hours off his 9-cell and I thought, "Dang, I should get around three at least."

1. What is the most accurate way to measure the efficiency of the battery?
2. Does two hours on a charge sound like very little? I don't do any video editing or anything particularly intensive, I do have the wireless on.
3. What would you recommend in my situation? Would love to get a little more bang off my charge.

Thanks in advance!

 

When fully charged (100%), I can get 6-7 hours depending on usage on my 6-cell for my T400.

I have my threshold to stop charging at 85. Right now my battery is at 81% and it says I have ~5 hrs left which sounds about right.

 

What brightness is your screen set to? With moderate brightness and WiFi on while web browsing and word processing, I can get 6-7 hours on my T500's 9-cell.

 

Running on integrated or discrete graphics? What power plan? What are you doing on battery (e.g. processor intensive will drain the battery fast)? Etc. Do you have Power Manger and it's drivers installed? If you are running on discrete switch to integrated to gain the extra battery life.

 

Hi vilmosz, have you tried a battery gauge reset via the "battery maintenance" button from the "battery information" tab of your Power Manager utility (click on the green battery icon at your task bar)?

Do note down the pre- and post-reset statistics (battery details). If its endurance has not improved, yours might be a flaky battery. Since you bought it in Apr, your battery is still covered by the 1 yr warranty. Get it replaced ASAP.

 

with brightness set to five and wireless off, word processor running, my baterry is estimating 4:53 left @ 68%. I suggest you download Vista Battery Saver and play around with the power settings!

 

Thanks for the responses thus far: I recently reinstalled the latest version of Power Manager (I had uninstalled it previously because I find the constant flashing of the screen brightness meter to be annoying). In any case, when the battery is 96% full I get 2:34 (hours/minutes) as the reading for how much time I have left -- and timing it with an external stopwatch, seems accurate. That's got to be wrong, no? Power used is showing as 18 watts -- screen brightness is pretty low. I have wireless on but Bluetooth off. I'm not doing anything crazily intensive. Does this sound like a bad battery?

 

Try manually reducing your wireless adapter's transmission power. Go to your adapter settings window inwireless network configuration and select "Configure". Once there, select the advanced tab. You should see options for roaming aggressiveness , transmit power, throughput enhancement , etc...

I can easily get half an hour of extra battery life on my T61 ( T7800 , 4GB , Seagate 7200.4, X3100 ) by doing that.

I know the wifi adapter should follow the power profile selected and you shouldn't have to do this manually, but for some reason it seems it doesn't/it's not doing it enough.

The lower consumption I've gotten with Wifi on was around 11w +/- 0.5w ... Minimum brightness, Bluetooth disabled, ultrabay cdrom removed...

 

18 watts is way too much. I wonder though since you uninstalled Power Manager originally if you uninstalled too much or haven't tweaked properly. Power Manager works in tandum with the power manager driver and really every driver that is specifically from Lenovo. Using generic drivers could be resulting in this. Either try a system restore or download Thinkvantage System Update and see if your missing some key Lenovo drivers.

As much as I like clean installs, I personally don't recommend them to people in general for laptops.

 

Thanks for the recommendations. I had to uninstall Power Manager for a couple of reasons when I first got the machine; One was that it provided erroneous information regarding battery status and charge. The other was the annoying screen brightness meter that kept flashing at the bottom of the screen as the screen setting reset themselves in correlation with the battery power. (Is there any way to disable that meter?) .nox, I took your advice about the roaming config -- thanks for the tip. StealthTH, I'll follow your advice as well.
BTW:My Main Battery condition has always been listed -- even when machine was brand new -- in power manager as "good." Does it ever say something like "excellent" or "very good"?

 

Let us know how it goes because my 6-cell is not getting the 6-7 hours like some people said. I can get about 3.5 hours on it and it was new when I bought it.

 

Good is what it says until the battery won't charge. What you need to do for us to determine if it is a bad battery is go into the Power Manager application, go to the battery page, and show us this screen.

 

I'm wondering if maybe you have the GPU on "3D" mode ? I'm completely T400-stupid, but maybe it's got something to do with it if he's got a hybrid GPU.

 

Here are my battery screenshots: Let me know if this helps you help me solve this mystery.


http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2617/3996780631_2fe7506764.jpg

 

You're power usage is really high at almost 14.5 watts.

 

I know -- and the wattage is often at 18 or 20 -- but I can't figure out why it's so high.

 

Battery health is good, still holds a full charge. It does confirm that it is the wattage and possibly a software/driver issue. Perhaps it may be time to back up your personal files and restore the system.

 

Do you think this will be resolved if I hold off till updating to Windows 7?

 

My wattage is 24.7. How do I lower the wattage? thanks

 

Well, a battery gauge reset did it for me. According to Power Manager, I am now getting a 6:11 hours with brightness on 0 bars at approximately 8.5 W power draw, compared to 14-24 W before. However, the reset did lower my overall capacity by about 2 Wh.

 

Stealth, I noticed you have a 90 W adapter. I guess that's because you have a 9-cell. Does that mean I have to buy a 90 W adapter if I decide to switch to a 9-cell? I currently have a 65 W adapter charging a 6-cell.

 

No, you should fine the 65 W adapter. You would get better & faster performance while charging with the 90watt though.

 

I figured, thanks.

 

The battery size does not impact which AC adapter Lenovo gives you - it is the graphics chipset that determines that. T-series Thinkpads with integrated graphics only come with a 65W AC adapter, whereas those that come with swtichable discrete graphics come with a 90W AC adapter.

It is true, though, that the 90W AC adapter will give improved charging time, especially if you are using the laptop while it is charging.

 

the 90 w adapter allows you to run the laptop without the battery attached, and still allows you to achieve 100% cpu usage when needed. As compared to the 65 w where without the battery, it would only peak at around 70% usage regardless of whether 100% usage is needed or not.

Also, now in many countries lenovo allows the users to option for the 90 w adapter in integrated graphics card laptop if you choose to, rather than locking in you using the 65 w. This is upgrade was done during the initial purchase order online either free or with a 5 to 10 dollars charge.

 

Back to the original topic of batteries: Are there opinions about whether upgrading to Windows 7 as opposed to to doing a system reinstall will address this?

 

Installing Win 7 would should have the same effect as system restore. Just remember to download system update to get the latest drivers.

 

Is there one place to get system update? When I try to update through the ThinkVantage button I get this error message: "A problem occurred when upgrading System Update to the latest version. You can download and install the latest version of System Update from the Lenovo Support Web site at http://www.lenovo.com/support." Then when I go to the Lenovo web site, I'm not presented with any clear information on updating my system. My understanding is when the ThinkVantage update system works, it's a charm -- much easier than having to individually scout around the Lenovo web site in an attempt to determine what you need.

 

Link to System Update

Run that and download the lastest of drivers, Power Manager and whatever other Thinkvantage apps you use.

Also, could you check your task manager by pressing Alt+Ctrl+Delete. Once in the task manager go to the processes tab and see if anything is spiking your CPU usage. To see it easily click the cpu tab until you get the arrow down above "CPU". Let us know if and what may be spiking causing the high energy use. Make sure that nothing else is open and that other than Task Manager your computer is idle.

 

Thanks; I checked the CPU processes: CPU total usage is about 5%. (8 (percent?) of my CPU in the Processes tab of Windows Task Manager is attributed to System Idle Process. This flag any possible causes of the battery issue?

 

Have you tried doing a reset?

 

That seems okay. Maybe the original diagnosis of a driver/bad install is correct.

 

How would I do a battery reset?
I have a stock laptop with all Lenovo programs intack.

I'm in the SAME situation as OP.
My battery is new, just two weeks and I'm getting roughly 2.5-3.5 hours.
First time I used the laptop I let the battery drain till the laptop shut down.

Thanks.

 

If you have ThinkPad Power Manager installed you can go in there and select the "Battery" tab. Under "Battery Maintenance" you should see an option for reset.

 

He has a Lenovo 3000 laptop, he doesn't have the thinkpad power manager.

 

I'll reinstall ThinkPad Power Manager and try the reset; thing about power manager is that the constant flashing of the screen brightness meter (the large green vertical lines that display at the bottom of my actual screen -- not on the task bar) is so annoying -- is there anyway to turn off that particular meter?

 

That may be a problem with on screen display and/or hotkey. Redownload this as well.

 

I'm in midst of trying the battery reset; fingers crossed. Takes an awfully long time, however.

In terms of the redownload -- is there one download to reinstall the screen display hotkey? Would be grateful if you could provide a link.
Thank you!

 

Strange.
I have a SL500 updated to the latest Power Manager and under Battery tab doesn't have 'Battery Maintenance'.
Under both Basic and Advance

 

resetting my battery didn't do anything unfortunately -- getting two hours on a full charge, and after all that.

 

Just accept the fact that your battery is worn out, and probably would need replacement soon.

 

You can see exactly how much charge is left. I doubt his battery has lost that much capacity. OPs issue seemed to be power consumption that seems too high.

 

It isn't worn out. His system is drawing far more power than it should. If you read his battery information picture you will see that it holds full charge still.

EDIT:

An idea just popped into my head, does your system have switchable graphics? You running on integrated? If so you may want to go to the selective start up menu (start -> run -> type msconfig hit enter - > selective start up) and uncheck the intel services. With the latest switchable drivers there is a bug when on integrated that cause high power consumption. If this isn't the case then I may be out of ideas lol.

 

14-18W is NOT really high power usage. I am lucky to get my S10e netbook with atom CPU and LED lit screen down below 10 or 11 watts. My T400 usually runs around 20W or more. If his machine has discreet graphics (which has been mentioned several times but never answered) then it would normally be much higher. So I don't think the problem here is unusually high power draw...The real issue is the 40 Wh remaining of the original 56Wh capacity of the battery. This is due to the 90+ cycles on the battery.

Want to gain 40% battery life? Buy a new battery. Your current one is used up a little.

--edit--

Ok, I just realized I read something wrong in your screenshot of the battery properties. I thought the 40 Wh was the "Full Charge Capacity" not the "Remaining Capacity" like it is. I am very surprised the battery still has OVER the design capacity with over 90 cycles, so I am guessing it is not reporting the "Full Charge Capacity" correctly. But still, 14-18W is NOT high, I am constantly at least at this level if not over on my T400. If someones sees a significantly lower wattage number, I would suspect that they are reading their charging wattage, not their discharge wattage.

 

I've had this issue since the computer was brand new: In fact, I had issues with the Power Manager reading the battery charge wrong from day one: It used to read 96% and stay there. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. But now I time my battery with an external timer and it does match the power manager's estimates, with battery life at two hours or so.

I found the window but didn't see an option for intel services. Where is this an option?
Thanks for your help!

 

Click on the start up tab on the top of the page and it will be in there. Btw, just so you know, all this will do is disable the Intel graphics start up tray icon. There are three things to deselect. All labeled intel. To access features of the tray icon later on just go into the display properties by right clicking the desktop.

 

I'm going to request a new battery -- maybe it's the battery after all. Since it's under warranty, anyone know the fastest route to getting a replacement? Better to call or request online?

 

None of the startup items is named Intel or has the word Intel in it.

 

14-18watts is high. Also your charging wattage would certainly be higher than the discharge wattage.

 

Can you explain the practical implication? Power management is not one of my strong areas. If there's a specific step I can take, it would be helpful -- I'm hoping requesting a battery replacement under warranty will resolve this.