Increasing ThinkPad Battery Life

Hi all,

So I have the 3 + 3 cell battery combination in my X240. Lenovo claims up to 6 hours of battery life, which real world tests agree with.

However, I am only able to achieve a disappointing 4 hours - with medium screen brightness, Wi-Fi surfing. I am using 'Battery saving' Windows power profile, and I have reduced the maximum processor state to 50%. My battery reads 3% wear level.

Any tips/tricks or tweaks that will help increase this?

 

Turn down the brightness a bit, switch to an SSD, close any background programs you are not using, use linux + power saving customizations, make sure all drivers are up to date, make sure you dont have a virus taking up system resources.

 

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Brightness - I cannot (otherwise I will go blind, already at half brightness), already has an SSD, only have one app open (Chrome - 2/3 tabs only).

I heard somewhere that TP owners were doing things like disabling Bluetooth, and other hardware adapters in Device manager or something. Would that save power?

 

I've found that using 'power saving mode' in power options in Windows helps quite a bit on my t440s - it seems to not rev up the CPU clocks nearly as much as it does normally.

 

Probably not much. As noted the screen, by far, is the biggest battery drainer on any notebook, so the lower you can go, the better battery life you'll get. You could pick up one of the six-cell batteries if you need more time.

 

I recently went to check out a T440s at a retailer and was pleasantly surprised to see how low the power drain was even with the screen at full brightness.
Having played around quite a bit with the power settings on various Thinkpads in the past, here are some pointers:

- Remove the power cord, you need to be using the battery for what's below.
- Launch Power Manager, go to the Battery tab.
- The Remaining Capacity is given in Wh, that is Watt-hours.
- Four down, there is Wattage. That is how much the notebook is using at that time. Mine updates at 15second intervals.
- Whatever your wattage is, divide the Remaining Capacity by that number.
ex: if the R.C. is 30Wh, and your wattage is 6W, then you have 5 hours of battery left, give or take.
- The Remaining time updates far more slowly than the wattage, so it may not exactly match your calculation

Now, if you have anything above 10W with the X240, then something is running, possibly in the background, that is causing this.
I would
- Close all programs that you have launched
This may even include Google Drive (you can close it from the Notification Area). Curious enough, I have no added power usage with Dropbox.
Services, like anything Apple, anything 'updater", anything "web services", etc. MAY BE keeping the CPU active.
I launch services.msc and begin to turn them off one by one to watch their effect on the power usage.
You need to keep a list of what you mess with, since some may be really necessary.
I've found at least three in my Windows installation that cause higher-than-usual wattage.
Once you've identified those few services, you can decide whether to keep them running or not.
Another way to do this is to turn one service off, wait a bit for the wattage to settle, see if it has made a difference, and then turn it back on if it has not.

Also, I've found that my logitech dongle for my mouse adds .5W May not seem like much, but it's quite a bit on a 4W power draw.

Which antivirus are you running, or anti-malware? They may also be keeping the cpu from going to its low power state.

 

Go to your command line and type in the following command.

powercfg /batteryreport /output %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\battery_report.html

The command will provide you report on your battery usage. It is very helpful. I have the same issue. My T440s barely gets 4 hours (5 hours if I don't do much). The wear on my battery is already near 20% though. I am thinking of just getting the 6 cell which I heard would put battery life over 12 hours

 

Unfortunately there is no Power Manager for Windows 8.1. My usage is pretty much basic as it gets (NO additional services running in the background, apart from BitDefender - which uses very little resources as verified by Task Manager).

I'll just have to live with what I currently get, or upgrade to the 6 cell rear.

 

Yikes - I get ~10-12 hours realistically if I use power saving mode in Windows 8.1. Also, I bought my machine in June, and have 0% wear on the external/4% on internal. That said, I don't use it on battery for more than an hour or two at a time - I'm at uni, but mostly study in my dorm. Of course, that also means that the internal battery sits at 100% SoC most of the time, unused.

Your machine might be overestimating wear though - I've seen both my x120e and t440s do that. Well, overestimating wear is better than underestimating it...

 

Interesting how your internal battery has more wear than the external. Since the external one always starts discharging first, you would expect it to have more wear, no?

 

I suppose - but again, it almost never gets a break from 100% SoC. I just discharged the internal most of the way to calibrate it (removed the external while doing this), and am now at 11% wear on it. Baffling... and my external is still sitting happily at 0% wear (full charge capacity is still slightly above design capacity).

 

I suppose so.

The most annoying thing is that Lenovo has done nothing to prevent this ageing from happening. It is well known that Li-Po batteries should not be stored at 100%.

 

Actually, for systems running Windows 7 and earlier, Lenovo does do something by having Power Manager limit the charge state to 90% when it detects your battery could benefit. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on Windows 8.

 

That tool tended to glitch on some systems though. On my x120e, it would suddenly drop from 40% SoC to 6% SoC at some point, and not stop until I let it charge fully at least once. I finally gave up on it.

 

I woiuld disable turbo boost. Either do that through the bios or via throttlestop. Also the hawells can run intel xtu I think. I undervolt mine all at -70mv stable across all multipliers and use throttlestop.

 

Hi
I have had a T440s for 6 months or so. I have the i7, 12 gigs of RAM, samsung evo 500 gig ssd. Battery life has always been awful and I finally got around to running some tests and I am wondering if the described performance is worth raising with lenovo to get a new battery. Below is the test I ran:

1. Fully charged batteries (3 cell internal and 3 cell removable)
2. applications open:
   1. word.
   2. chrome with 4-5 tabs open
   3. wifi on
   4. screen brightness was one 'notch' down from max
   5. periodically excel (opened and closed twice to do some quick calculations)
3. I worked on a paper in word during the test. Periodically would look something in chrome. A lot of time staring at the screen and thinking. No streaming video, no streaming audio. Basically was not taxing the machine in any way.
4. During the test, I also stepped away from the computer twice for a total of about 35 minutes.
5. I used CPUID HWMonitor and ran it every half hour and logged the temperatures and the battery drain.
6. Table below summarizes the results

Time Ext battery Int battery temp
0 97 99 47
30 min 60 99 48
1 hr 32 99 50
1:30 8 99 48
2 hr 5 76 51
2:30 5 47 50
3 hr 5 18 50
3:15: machine shut down

From the time between 3 hrs and 3:15 several warnings popped up about the battery levels. So in summary:

- battery time was 3:15 with extremely low load on the processor and on the video. Of the 3:15 I was away from the machine for 35 min.

Please let me know your thoughts. I also have the 6 cell external and of course I get longer run times but still nothing close to what i expected.

thanks

 

Q: Which is worse in terms of wear for the internal Li-Po battery?

A) Keeping constantly charged at 100%
B) Frequently discharging down to ~20%, and then charging back up to 100%

 

Technically, neither. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBKuOomv9Ko