Feast your eyes on the amount of battery life I was projected to get from my Lenovo X200s today:
Close up of the battery meter
Granted, I probably won’t end up getting the full 15 hours. That came up while viewing a PDF in class with wireless off and the screen at fairly low brightness. In normal use I probably get only 8-10 hours.
You know, only 8-10 hours for a dual-core laptop with 1440×900 screen and 4gb ram. In a well-built 3-lb package. Gotta say, I do love this little laptop.
#1 by Orlando on December 5th, 2009
Hi Spencer,
I stumbled on your website while searching for others with an X200s in regards to battery life. It looks like you have Windows 7. Would you mind sharing your configuration, please? I’m struggling to get 7 hours on my 9-cell and am looking for insight from others. This is my sig line from notebookreviews.com – - Lenovo X200s (1.2Ghz|500GB,7200rpm|4GB|1400×900 LED|BT|Intel 5100 Wifi|FingerPrint|5-in-1 card reader w/modem|Windows 7 Ult)
Hope to hear from you. Thanks.
#2 by Spencer on December 5th, 2009
Hey Orlando,
Here’s my configuration:
Intel SL9400 CPU @ 1.86GHz
160GB 5400rpm HDD
4GB DDR3 RAM
1400×900 LED screen
Bluetooth
Intel 5300 WiFi
Fingerprint
5-in-1 card reader
(with modem)
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
A few thing that have helped my battery life:
Installed all the latest Win 7 drivers from Lenovo: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70656.html (in particular the power management driver)
Manually configured the “battery settings” for “power source optimized” power profile:
Max CPU speed is Low
CPU deeper sleep enabled
optimize fan control to balance all parameters
display brightness fairly low
Dim display after 1 minute
Stop HDD rotation after 3 minutes
standby after 10 minutes
PCI express link state power maximum power savings
desktop background slideshow paused
system cooling passive
As a student, my main activities include reading a lot of PDFs, writing (MS Word), and performing compute-intensive tasks in Matlab and the Adobe Creative Suite. My maximum battery performance obviously comes when I spend my time reading PDFs or writing. Every little thing affects the battery life at that point – for instance, scrolling the PDF a lot up and down drops the projected running time. It’s in these situations that I’ll get 8+ hours of run time.
The screenshot in this post came after I’d just fully recharged the battery and had the screen dimmed about halfway. I noticed projected life was 13 hours. I thought it would be fun to see how high I could get it, so I switched everything off, completely dimmed the screen, and let the PDF stay on the screen unchanged while the professor was explaining a particular point. That’s when the projected life jumped up to 15 hours.
When I use Matlab, my battery life probably drops to 5-6+ hours, depending on whether I switch the power profile to “Maximum performance”.
I’m also pretty conscious about turning things off, like WiFi and Bluetooth, when I don’t need them. Bluetooth is almost never on. WiFi I’ll turn off when I’m travelling on a bus or don’t need it.
Hope that helps -
Spencer