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Very poor battery life on Lenovo ThinkPad W500 laptop

Very poor battery life on Lenovo ThinkPad W500 laptop

I have a new ThinkPad W500 laptop (w/ 9 cell battery) running Windows 7 RTM 64-bit. All drivers* and BIOS are the latest. Battery life appeared poor so I performed several tests under the following conditions:

Asked by: Guest | Views: 245
Total answers/comments: 3
Guest [Entry]

"The problem was the switchable graphics driver (a feature of this ThinkPad) not working properly. If you look at the second instance of ""**"" in question How do I achieve a working switchable graphics install and config on a ThinkPad W500 running Windows 7 64-bit RTM? you'll see my switchable graphics driver problem. From the question:

...During the short period where I did manage to get switchable graphics working and had ""Energy Saver"" selected, the ThinkPad Power Manager showed 2 hours and 47 minutes of runtime (when fully charged) vs. the approx. 2 hours it showed before switchable graphics was running (I haven't yet done an actual run time test). I need to test this out more but it's an interesting correlation.

I redid the test stated in this question and got an unbelievable 7 hours and 46 minutes of run time at idle. I'll likely see less than half that during normal usage, but I'll update the answer after I test it."
Guest [Entry]

"ThinkPad W500 laptop (w/ 9 cell
battery)
I clocked under 2 hours of battery
life across 3 tests (1:49, 1:52,
1:47). If I actually use the computer,
we're looking at 1:30.

I would think that the battery's probably damaged, with respect to its Charge retaining capacity. Check the state of your battery's wear level using Notebook Hardware Control."
Guest [Entry]

I wonder if any W500 users have used Windows 7 and Windows Vista on the same machine. On my Dell 1525, under Windows 7 the battery life (according to the meter) is about 20% lower than using Windows Vista. Many reports have said that Windows 7 will use less power, and it certainly is less resource hungry, but my experience (albeit on only one machine) doesn't agree.