Windows – Very poor battery life on Lenovo ThinkPad W500 laptop

batterybattery-lifelaptopthinkpadwindows 7

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:

  • Battery starts with 100% charge
  • Screen on minimum brightness
  • Screen saver running
  • Wifi n enabled and active
  • "Normal" set of programs running including Outlook 2007, FeedDemon, TweetDeck and antivirus
  • Laptop left untouched during tests

Under the above conditions, 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.

Something is not right…

  • The smoking gun here is that Lenovo hasn't officially released Windows 7 drivers for this laptop. I haven't tried with Vista or XP yet.

What are others seeing?

Update: For W500 owners w/ the 9 cell battery, what value do you see for "Full charge capacity" when on the Battery tab of the Power Manager utility? I see 81.87 Wh.

Best Answer

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.

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