W520 and terrible battery life [ Edited ]

[eos]

I have read that many people get good life on battery.  With the 6 cell, I get 2h using light web browsing at most, and using the 9 cell 3 at most.

Does anyone else get terrible battery life, or is it just me?

Could it be the 1080p display eating the battery?  I have found I cant use it on anything less than full brighness, which means using things like the maxum battery power settings are useless as it more or less blacks out the screen and you cant work.

I had a LOT of problems with CPU being stuck at 2.2 GHz on battery with an idle machine, but this appears to be solved by recent BIOS updates.  Using CPU-Z I can see that the cores speed is mostly 800MHz on battery.

I have not found a way to disable bluetooth, but have set everything else to sleep.

[ColonelONeill]

I can get 6-8 on my 9-cell on normal (light usage) conditions (80% full charge).

I can get 5-7 on full brightness, and I have almost the same config as you, except with 6GB of RAM.

Are you running Windows?

[Chatbox]

2 hours...That's a dream number for me.  I would be lucky is I can get 1h 45min on mine...but that's a W510  :-(

[ColonelONeill]

Yeah the lack of Optimus + quad-core Core i (first gen) is a massive power drain.

[eos]

Yes, the factory installed Win 7 64Bit.
I guess I am one of the unlucky ones who has a bad machine. Im gutted. I dont know if the fact that the batter drains around 8% per 24h when the machine is shutdown is related.

[ColonelONeill]

Yeah I dunno. So at 0% CPU usage, discrete GPU off, screen at 0, what's the estimated battery life?

[salzrat]

Can you guys monitor the wattage reported in Power Manager?

The lowest I can get here in minimum brightness and not doing anything is around 9W. That leads to a reported battery life of 6-7h, not even close to the 9h reported in reviews...

[eos]

Doing nothing, The lowest it seems to go on battery is 17W, but jumps to 22+ watts if I do as much as type.t

This is with screen bright,

wifi enabled,

DVD disabled

system performance balanced

cpu deep sleep enabled.

fan control balance all params

auto optical off enabled.

[eos]

I cant use the machine with brighness anything other than full.
Completely idle, the estimated battery life with a Full charge is around 2:20, but soon drops to 2h if do so much as type.

[salzrat]

Have you enabled the NVIDIA GPU activity icon in Nvidia system control panel and checked whether your discrete GPU is not being used?