X1 battery life

[OrosAraba]

Any X1 owners care to share their battery status/experience?  I was wondering a bit about my missus X1 showing a max capacity of 33 Wh out of original 38,something, after just a month and 6 cycles. Thats more than 10% down already.

As a sidenote, if she unplugs the machine to watch an episode of some series, it will only last power on battery for about 45-60mins. Admitted that is with a bright screen and using the speakers, but still, i was a bit shocked to learn this. When looking it up, it was bragging with about 4-5 hours battery life. I know this is with NOTHING enabled, lowest brightness, no sound and only looking at the desktop without actually moving anything... but... yeah well... Is our battery sick, or is this normal?

[HiVolt]

Down 10% after 1 month/6 cycles? That surely can't be right.

For comparison, my X220 with 6 Cell batt is 99% capacity, 56.13Wh out of 56.78Wh, 18 cycles, 6 months old.

[ColonelONeill]

@OrosAraba,
What's the battery manufacturer? It'll say it in Power Manager, and also on the battery sticker somewhere.

How much you can use the battery under video playback will vary greatly depending on what codec and which player. If it's a Flash player, then it'll be very battery hungry. If it's some GPU accelerated H.264 decode in Media Player Classic, you should get a good 2-3x the battery life by comparison.

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

you may need to reset the battery firmware.

http://leadorg.wordpress.com/technology/thinkpad-x1-battery-firmware-update/

[OrosAraba]

The FRU-partnumber is 42T4977

original kapacity is listed as 38.92 Wh

listed as remaining kapacity at 33.18 Wh

9 cyclusses now.

Manufactor : SMP 23-06-2011

first use 10-2011

The clips she was watching was just some 250mb episodes of 20minutes lenght, so nothing demanding really, I did however discover she was streaming it wirelessly from out local NAS, so that ofc did pull some extra power.

I'll try and dig out the fw on it, i just remember it was updated right after we turned it on and started downloading updates. But I don't have a connection to it right now.

[karothacker]

I also have the X1, but have no problems with battery life.

I use the "Power Source Optimized" setting in Lenovo's Power Manager.

I use the backlit keyboard when necessary and adjust my screens brightness when necessary (Normally on 5).  Get 4hr on average.

My Cycle Count is also at 6, but I've had mine a little over a week.

My system also has an SSD which takes less power so that may be one reason why mine is better than yours.

[OrosAraba]

Goodness me, 1½ month later, and already 14 updates again. Among other both power manager, bios and ahci (now that i've put in a ssd better grab that)

I'll see what happens afterwards, as I see it there was no battery fw update at this time, so it should be running the latest.

[joncordova]

---

OrosAraba wrote:

...if she unplugs the machine to watch an episode of some series, it will only last power on battery for about 45-60mins.

---

It sounds to me like you're running the CPU on turbo or high while on battery. Go into the Advanced Settings in Power Manager and select "Low" in the CPU speed. Your i5 will underclock itself to 800Mhz, but that's actually more fine for playing back video, especially if it's from the hard drive, like on iTunes or something. [Flash video is a power hog.]

Two hours of video would be more realistic from the 38Whr battery, but one hour I think means you have some settings cranked up.

If you are already running on Low while on battery power, maybe it's the screen. The X1 has a very bright backlight.

[ColonelONeill]

In which codec was it encoded? Some codecs require more processing power (especially the high compression ones).

Which media player? VLC? MPC-HC? Windows Media Player?

[OrosAraba]

Wow, my girlfriend now told me the laptop showed 0% battery after having been on the adapter the entire day, I figured the power meter was just not showing the correct amount, but after unplugging it, it went dead instantaneously. Plugged it back in, started up and went to look at the specs. It said 0.03 capacity, and it didnt charge at all, said 46hours until complete charge. And the capacity at full charge has now dropped to a mindblowing 26.67Wh. I started the reset procedure and that seemed to kickstart the battery again, but really? Something has to be wrong with this battery no?