Improving battery life on T460s

[alysia]

Thank you to everyone who commented on battery life. After testing several T460s systems, we isolated a fingerprint reader driver that was excessively draining battery life. The version of this driver is 5.0.62.30. The latest driver – 5.0.88.04 – will address this issue and improve battery life.

To update your drivers, you can follow the steps below:

For Windows 10:

Hit Start

Select All Apps

Select Lenovo Companion

Click in the upper-left hand corner and select “System Update”

You can also find the new driver at the link below.

http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/DS105408

We sincerely appreciate your business and passion. We are closely monitoring our forums to identify opportunities to continue to meet your needs and we look forward to exceeding your expectations.

Sincerely,

ThinkPad Product Marketing

[justifiedcause]

My battery drops from 100% to 93% within 20 minutes. Is this normal? I am using the lenovo optimised power plan. Screen brightness is at 40% and doing nothing else other than surfing on google chrome. 

My configuration is a i7-6600u, FHD IPS non-touch, 512gb PCIe ssd and 8gb ram. 

[lindros2]

This doesn't solve my issue.  The trackpad driver might have been bad, but the fundamentals are worse.

Battery life is crap on the T460s (i7, not sure about i5).

[Charly_Mad]

And for Windows 7 Pro 64-bit?

[matador_el]

Good afternoon.  I have installed the recommended driver and did not notice much difference.  Overall, I love the T460S, but I am disappointed by the battery life.  Immediately after charging the batteries, with brightness at 50%, without running any programs, the estimated battery life is 5 hours 10 minutes.  Once I start actually using the laptop, estimated and actual battery times go down dramatically.  My machine runs Windows 10, i5, 1080p.  Are there any more recommendations?

Thank you,

Matt

[ClickRight]

I have had the fingerprint driver 5.0.88.04 updated on April 19th when I installed Windows 10.

I wish I had better news to report, however, battery life has been dismal at best. 

5 hours and  30 minutes MAXIMUM just surfing the web and taking notes.

Sleep mode is no better. I put my laptop to sleep at 50% on Wednesday evening, ensuring that all external devices were unplugged. When I went to turn it on today (Saturday morning) it was booting and then I looked away for a few seconds and when I looked back, it was off. When I plugged it in and booted it up, the battery guage was at 0%

Specs: FHD IPS non-touch, i7-6600U, 8GB, 256 SSD

I would be very interested in any more suggestions for improving the battery life in this series.

[justifiedcause]

Essentially what I did to make the battery last an entire day is to reduce screen brightness to 35%, no bluetooth and not use any peripheral USB devices such as mouse and reduce the number of pinned tabs on chrome.. This can fetch me about 7 hours plus..

[wesleyyin]

Under admin cmd, I did "powercfg energy" and removed all "errors" where one of them is the camera drive not entering the sleep mode. An auto driver update in Device Manage got rid of the error. Then, like the setting above (but with bluetooth on and a 1920x1080 touch screen) I got slightly more than eight hours with my T460s.

On my previous thinkpads, I was always using TPFanControl. I am debating whether I should use it on T460s because it is quite quiet already. TPFanControl itself takes a bit of CPU time, so if it does not significiantly save battery by reducing fan speeds, there is no point using it.

[marty_0802]

Was the battery life problem solved by installing new drivers ?

According to others' posts, the problem still exists.

So can anyone report more status after applying the new drivers ?

Thank you.

[justifiedcause]

This seems to help extend battery life by about an hour or so!