Very poor battery life on Lenovo ThinkPad W500 laptop

Posted by Matt on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Matt
Published on 2009-10-08T07:34:17Z Indexed on 2010/03/12 14:17 UTC
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battery-life

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laptop-battery

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thinkpad

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windows-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.

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