Very poor battery life on Lenovo ThinkPad W500 laptop
- by Matt
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.