Sunday, April 24, 2011

W520 Battery Life

I just got my W520 and have been running it mostly in Ubuntu (occasionally in Windows) and I have found the battery life is not what I expected. I am only getting 2 hours of battery life. Is there something I can do?

Reply 1 : W520 Battery Life

I was somewhat surprised at the battery life claims being made in this video YouTube - Lenovo Unboxed: ThinkPad W520 laptop - something 6hrs on 6cell, 11hrs on 9cell, 20hrs with 9cell + slice IIRC.

Reply 2 : W520 Battery Life


Quote:








Originally Posted by cpm22
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I just got my W520 and have been running it mostly in Ubuntu (occasionally in Windows) and I have found the battery life is not what I expected. I am only getting 2 hours of battery life. Is there something I can do?

I think the culprit is the discrete graphic card. Did you set the graphic option as discrete?

Reply 3 : W520 Battery Life

You probably is using discrete graphic chipset (Nvidia Quadro 1000M or 2000M) instead of Intel Integrated graphic. Try to go to BIOS and manually select Intel graphic and see whether your battery life is a lot better.

Reply 4 : W520 Battery Life

2h sounds about right on max brightness with the 6-cell battery.



I'm getting 4-5h on 9-cell with discrete only, brightness at 50%.



EDIT: On Linux (Fedora 14)

Reply 5 : W520 Battery Life


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Originally Posted by Volker
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2h sounds about right on max brightness with the 6-cell battery.



I'm getting 4-5h on 9-cell with discrete only, brightness at 50%.

Using linux or Windows 7?

Reply 6 : W520 Battery Life


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Originally Posted by Thors.Hammer
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Using linux or Windows 7?

He's on Linux as I recall he replied to one of my posts.

Well, I'll get mine tomorrow(Scheduled Delivery: Thursday, 04/21/2011, By End of Day), I'll be posting some serious power consumption figures as I'm hunting for the very lowest power usage under Windows 7.

Reply 7 : W520 Battery Life

2 hours very low. Even W510 last me longer which has only one graphic card...



sounds fishy to me..

Reply 8 : W520 Battery Life

is the OP running the Thinkvantage Power Manager in windows?

Reply 9 : W520 Battery Life


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Originally Posted by lead_org
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is the OP running the Thinkvantage Power Manager in windows?

It's difficult to tell. It appears the focus is linux. 2 hours is certainly concerning. Especially since the norm appears to be twice that or more for Windows 7 users.
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1 comment:

  1. Jonathan ChanFebruary 20, 2012 at 5:19 AM

    The reason your computer is getting very low battery life is the gpu. ive run ubuntu before on my w520. the battery life is horrible 2-3 hrs. on windows 7, i can get 6 hours easy.

    The thing is, this gpu is an optimus gpu. physically, it is integrated into the intel graphics. so that means u cant disable it without disabling integrated graphics. the only way to get it to work with only the integrated graphics is graphics drivers that will control it properly. there is a program for linux called ubuntu for automatic optimus graphics switching. its kinda hard to install. i had ironhide (i manual switching fork of bumblebee) installed but i dont think i had it installed properaly because the battery life was short and the computer was always hot.

    i ended up just dumping ubuntu and sticking with windows 7 because there are nvidia optimus drrivers on windows.

    on windows i get around 10-14 watts of power usage when im using "maximum battery life" power plan and doing office stuff at school. on linux, even with power saving software, i get around 35 watts of power comsumption.

    btw my specs are 9 cell battery, quadro 2000m, i7 2.2ghz quad. hope this helps

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