[ltp] Aggressive battery diagnostics on T42p, should I return these?

[Chris Bainbridge]

On 04/04/06, Igor V. Rafienko <igorr@ifi.uio.no> wrote:
> on Apr 4, 2006, 13:36, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
>
> >> This should give you a hint wether your device consumes to much or the
> >> batteries are damaged.
> >
> > Looking at IBM's own page, they claim 7.5 hours of runtime with the
> > battery cells I have, using WinStone's Battery Rundown utility. I'm
> > getting less than 25% of that amount with my two 9-cell batteries:
>
>
> Although 7.5hours sounds nearly fantastic to me, 5 hours should be easily
> attainable given certain adjustments. I can make my T43 draw a bit below
> 14W, and with a 77Wh battery pack (9-cell, standard edition) that is 5+
> hours on full charge. My understanding was that PCI-e draws more power
> than PCI, so a T42 should be able to hold out measurably longer.
>
>
> > Either their stats are completely false, or they're manufacturing
> > batteries which don't even come REMOTELY close to these figures.
> >
> > I'll call IBM and see what they can do for me.
>
>
> It sounds like something is very wrong with your laptop. How much *does*
> your laptop draw with brightness on minimum, wifi off, bluetooth off,
> min mode on the gfx card, powersave governor and the CPU locked to the
> minimum frequency?

If you have a radeon card, I've heard that whether or not you use the
ATI fglrx drivers can make a difference. They're supposed to support
power saving features of the chipset... would be interesting if
someone could confirm that.

I used to have the hd spin down after a few minutes. But it takes ages
to spin back up again, and I noticed these delays much more than any
battery time extension.

I find that when I get the 20 minute shutdown warning I can extend the
time considerably by switching to the lowest LCD lighting. Of course,
that makes it difficult to see the screen ;-)