Comments on: Battery smackdown, now and then: No contest

By: keithpeter

keithpeter — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 17:04:00 +0000

I must be lucky, my T42 ‘refurbished’ laptop off the well known web site gets just over 3 hours off its battery (6 years old). The fan only comes on when doing processor intensive things.

I decided to acquire a newer and faster thinkpad T60 (4 years old) based on my positive experiences, and ran into fan control problems (see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1586094&highlight=T60+Ubuntu+10.10). It also manages just over 3 hours with a realistic use (wifi, web browser, word-processor) but no videos. And it makes a noise. Often.

The original plan was to sell the T42 but I’m dithering now… it might be the T60 that goes.

By: Luca

Luca — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 12:03:54 +0000

Another thing to bear in mind is that up until 2 or 3 years ago there wasn’t really a focus on making hardware eco-friendly, it was all about making it faster and faster. Recent chips they are much more eco-friendly, you can now get laptops for < £300 that have a 12 hour battery life.

By: koleoptero

koleoptero — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 08:59:06 +0000

You must also take into consideration the significantly lower prices computers have nowadays. You couldn’t easily find a NEW laptop with $400 ten years ago. Now you can. And even if the thinkpad wasn’t in the “cheap” category, all hardware has paid the price.

By: PeterStJ

PeterStJ — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 08:47:52 +0000

I have seen laptops from lenovo, acer and toshiba drain the battery to ‘a few seconds when no AC’ in less than year. I am not sure why, but this is the case with all laptops at work, even the newer ones. On the other hand I have always wanter a laptop, that can work on solar power, meaning efficient enough to make its computation on the lower power supplied. The lower computational capacity can be easily overcome with the console applications (I am happy to state, that I am almost entierly using those, it is easier on my eyes to). Unfortinately such CPUs have not yet been presented to the customer.
And I am still waiting. As one of my favourit tv show characters sais: “The things I want are not invented yet”

By: YankeeDDL

YankeeDDL — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 07:31:54 +0000

I subscribe the two comments above: both valid.
I would like to add that in the office where I work we went though a Thinkpad-phase. I can say that about 2/3rds of the laptop, after about 1 year had a pitiful battery life. Knowing the colleagues, I can assure you that no care, whatsoever, was taken to try to preserve the battery. Nevertheless, I found it quite disappointing.
I was lucky enough to have a high-capacity battery that lasted about 8hrs in it’s prime days (with quite restrictive power-management settings) and even 4 years down the road could easily cover more than half a day worth of email, light web browsing, and the usual set of office apps. Not bad at all if you ask me.

By: raymond300

raymond300 — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:36:20 +0000

Try keeping it at 40 percent, and removing the battery, it’ll improve battery life.

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

Yea, lithium-ion tends to wear out faster, while avoiding the memory effect. Maybe soldering new rechargable batteries might help

By: Reacocard

Reacocard — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 00:11:00 +0000

Keep in mind battery technology has changed over time. Those older laptops are probably using NiMH cells, while the newer Thinkpad uses Lithium-Ion. Lithium-Ion is lighter and (when new) lasts longer than an equivalent NiMH, but will wear out over time and eventually have a capacity much less than its original design. So far as I know, NiMH cells are not nearly as vulnerable to this, explaining the discrepancy you observe. I’d expect that Thinkpad to get upwards of 4 hours with a new battery, assuming it is just a case of the battery being worn out. For Thinkpads you can inspect battery status using tp-smapi, might want to take a look and see if you just have a bad battery. My Thinkpad T61 got over 5 hours new and still hits 2-3 regularly after 2 years of moderately heavy use.