Thinkpad owners: How is your battery life?

[Triumph]

I have a 2 ghz Thinkpad T30, about a year old. Compared to other people's laptops of other brands, this thing sucks on battery life! Even running at low power with low screen brightness, etc, I get about 2 hours at most. And this is just doing BASIC stuff. Playing solitaire, browsing the web, reading a document. Other people are able to watch an entire movie on their laptops without recharging.

I looked on the IBM website, and there doesn't seem to be an "extended charge" battery. All they have is extra batteries. That doesn't help me much when I'm on a plane and my battery is about to die.

 

[Triumph]

Anyone? NO ONE?!

 

[starwarsdad]

I have an older Thinkpad A22 1 GHz. I can run for about 1.5 at full screen brightness and without utilizing the speed step.

I think you may have a bum battery. We have 3 users on T30s that get well over 2 hours on a full charge running in a similar state to what you are describing.

I have had very good results with IBM's tech support. Give them a call.

 

[LuDaCriS66]

I have an T40... I get around 4 hours at the most basic power conserving settings but I usually get around 2 - 2.5 hours on full brightness and just word processing and internet stuff

 

[sunase]

>All they have is extra batteries. That doesn't help me much when I'm on a plane and my battery is about to die.

I'm fairly certain you can hot swap batteries while in suspend. I seem to recall doing that with my 770. (When I eventually took it apart I found an extra, but small battery in it, much bigger than the BIOS would need, which is probably how they pull that trick off.)

>there doesn't seem to be an "extended charge" battery

Well you can get secondary batteries that go in the extra drive bay, that's what I use with my glacial a22m anyway (and why I don't know about hot swapping anymore ^^).

 

[mobobuff]

All 3 ThinkPads that I've owned have averaged at a 2 hour charge life.

 

[t30caddler]

Triumph, my battery also sucks, I've a T30 Latinoamerican model, the same, the thing that annoyes me is the constant activity of the fan, which leads me to try SpeedSwitch but i cannot change the speed. CPU always get hot & hot, I've checked task manager but there's no signs of a program requesting power of the CPU.

Any ideas?

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: Triumph
I have a 2 ghz Thinkpad T30, about a year old. Compared to other people's laptops of other brands, this thing sucks on battery life! Even running at low power with low screen brightness, etc, I get about 2 hours at most. And this is just doing BASIC stuff. Playing solitaire, browsing the web, reading a document. Other people are able to watch an entire movie on their laptops without recharging.

I looked on the IBM website, and there doesn't seem to be an "extended charge" battery. All they have is extra batteries. That doesn't help me much when I'm on a plane and my battery is about to die.

Your T-30 is a Mobile Pentium 4 based notebook... Which wasn't known for stellar battery life to begin with. My A-31 would only get about 2 1/2 hours, and that was at a little over 1 year old. The battery in your T-30 stands to be at least 1 year but probably closer to 2 years old depending when it was bought.... So that's not helping either.

We can't look to comparison with newer thinkpads due to the use of the Pentium M... which is a whole different animal when it comes to battery life.

IBM never made an extended battery for the T30... so you can buy a replacement, as well as what's call an "Ultra Bay 2000 battery", which fits into the bay where you would normally keep your optical drive. T40's on up have extended battery options, including the R50's+, X31, and X40.

So I tend to think it's the age of the battery and the fact that the t30 is a P4m that is the problem....Don't hold it against the T30.... it's a great lappy, just a generation or two behind the times.

 

[WackyDan]

In addition... IBM posts a thinkpad battery run time .pdf on their site.

I checked it and found that depending on your specific config on your t-30 -IBM has them benched out at 2:30 at the low side, and 3:27 as the high.

Your screen, amount of memory, speed of drive, opticals, speed of processor will all play a role in varying consumption compared to other t30's of different specs.

I don't know of a single manufacturer that can give you an accurate bench on their battery life... they tend to error on the high side.... That said, you are getting pretty decent battery life all considering.