Power consumption on Thinkpad X200 / X200T

orschiro · 2013-10-13 06:21:00

Speaking about the optimal treatment of the battery, do you take your battery off your laptop when you are on AC or is it harmless to the lifetime of the battery to leave it plugged in?

masteryod · 2013-10-13 11:38:36

plam wrote:

1. You don't want to charge your battery to 100%. Never!

I've never said you should charge your battery up to 100% of design capacity.

plam wrote:

2. Small charges and discharges are actually not considered cycles. My father's thinkpad runs windows, and when I run ThinkVantage Power Manager and set charging thresholds for automatic battery lifetime optimisation the thresholds are set to 90/86. [...]

That's interesting. I always thought that short cycles are bad bum bum to your battery.

Thanks for your input. It's fun to learn something new.

orschiro wrote:

Speaking about the optimal treatment of the battery, do you take your battery off your laptop when you are on AC or is it harmless to the lifetime of the battery to leave it plugged in?

In theory if it's not charging then your fine. In practice it all depends on temperature. If your laptop is getting hot while on AC, battery will get warmer too and it's not healthy for it, afaik. If you work exclusively on AC than you can unplug your battery but I don't think this is worth the risk. Battery works as an UPS if there is power failure you won't loose your work. This whole issue is about being reasonable. If you take care of your battery it will serve you well. You don't have to be paranoid about it.

Last edited by masteryod (2013-10-13 11:44:50)

demian · 2013-11-15 23:42:04

i see a lot of discussion on correct battery treatment on a lot of forums and my advice would be to pay no mind to all that. i mean, sure, set up some charge thresholds, but other than that just use those things at your pleasure - they are commodities, after all.

trivia:
the first-use date of my current 6c battery is 2009-04-27. that's more than 4.5 years now and it has only lost 20% of its design capacity. and all i ever did was set charge threshold to 95% (and for a year or two of mainly windows usage inbetween i even used it without any thresholds).

i have one (bigger) backup battery but at this rate i might need a new laptop before i need a new battery.

@Topic:
I'm using a X200s and typically get between 5.5-8 W with light activity (browsing without videos/flash, coding, reading and irc chatting) and about 9-12 W while watching movies fullscreen, which is about the same as watching a youtube video (not fullscreen) with lots of tabs open. if i really crank up the brightness and/or watch 1080p youtube or otherwise really stress my machine i can get up to 15-18W. i rarely use more than 10/15 brightness though. CPU at 100% via stress -c 2 is pretty much exactly 20W (4/15 brightness). with everything at minimum (no open apps, no wifi, brightness 0), i get around 5 to 5.5 W.

the lowest i've ever gotten in Linux was 4.6W idle (3.4 with screen off), that was still with 2.6 kernel. In Windows, driver support naturally was (or still is) better, i got 4W idle and 2.9W with screen off but that was really pushing it with every tweak i could find.

the reason i'm posting screen off results are because i actually used to turn off the screen a lot on demand with a FN-key when i was learning from a book and only a couple minutes later i would type some excerpts into the laptop. and turning off the display, if you can make use of it, is one of the biggest power savers.

cheers

Last edited by demian (2013-11-16 00:58:32)

orschiro · 2013-11-16 08:02:05

the reason i'm posting screen off results are because i actually used to turn off the screen a lot on demand with a FN-key when i was learning from a book and only a couple minutes later i would type some excerpts into the laptop. and turning off the display, if you can make use of it, is one of the biggest power savers.

Good point. I am also automatically turning off my display after a while. Doing that manually would annoy me too much.

xset dpms 120 180 240

Arch Linux

#26 2013-10-13 06:21:00

Re: Power consumption on Thinkpad X200 / X200T

#27 2013-10-13 11:38:36

Re: Power consumption on Thinkpad X200 / X200T

#28 2013-11-15 23:42:04

Re: Power consumption on Thinkpad X200 / X200T

#29 2013-11-16 08:02:05

Re: Power consumption on Thinkpad X200 / X200T

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