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#1 2010-03-19 22:14:30

Bionic Apple
Member
Registered: 2008-08-05
Posts: 59

Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

As you can tell from the title, I have had terrible battery life with this Thinkpad W500 in Linux.  I have scoured the general web, ThinkWiki, and the Arch Wiki to solve the problem.  No luck, yet.  Let me organize my information in neat sections for you guys:

Battery Life (While Web Surfing)

Windows: ~4:30 hr
Arch: ~2:00 hr

Specs

- Lenovo Thinkpad W500
- 9-cell battery @ 80% capacity
- Switchable graphics (ATI FireGL V5700 & Intel GMA 4500MHD)
- Bluetooth, Wireless, Webcam, Microphone
- 7200 RPM drive
- Ultrabay CD drive
- WUXGA (1920x1200) 15.4" screen

Windows Setup

- 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate
- Standard Windows 7 Lenovo drivers off of their website
- ThinkVantage tools (HDAPS, Power Manager, etc.) installed
- Aero transluscensy/blur effects usually not used on battery power.
- Intel card usually used

Arch Setup

- 64-bit 2.6.32 kernel
- Switchable graphics not recognized, therefore the Intel card will be used be default if the Ati card is not specified in the BIOS.
- Cpufrequtils installed with several governers.  Daemon is not used, but Powertop reports CPU is at 800Mhz 99% of the time anyways.
- Laptop-mode-tools installed.  All features are enabled.
- Thinkpad-acpi and smapi drivers/modules installed.
- Removeable CD tray ejected on boot.  This stops power from being routed to it.
- HDAPS enabled.
- Bluetooth shutdown on boot.
- Usb auto suspend and hal-disable-polling (of cd-drive) enabled
- Awesome WM.  No compositing.
- Intel card usually used

Probable Causes

- Switchable graphics.  Let me tell you my experience with it in Windows first.  When I log in to Windows, the battery meter will say ~2:45 or so for a full charge using the Intel card.  After switching to the Ati card on-the-fly, the life actually goes up.  When I switch back to the Intel card, it goes up a little bit more to a grand total of ~4:30 hr.  I suspect this is because the cards actually aren't turned off, but merely put into a power-saving mode.  By default, the cards must not go into this mode until a driver is loaded.  Or, at least that is my suspicion.  I have no actual evidence of any kind.  Switchable graphics support will be included in 2.6.34, so at the very least I guess I can switch to the release candidate.  It is just that I have never used a custom kernel before.

- Fan.  The laptop runs rather hot when Linux is running.  Why this is, I don't know.  Perhaps it supports my theory above?

- Cpu.  After cpufrequtils was enabled, little high pitch noises can be heard from inside the laptop when either I move my mouse or something intensive is running.  Not a big deal, just worth mentioning.  Since I believe a CPU cannot make noise, this might actually be a fan problem.

- Intel AMT.  Supposedly this card serves as a flash memory buffer for the hard drive. Linux cannot use it, so its benefits are lost.  Or so I think, I am actually not quite sure what is going on here.


Anyways, I hope that is enough information!  Hopefully this problem isn't terrible to fix, as it has had me stuck to my Windows partition for the time being.

Last edited by Bionic Apple (2010-03-19 23:37:46)

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#2 2010-03-19 23:52:03

takedown
Member
From: Argentina
Registered: 2008-08-31
Posts: 219

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

Try to disable the ATI card under BIOS, in my t500, if I keep the original setting, xorg use the intel card defined in xorg.conf, but the ati card still consume a lot of power and the left side of my laptop is very hot. I can see with lm-sensors that the fan run soo faster.
After, if i disable the discrete graphic in bios, all run very cool smile

Sorry my poor english

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#3 2010-03-20 01:09:02

Bionic Apple
Member
Registered: 2008-08-05
Posts: 59

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

Oh wow, I could have swore I had done that.  I remember switching the setting to integrated and having no meaningful results.

But, apparently I was wrong.  By actually disabling it this time, my power usage went from 30W to 15W.  Wow oh wow.

Thanks!  But, don't let that be the end of the thread.  If anybody has any other ideas on how to save power, I would be grateful.

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#4 2010-03-20 01:21:57

takedown
Member
From: Argentina
Registered: 2008-08-31
Posts: 219

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

can you post your powertop output?

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#5 2010-03-20 01:36:33

Bionic Apple
Member
Registered: 2008-08-05
Posts: 59

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

Sure:

G0ekC.png

Looks like HDAPS (hard drive shock protection) and iwlagn (wireless card) are causing the most wakeups.  Is there a way to reduce that of both without sacrificing their features?

Last edited by Bionic Apple (2010-03-20 01:41:38)

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#6 2010-03-20 03:31:37

takedown
Member
From: Argentina
Registered: 2008-08-31
Posts: 219

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

# iwconfig wlan0 power on
# ethtool -s eth0 wol d

help?

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#7 2010-03-20 04:41:21

Bionic Apple
Member
Registered: 2008-08-05
Posts: 59

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

No, iwlagn stays at about the same levels.

Now regarding HDAPS, is there a way make it check less often?  Or perhaps I don't even need it?

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#8 2010-03-25 02:02:30

zacs7
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-02-23
Posts: 5

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

Bionic Apple wrote:

No, iwlagn stays at about the same levels.

Now regarding HDAPS, is there a way make it check less often?  Or perhaps I don't even need it?

I would leave HDAPS. You can find the sampling frequency in /sys/devices/platform/hdaps/sampling_rate. Although I doubt changing it will result in significantly more battery life.

If it does, you could reduce (that is, increase) the frequency while running on battery, and leave it the same for mains. That way the chance of HDAPS not helping you if you drop it will be reduced. Although making it more complex than it needs to be.

Last edited by zacs7 (2010-03-25 02:02:55)

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#9 2010-04-02 06:01:09

daggo
Member
Registered: 2009-08-12
Posts: 5

Re: Terrible Battery Life on Thinkpad W500

I also ran into this same issue w/ my T500
  35W rate while running linux using Intel drivers w/ BIOS set at Switchable graphics (the ATI graphics card still sucks energy)
~21W rate while using linux + catalyst proprietary drivers and bios set to discreet
  15W rate while Switchable turned off and set to Internal (Intel) graphics only in bios

Has anyone found a way to power down your pci port? I was reading in another thread that it may be possible
http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=66577
I think it would be good for us who like the 'switchable graphics' in windows but want to stay with intel on the linux side.

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