W520 Battery Life

Hey all,

Since there is a thread for the X220, I figured, why don't we start one for the W520, too? Sure, it's meant to sit at a desk and use its battery only as a reserve; however, this does not prevent some users such as myself from purchasing one to use mainly as an all-in-one computer as it does have great battery life. That being said, I thought that perhaps some potential W520 buyers are turned off thinking that it has poor battery life, so let's see those battery lives.

With the rig in my signature, I get:
Flash based web browsing (YouTube) + Word Processing - around 6hrs
Random stuff (no games, some YouTube, web surfing, music, HD and FHD videos) - around 7hrs
Light web surfing - around 8.5hrs

I use the factory image + some other programs, my web browser is Firefox 4.0.1, and my brightness is 9.

 

I suppose I am a bit short of that but I use Chrome as a browser.

I do know I can watch 2 full movies on a long flight along with prep email and surfing while waiting boarding.

That never occurred with my T61. Also the W520 runs very cool.

Perry

 

With 3 virtual machines running on VMWare Server in the background (domain controller, sql server, team foundation server) I get about 6 hours web surfing, 4-5 hours flash use.

Brightness is 5-10.

 

With 27++ slice battery: Haven't managed to run out of battery yet

 

I have a nine cell on my W520. Id say without a doubt the battery life is better that my t61 but I have never fully discharged the battery to find out.

I do know that the amount of charge is fairly erratic bouncing grom 41/2 hours to 31/2 hours in a sitting.

Renee

 

Eek, 3.5-4.5? Sounds like you aren't being as aggressive as you could be with your power plan. I bounce around from 6-8.5 depending on what I'm doing. Real world usage seems to be about 8+

 

With a 6-cell, 3 hours of mild usage.

optimus disabled (1000m only), 16 gig ram, 2 drives, brightness 10, max. performance.

 

Why do you need it on max performance for mild usage? Flip that to a more conservative plan and you'll get more battery life. Plus, it'll be a bit more gentle on your battery over the long haul.