Battery life with Thinkpad T430

[offgridguy]

Hello pschyska; I noticed in your post you mentioned bad display quality issues, myL512 has the same problem, enough reason for me never to buy another lenovo.Regarding the mac and dual boot, apparently that can be a problem, there is some info on that in this thread. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2081105&page=2 I did some checking and found there is very little price difference between the macbook pro and the MBA, so i would probably opt for the pro, larger screen for one thing. If i did dual boot i would use virtual box as suggested in the above thread, another learning curve as i am not familiar with virtual box.

Edit; looking at the specs. for the Dell, looks good, i assume you are going for the 9 cell Batt?
Very interested in how you like it,please let me know, Private message okay.

[pschyska]

Sure, I'll let you know. It's coming 31.12.
I ordered it with a 6cell, but I will get an additional 9cell too.
That way I can have my machine a bit lighter, but can take both batteries with me when I travel. The X1C, like most ultrabooks, doesn't allow swapping batteries. (btw, both the MBP and MBA have non-replaceable batteries, so bad ).oar
I also looked at the 6430s, which is a 13,3" body like the 6330, but has a 14" screen (like X1C). However, there is no HD display avaiable and I think resolution would be too low with 1366x768 on 14". I got the 1600x900 panel for my 6430.
You can find a very nice review on: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-...k.81780.0.html
Skip the part about the bad display, they also tested the HD panel in the 6330 (linked in test), which sounded quite nice.

On the MBs, I think you should look at the 13" retina model. I heard very good things from it. However, in addition to the battery not removable/replaceable by the user, they even soldered the RAM on the board. I hate this trend. So be sure to get enough when you order

[tgalati4]

Mac's are so difficult to repair, they might as well weld them shut. I was not aware of the Lenovo display problems, but there has been a trend of lower build quality since IBM sold the Thinkpad line to Lenovo. And yes, it is the same manufacturer that IBM used to make Thinkpads, but you don't have IBM quality control or design standards.

Mac's work great and generally have good battery life. Just buy Apple Care and you are good for 3 years. After that, any repair means throw it in the trash.

[pschyska]

It depends on the type of repair obviously, but yes, some repairs are not worth it because of costs (like mobo, I guess). However, things like replacing battery or SSD shouldn't be too bad. You have to bring it in to an Apple Store or send the machine though. My main problem with the retina and air macs is that you can't get a cheap SSD like for most computers, you can't upgrade the RAM at all (I don't even think it's possibly in an Apple Store), and you can't take a replacement battery for longer travels with you.
The keyboards are good, though not best-in-class, the screen are good, though glossy. The build quality is stellar. You pay a premium for any accessories.
OSX turns more and more into a jail, i.e. you can't install Software outside of the apple app store by default - configurable, but still: wtf?. If you get an aftermarket SSD, Apple won't send TRIM. They String-match the model name and search for APPLE SSD in it, else they just disable it, for no good technical reason. APPLE SSDs of course cost at least twice the price, just like the standard RAM they use. There is a fix though (nulling the APPLE SSD string in the kernel module, which will match any SSD model name), has to be applied after every OSX update.
Apple tries to force their users more and more to use their products, and their products only. I expect they remove Google sync capabilities from their default mail, calendar and contacts to force users to use iPhones and the iCloud service soon...
As a developer, the OS is not very optimal. There is no real package manager, they change the compiler toolchain virtually every XCode release - Which is a multi-GB download where you get the whole Objective-C, Cocoa, iOS development stack, just to get a working gcc. Well, it used to be gcc, then it was llvm-gcc, no they changed it again to clang. The third-party package managers (homebrew, macports) are constantly trying to keep up and patch up their ports to make it compile again.
The UI also gets more and more redicoulous. A iOS-like Launchpad, which serves no function as you can reach every program with only a few keystrokes through Spotlight. The default view on the Finder (file explorer) is "All my files". Yes, that's the view I have been waiting for, now I can finally see all my ~2 million source files in my home folder in a nice expose; fail.

To sum up - OSX sucks, Linux is a so-so experience on macs (battery life, touchpad quirks), Hardware is made intentionally hard to service, premium price, stellar build quality, touchpad best-in-class in OSX. If you can live with the fact that you have to hack up stuff to make the system work, or you don't use the machine for software development they work reasonably well.

Edit: Looks like I kanged my own thread here lol. Still looking for a great Linux laptop with matte screen and replaceable battery with good life. My Dell E6430 will arrive tomorrow as it seems, I will report back how it's going. I fear the machine will be too bulky for me though... I plan to drive to a shop today to see the Lenovo X230.

The screen is said to be good (matte IPS 12,5"), battery life is OK and lots of options because of replaceable battery (4,6,9 cells available), slice battery available, docking port, very good keyboard, good perf. with 3rd gen i7.
I realized that screen size might be fine as it should be enough to hack in vim while traveling or read technical documentation, and I'll have it attached to a 24" anyways while stationary.

[offgridguy]

Not a real flattering endoresment for apple. Maybe i should rethink this.

[pschyska]

Ha, it's been a while Happy new year everyone.
The Dell is quite nice, but too heavy and big for me. I don't really like the trackpoint - no one beats Lenovo on this it seems. The keyboard and screen are OK, but not great. The power consumption is low and the battery life is long, and the device is mostly silent.

I've finally settled for a X230, as it seemed to be the best compromise in portability and function. They keyboard is great and the trackpoint is great, too. The screen is good (albeit small) - however, as it's an matte IPS panel the quality is good - at least for thinkpad standards. Lenovo appearently has huge problems with their screens up to 14" lateley it seems. They all suffer from screen door effects and bad colors/contrast. I hope they will do something in this area soon. I would have gotten a T430s probably if the screen weren't so bad (it's kind of a gamble as they have 3 suppliers and 1 of them is said to be OK...).

I only tested the machine in store though, my configuration will arrive on Thursday. Will report back

[pschyska]

Hey forums,

I got my X230 finally, and I must say it's almost perfect. The screen is good and I had no driver issues at all with 12.10. I installed TLP for power tweaks and battery life seems to be quite nice with the 6cell (I estimate 4h+). It's beautiful machine, however it died completely on day two of using it. When I plugged in the powr adapter it instantly turned off and won't turn on. I hope it's just bad luck
Will continue my Ubuntu adventure when it's repaired.

[tgalati4]

Not a ringing endorsement for Lenovo either.

[br0adband]

Not sure that any of this matters but I'll toss the info out there just in case it's useful to someone.

My current hardware is a trusty rock solid Dell Latitude E6400 - I've also got a ThinkPad T60 just for the record, but this is related to the E6400 specifically.

I have it currently running Windows 7 Pro x64 and I have a 6-cell battery, 9-cell battery, and also the "battery slice" available for this model of Latitude (shared with some other models like the E6410, etc). Using a combination of the most current drivers (I check for new updated drivers weekly, just kinda paranoid about it I suppose), undervolting the P8700 CPU (Core 2 Duo @ 2.53 GHz, Penryn class), and bringing the display brightness down to about 50% I can manage the following runtimes (with Wi-Fi enabled/connected):

6-cell alone: ~4 hours
9-cell alone: -7 hours
6-cell + slice = ~11 hours
9-cell + slice = ~15 hours

Now the ~ there means in my testing I was within 15-20 minutes of the stated amounts on either side, and I did spend a few days doing nothing but testing the battery life. My testing basis is load a 720p video clip I have stored on a network server accessed using Wi-Fi (the Intel 5100 Wi-Fi card in the E6400, 11n mode). It's the Avatar movie trailer, taken direct from Blu-ray from the original 1080p .m2ts file, compressed to 1280x720 using HandBrake, h.264 video stream with 2 channel stereo 192Kbps AAC audio, High Profile Level 4.1, average bitrate on playback is 13Mbps) and play it using MPC-HC set to repeat and playing in maximized window mode (not true fullscreen). So not only am I playing an HD video clip but the content itself is being pulled wirelessly so that adds to the power requirements.

The batteries I have are all "new" in the sense that I just recently replaced the original factory ones that came when I got this laptop in mid 2010 from Dell. I picked up brand new never used OEM batteries (meaning the real Dell batteries and not cheap Chinese knockoffs) from an eBay seller that shipped from the US - again, not cheap Chinese knockoff batteries. These are the real deal from Dell, just not sold by Dell directly.

Once the batteries arrived I used BatteryBar (a cool Windows tool) to check the actual wear on each battery individually and each one showed 0% wear - they literally were brand new and had never been used before, ever so I guess I lucked out in that respect.

My quest right now is to get Ubuntu 12.04 installed, upgraded, and running as solidly and completely as I can (having issues with hardware video acceleration, just posted another thread about that because it too can dramatically help with battery life in some respects), and of course maximizing the potential battery life as much as I possibly can using tools like powertop and PHC, etc.

I haven't done any testing yet and probably won't until I can resolve the HWA issues (hopefully) but I suspect that by default Ubuntu will suffer in terms of battery life - hence the hope that with tweaks and adjustments of all kinds that I might be able to manage getting within 10% of the times I can and did achieve using Windows 7.

I'd love to get another more current ThinkPad at some point, probably a T410 at most because I simply can't tolerate 16:9 panels at this point (have a 1440x900 in this Dell Latitude E6400). And this is also a CCFL backlight - there were some E6400 units that offered an LED backlight iirc, maybe I might look into that as well.

Anyway, there's some info I figured I'd toss out there. Yes, this is a "beast" when I have the 9-cell + slice active, it adds to the weight of it but, when I think of the near guaranteed 15 hours of battery life with that setup, I could care less about another pound or two I'll end up carrying around.

The basic gist of this for me is: buying a brand new machine these days isn't necessarily the best idea for a variety of reasons. Even with the newest generation processors using less power, the SSDs using somewhat less power, LED backlit displays using less power, and so on... I doubt I'm gonna get ~15 hours of continuous usage from anything I can buy right now today for less than $1000 - and it could probably be a lot more if I was actually using it the entire time but the looping video test is the most efficient I suppose).

Just my two cents, with a lot of spare change to boot...

[offgridguy]

br0adband, thanks for the input here. I appreciate the effort you went to to test this out
and then itemize it here.