Laptop battery life question

[user55009]

I bought a laptop fairly recently, and haven't used it very much. What I have noticed, however, is that it runs out of battery within a few hours, as opposed to the "11 hour battery life", or whatever it boasted (Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Gen 2). I understand that the 11 hours, or whatever it was, is probably achieved by turning the brightness all the way down, and not doing anything too taxing, but prior to purchasing the laptop, I did look at reviews, and some said they would get 8 or 9 hours of continuous use out of the battery, while surfing the internet and streaming video, etc... Why exactly does mine die so quickly? I run brightness at about half of the total brightness it could be, and I don't do extremely taxing things on it, mainly typing and watching a video or something simple. Is that just how laptops are, they boast a long battery life and in reality, the way people use them, they end up running out of battery much quicker?

NOTE: I have owned laptops before, however they didn't have the best of batteries to begin with, so the fact they didn't last long didn't bother me, so I didn't look much into it. Owning a laptop now that is meant to have a longer battery life, and it simply doesn't, is prompting me to try and understand this better.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

If you search for kaby lake micro code update you mostly get results about a crash bug involving hyperthreading. Assuming that's what's in the BIOS, it seems like a worthwhile thing to get. The safest way would be to follow the manufacturers instructions in the same readme file that contained the release notes.

 

[user55009]

I got that updated, and then I ran a hardware scan through the Lenovo Companion app, to check to make sure my hardware components are working properly. It says that all of the components check out and are working properly. I wonder if maybe there's some program somewhere on the laptop that is what draws so much power, but I'm not sure which one it would be.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

You can try keeping Task Manager up in the background, on the Processes tab, and sort by CPU usage. You may need to show processes from all users. In Win 10, I think you access that from the users tab.

 

[user55009]

Okay, thank you for all the help on this topic. I'll try checking on the processes every so often, and see if that yields anything. If not, I might just have to contact Lenovo and see if there is anything they can do under the warranty I currently have. It seems like we've tried most of the troubleshooting for this sort of issue. I certainly learned a lot, thank you for assisting!

 

[ranaldmackinnon]

Okay, thank you for all the help on this topic. I'll try checking on the processes every so often, and see if that yields anything. If not, I might just have to contact Lenovo and see if there is anything they can do under the warranty I currently have. It seems like we've tried most of the troubleshooting for this sort of issue. I certainly learned a lot, thank you for assisting!

Hello, I also am having the exact same problem with my battery life not being as expect. One of the reasons I got the Thinkpad 13 was the battery life they boasted. For example right now I have 97% with battery saver enabled and power saver power plan yet the estimated battery life is only 3hr 20mins.Did you contact Lenovo about this or did you just live with it? Would love to hear back from you

 

[user55009]

Hello! I did bring my laptop into a certified Lenovo repair center, and they did a battery gauge reset, which helped the problem about halfway. Apparently the battery and Windows were not detecting the same level of charge between the two, so when Windows thought the battery was fully charged, it wasn't.

Please read the full post before doing anything, just to make sure nothing goes wrong.

In order to perform a battery gauge reset, you need to open Lenovo Vantage (which can be downloaded from the microsoft store if for some reason it is not on your laptop), and then navigate into hardware settings. Under the power status section, you should be able to find an option for battery gauge reset. Hit that and follow the instructions (note that this process will take quite a while, so do it when you aren't going to be using your laptop). I also recommend, prior to doing this, to make sure your laptop is up-to-date, through Windows Update, as well as Lenovo Vantage (vantage gives drivers for your system from Lenovo).

As I said, that only fixed it halfway. The other half was to disable microsoft one drive. I noticed that the laptop fans would spin up when the one drive symbol appeared in the system tray, and the battery would deplete rapidly. Right-clicking on the symbol and clicking Exit would terminate the program and the fans would spin down. I got tired of constantly having to do that, and I couldn't find a way to permanently disable it, so I did a clean install of windows and avoided setting up One Drive related services (I created a local account upon Windows installation, and then after I was able to use the computer, I changed the local account into my microsoft account under the account settings - doing this prevented One Drive's initial setup on my laptop, so it no longer runs in the background at random times). If you have One Drive frequently show up in the system tray and deplete your battery like I did, and you cannot find a way to disable it, and you elect to do a clean installation of Windows, do the clean install prior to the Lenovo Vantage stuff, because you'll have to re-update your laptop after a clean install.

Doing both of those fixes has extended the battery life a decent amount, but not as much as Lenovo boasts the laptop can achieve. It is worth doing, but please know that it may not completely solve the issue - I think Lenovo reported that battery life statistic under the most ideal and least-stressed conditions, so normal use won't achieve it.