Yes, a 7200rpm HD and more RAM will use more power. Your runtime stats seem
roughly in-line with what I've seen on other PIII-M 1.13GHz laptops...the
PIII-M was a pretty hungry chip compared to the power sipping P-M's.
Greg
----- Original Message -----
From: "Winterlight" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 3:56 PM
Subject: [H] Laptop upgrade kills battery life
I have a 2002 IBM Thinkpad T23 that I bought on Ebay about 18 months ago
... I really like this, and I use to have a Latitude. Thinkpad's deserve
their rep as the Cadillac of laptops. But there is one problem with them,
... battery life.
Stock mine was a PM PIII 1.133 Ghz, 256megs of PC133, a non 3D 16 meg S3
video card, and a 4500 RPM 30 GB laptop.Battery life specs shows as a max
of 2 hours and 20 minutes and that is pretty much what I was getting.
I have done two upgrades...increased the RAM to 1GB and upgraded the hard
drive to the hot 80GB Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 80GB ATA-6 2.5in 7200RPM
Mobile Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer ... But it's a state of the art laptop hard
drive that is suppose to conserve power.
Turned off the swap file and speed zoomed up. Feels quicker then my
sisters two year old PM 1700 Thinkpad and she has the 5400 RPM drive.
But my battery life went down substantially. Actually I think the
improvements, with it's increased load, helped kill my stock 4.0 AH
battery. So I purchased a refilled battery with 4.4AH using Thinkpad
case, and electronics for guaranteed quality and compatibility, and I
also picked up an exact model used battery = 4.0AH, but guaranteed good
battery, from EBAY for 15 dollars
With my old battery, and stock components doing normal stuff I got about
2 hours plus or minus 20 minutes. Now it will do that if I boot into safe
mode command line only where it does 3 plus hours. But if I run a DVD from
the hard drive, the stock battery only gets 1 hour and 15 minutes and the
refill gets 1 hour and 45 minutes. Would I get better battery life
running the DVD from the DVD drive?
Is it reasonable that the RAM and the hard drive costs me 25-30 percent of
battery power?
