Battery Lifetime Lenovo T61 with 7-Cell-Battery
So after used my T61 for quite a while now I wanted to give a update about my experience with the battery lifetime of this laptop. In almost every review about the T61 the biggest issue was its short running time on battery. And that’s at least not totally wrong. The T61 won’t ever become a battery life wonder… But after taking proper care about the Lithium ion following the Maintenance Guide on thinkwiki.org, with the help of the nice Kernel module tp-smapi, I’ve got a maximum capacity of about 74W.
Experimenting with bleeding-edge kernel sources like kamikaze-sources and its successor zen-sources and following some tips under www.lesswatts.org leaded to an energy consumption of about 16-18Wh with WiFi and even 14Wh without. Of course you get this values only with darkened backlight (use xbacklight instead of /proc/acpi/ibm/brightness see here why).
So all this together gives me something like 3 to 3 1/2 hours of surfing and working in the Uni… of course much lesser if I compile the latest KDE 
. But I thinks that are pretty reasonable results for an laptop with this performance.
Disk Speed Issues Solved! (at least for me)
I finally found out why I had such a bad disk performance! Actually I wanted to care about this problem later, because I’m traveling at the moment and therefor I wanted to have a stable system. But it got so annoying that I decided to take the risk of breaking the system totally and so I did some more serious research. A simple hdparm -tT /dev/hda revealed the following:
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 7932 MB in 1.99 seconds = 3985.16 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.02 seconds = 2.60 MB/sec
So what the heck… why only 2.6MB? And by the way, why is it hda shouldn’t it be sda for a SATA disk?
It turned out that I still had compatibility mode activated in my BIOS, so the kernel recognized the SATA disk as a old style ATA disk which apparently caused this incredible low performance. After 2 minutes of changing /etc/fstab and the boot options in GRUB the hard disk was running with nice 44 MB/s.
What do we learn out of this? Don’t blame always the operating system! Maybe it’s just a wrong BIOS option…
T61 and Linux
So after quite a bit time playing around with my T61 and Gentoo I’m really surprised that there are actually so less problems. I admit that you have to use very often bleeding edge drivers (i.e. to get sound under ALSA working), but hey thats brand new hardware! And the awesome documentation on the Gentoo Wiki about the T61 and ThinkWiki helped a lot to get most of the things running. I just can encourage everybody who has a Thinkpad (preferable a T61) to contribute his experiences to this two projects in order to get a even better Linux support on this notebook. There are still some unsolved issues about suspend/hibernation, the APS, Nvidia Drivers and some other minor stuff. But nothing to big, so we can hope to get them solved in a few weeks/months.
But apparently Linux has a issue with SATA performance under x86_64 (link1, link2), which is quite annoying and I’m thinking about switching back to i386 and see how it looks there…
Lenovo T61 NC11DGE [hardware]
After about 3 weeks with my new notebook I think it’s time to tell you my experience with it. At first I thought about making a complete review, but well firstly I’m to lazy and secondly there are enough good ones around in the net(). So I just gonna tell you about some strange/interesting things which caught my eye, by examining my new toy. If you buy your Thinkpad in Germany you can’t customize it like in the US Lenovo shop, so I had to stick with a pretty preconfigured version. Furthermore the specs on the German Lenovo Page are not complete or even incorrect, so I had some interesting surprises(red marked in the hardware specs)!
Hardware Specs
- Intel Centrino Pro (Santa Rosa/Mobile 965GM)
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 at 2000 MHz
- 2048 MB PC-5300 DDR2 SD-RAM
- 80 GB SATA, 5400 RPM,8 MB Cache (Hitachi Travelstar 5K080)
- CD-RW/DVD Combo in Ultrabay Slim
- 14.1″ TFT, 1440×900 WXGA
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
- Intel 4965AGN Wireless Chip (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n(draft) )
- Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
- Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate (BDC-2) with Broadcom Chip
- Intel HDA Audio (AD1984)
- Finger Print Reader
- TPM Chip (Atmel or National Semiconductor, not sure yet)
- 7-cell Lithium ion Battery
- Ports:
- Expansion Bus port (for Essential Port Replicator, Advanced Dock, Advanced Mini Dock)
- ExpressCard and PCMCIA Slot
- External Display (VGA)
- External Microphone/Line-In
- Internal Microphone
- Headphone / Line out
- IEEE 1394 (Mini)
- RJ-11
- RJ-45
- 3 USB 2.0
Working with this laptop is quiet nice. The keyboard works excellent for a laptop keyboard and the trackpoint is a useful alternative option to the also built in touchpad. I’m working with both of them and switch randomly or depending on the task.
I went for a integrated graphic because firstly the driver support under Linux is better (open source driver) and for lesser power consumption, because some tests indicated a very short running time on battery. So I also decided to go for a 7-cell battery instead of the normal 4-cell one. But even with this I’m a little bit disappointed about the running time, but I haven’t tweaked anything till know under Linux so maybe it gets better. But one confusing thing happened in the first charging cycles… at one point I had a full capacity of 73 Wh but thereafter i had again something like 68 Wh which is quiet a difference… so let’s see time will show.
The ThinkLight which helps to illuminate the keyboard in the dark is a quiet nice idea, but actually mostly the light of the screen is enough. And talking about the screen… actually its pretty good and 14.1″ are a good compromise between small form factor and useful screen size. It’s very bright and you can regulate it in 7 levels of brightness. But even with the brightest setup there is a strange dark shadow at the bottom of the screen, it’s not really annoying, but I’m a little bit concerned about a damage of the backlight…
All in all it’s a really nice Laptop and like like to work with it(especially having the freedom to sit on my balcony in the sun and working on the Laptop, how I do it now, is just awesome) I’m not sure about the battery, but this will turn out later. At the moment I’m just enjoying the speed of my new toy!
Later on I gonna write a little bit about my experience with Gentoo Linux on it. So stay tuned.
