3d ago

Any suggestions for improving battery life?

I've got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 10th generation, which, from the start, IIRC was criticized for not having the best battery life, I think, because of its processor (12th Gen Intel Core i7-1280P × 14).

I thought I had read that using a more recent kernel might help the lowish battery life problem (I'm using 6.11.0-24-generic at the moment), but it doesn't seem to help much, if at all.

I tried using tlp, which meant uninstalling power-profiles-daemon, but this just made my laptop run hot, and also screwed up my battery when I tried to set charging thresholds (had to reset it by using the emergency pin hole), so I probably won't be trying that again. Reinstalled power-profiles-daemon, and now have it on power saver; so back to normal now, not running hot, but battery life still isn't great.

Anything else I could try? There's auto-cpufreq which I used for a while on an older laptop, but that was quite a while ago . . .

8 comments

The basics are key: adjust screen brightness to a reasonable value and make sure your energy settings (dim, suspend) make sense to your working style.
- Yeah, my brightness level is usually set kind of low; like right now it's 20%(!), which is actually how I like it. The keyboard backlight is at 100%, and I kind of need it to be that way because of the state of my vision. The screen dims to 5% after 5 minutes. My stopwatch applet tells me now that I didn't even make it to 3 hours! 🙁
  A bad habit, but I often end up watching videos in my browser, LibreWolf, while I'm working, and I'm sure that probably adds to the power drain rather significantly.
  
  I think you are right on the money about the videos.
  
  Especially if I insist on watching them in high definition? Yeah, probably doesn't help!
  
  You need to enable hardware decoding of the videos via VA-API. See here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#Hardware_video_acceleration
  
  I think it's already enabled, AFAICT.