Hi All!
I have been using zorin OS version 16 for quite sometime and decided to upgrade to version 17.1 pro. After upgrading to 17.1 pro I noticed that the battery life on my laptop is only about 2 hours now. I used to get about a full 8 to 10 hours without any issues. The battery is brand new in this laptop.
For the laptop I am running a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 Extreme Gen 3. It has an i9-10885h, GTX 1660ti, 48gb ram and 1.5tb of ssds. I leave the laptop in battery saver mode since Im not doing anything intensive.
I checked powertop and nothing jumps out at me as running crazy or wild. I also tried to install TLP which I know is not advised but I tried it anyways to see if it would help and all it does is says that I have 99 hours left but I know thats not accurate.
Even something as simple as just browsing amazon for 20 minutes my laptop dropped from 99% to 87%.
Any help or tips to manage this other than being tethered to the wall?
@strike6 , I had the same problem - absolutely terrible battery life (I'd get a 40 minute warning, then it would just shut down) with Zorin 17.1 Core, so I installed TPL and it completely fixed the issue. Give it a go!
Just an additional note. Ideally batteries, to preserve their life, the number of charging cycles should be kept to a minimum. Never let the battery get below 35% and never charge beyond 80-85%. The only good thing about Samsung Notebooks that ran Windows had an app to prevent the battery being charged beyond 80%.
Based off my testing it is about 2 hours. Yes I calibrated the battery when I bought the brand new one.
But just for own sake from what I read online it said to drain the battery to 5% not 0, then charge it back up to 100%. Is there anything special in linux that has to be done?
I tried TLP but all it says is my laptop battery life is 99 hours but still dies after about 2 or 3 hours.
I did notice today that I had a firmware update from the software center and it updated a whole bunch of gnome firmware including the nvidia drivers so I guess ill see what happens
After some time, I finally got a solution, and my battery life has been much better so I wanted to share with everyone so if they run into this, they can also try this. I installed Powertop by using the command sudo apt install powertop. Once installed you can use the powertop --calibrate command to have it go through its calibration and it now gives me an accurate battery reading and Im going my full 8 to 10 hours of battery life.