Pro 9i Better Battery Life Guide
I recently acquired the base-ish model Pro 9i gen 10 (Ultra 9 285H, 32gb ram, 5050, non-tandem oled) and had a similar experience to so many posts here with regards to poor battery life. There are a few nuggets of wisdom scattered throughout a bunch of different posts here so I thought I would gather both tricks that worked for me for anyone in a similar situation. This is how I am getting 8+ hours unplugged while casually browsing or working, and around 6 hours video playback. And those numbers are from 80% charge.
- The biggest issue is the dedicated or discrete GPU (dgpu) being used when it shouldn't be. It is easy to see when this is occurring by hovering over the icon in the system tray at the bottom right of the screen. My biggest offender was Microsoft Edge kicking on the dgpu for the most basic tasks.
The best fix for this is to stop letting windows decide what programs use the dgpu. Go to system - display - graphics and force whatever app is using the dgpu to use integrated graphics instead. You may need to manually add the app to this list before being able to do this, just click add desktop app and browse to the apps location (example below).
- If this isn't enough, the other thing I did was install the Lenovo Legion toolkit (GitHub - LenovoLegionToolkit-Team/LenovoLegionToolkit: Lenovo Legion Toolkit (LLT) is a Windows desktop utility created for Lenovo gaming laptops that replaces Lenovo Vantage, Legion Zone, and Legion Space. · GitHub). This has some interesting additional settings, but the big one is a button that allows you to either kill apps using the dgpu, or restart the dgpu to hopefully force apps back to the igpu. You want to see this dgpu "Powered Off" as often as possible.
Between Lenovo Vantage mode being set to Battery saver and these two tricks to make sure I am not using the dgpu, I have consistently had great battery life.
FYI none of this applies to gaming, if you want to game plug it in.