How to monitor Thinkpad power consumption in Xubuntu

I received my new battery yesterday and was curious about my laptop's power consumption. I did some searching and found the perfect tool. It's a small command-line application called powerstat. It's easy to run and available in the package manager.

Output of powerstat

 

To install powerstat

sudo apt-get install powerstat

IBM T42p RAM upgrade and new (used) 9-cell battery

My IBM T42p came with 1.5 GB of RAM--a 500 MB stick in the slot under the keyboard and a 1 GB stick in the slot on the back of the machine. Don't get me wrong, 1.5 GB of RAM is not bad, especially  using Xubuntu. However, the machine can address a maximum of 2 GB, so I wanted to max it out.

I had an old 1 GB stick around the house from the old PC2700 DDR days, so I removed the keyboard and replaced the 500 MB stick with the 1 GB stick. See instructions for removing the keyboard below.

My Thinkpad came with a pretty crappy battery that lasted a cool 30 minutes. This meant, I was pretty much tethered to my outlet with the AC adaptor. I wanted a better battery, so I went to eBay. I bought a SANYO replacement (not genuine IBM/Lenovo) that was dead on arrival (DOA), but the seller gave me a refund. With the refund, I then bought a genuine--but used--IBM/Lenovo 9-cell battery that was guaranteed to last at least 3 hours.

DOA SANYO replacement battery

I'll update this blog post when I receive my new (old) battery.

UPDATE:

The 9-cell battery I purchased on eBay arrived today and it looks like a great purchase.

New 9-cell battery

It's been through only 3 charge cycles, and retains 96% of the designed charge capacity. With this capacity I should get between 3.5---4 hours of battery life between charges. See the tlp stats below.

My new 9-cell battery is awesome