Hey guys I recently got my T420 w/ enhanced graphics I've been reading around that pretty much all distributions don't have the optimus. Anyways thats not what im here for I was wondering if anyone has had any good experience with the 9 cell 55++ battery and Linux. I currently get 5-6 hours on a full charge while my windows partition gets roughly 10-11. If you guys have any suggestions on to which distro or programs that would increase the battery life, thatd be great. Oh one more thing, has anyone ever experienced their wireless connection being slower on their linux partition and faster on the windows partition. Thanks and take care.

I've got a T420 (see sig below) and run Ubuntu 11.10 on it presently. The battery lifetime you mention for the 9 cell under linux isn't too much more than I get with the 6 cell under linux (4.5-5.0 or so). I'll go out on a limb and assume that you're using the nVidia card all the time in linux and maybe that is where a good bit of battery life is going. There is a project for Optimus support under linux, I've not used it myself, but it's called Bumblebee. You might want to check into that. This link might help: http://www.ivegotavirus.com/blog/2012/01/23/installing-bumblebee-3-0-tumbleweed-on-ubuntu/. That's for Ubuntu - not sure what distro you are using... There was also a second project for optimus support, believe that one was named Ironhide...

Regarding wireless - no, I haven't experienced that a windows wireless connection is faster than linux. I'm using the Intel Ultimate-N 6300 model wireless card and a Netgear WNDR3700- which card is in your T420?

I figured out the battery life issue by just turning of the discrete graphics card which...I rarely use. Right now im using Lubuntu latest release. Now im just having wifi connectivity issues where im not able to connect at all. Im using the ThinkPad 1x1 11b/g/n Wireless LAN PCI Express Half Mini Card Adapter for Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit), Vista (32-bit, 64-bit), XP - ThinkPad wifi card. And im getting pretty *****Expletives removed by Moderator*****. Thanks for the response.

Yea, the Intel wireless cards are well supported under Ubuntu, but it sounds like you might have the ThinkPad 1x1 BGN model which is a RealTek based card. I've had multiple T410's and T420's that I know work great out of the box with the 6300 N and have read similar with the Intel 6205 and the Intel 1000.

I've seen accounts online with folks having degraded performance with the Realtek card. There are a couple of suggestions that might be worth trying here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1876728.

Good luck... of course you can always swap for one of the Intel cards as that would not only be faster but better supported.

Thank you for the help wolf. I would have replied sooner but I've been busy.