So i have gotten a t490 just recently, and ive installed fedora on it, gnome power profiles daemon said it was “on my lap” and wouldn’t let me change the power profiles even when on a desk. So i masked that, and installed auto-cpufreq, but the laptop still draws about 10W (according to powertop) when watching a youtube video, leading to 4-5 hours of battery life.
any tips on how to reduce the power consumption?
5 hours watching a video is not that unreasonable for a machine of that age, especially since it’s Intel.
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lenovo-thinkpad-t490#:~:text=Video Playback Battery Rundown Test
According to this review they got 10 hours with wifi off, playing a 720p video that was stored locally on the machine. Youtube is going to have plenty of background tasks going on, wifi is going to be active downloading things, and you’ve probably got more than just youtube in the background so I would consider 5 hours to be expected without really delving deep into power saving (and probably killing performance).