Thinkpads Forum

Hi all...

I know that we all know the Power Manager has issues; I was wondering if anyone out there sees what I've been seeing... I turn the Power Manager Gauge *off*, and it stays off, mostly, through successive reboots.

Then, as if by magic, that setting gets reversed, and explorer.exe hangs on startup. I kill explorer.exe, run it again, and there is the Power Manager Gauge on the taskbar again!

Freaky! Anyone seeing this?

- Tim

What OS do you have installed? What version or Power Manager do you have installed? I would suggest you perform a custom reinstall of Lenovo Power Manager. At some stage of the custom install, you will be presented with the option whether you want the Power Manager battery gauge to start with windows or not. Choose not, and even if you try to re-enable it from Power Manager options, it won´t appear again.

Marin85 wrote:What OS do you have installed? What version or Power Manager do you have installed? I would suggest you perform a custom reinstall of Lenovo Power Manager. At some stage of the custom install, you will be presented with the option whether you want the Power Manager battery gauge to start with windows or not. Choose not, and even if you try to re-enable it from Power Manager options, it won´t appear again.

Windows XP Pro... and whatever the latest version of the Power Manager there is (I'm on a different computer at the moment and can't check).

I'll give a try of what you suggest, thanks a lot!

- Tim

Marin85 wrote:What OS do you have installed? What version or Power Manager do you have installed? I would suggest you perform a custom reinstall of Lenovo Power Manager. At some stage of the custom install, you will be presented with the option whether you want the Power Manager battery gauge to start with windows or not. Choose not, and even if you try to re-enable it from Power Manager options, it won´t appear again.

Hi Marin85...

Well, I did exactly as you prescribed, and - it turned itself on again!

I uninstalled both Power Manager and Power Management Driver.

Rebooted.

Installed Power Management Drive.

Custom installed Power Manager, did not select battery gauge to start with windows.

This morning, I started the computer; explorer.exe locked up again. I killed it and restarted it, and... THERE WAS THE BATTERY GAUGE turned on again.

I'm wondering if there's any way I can kill the gauge permanently, since it seems impossible to turn it off in the usual way.

- Tim

Yes, there has been always this side effect -> if explorer.exe stops responding, the battery gauge reappears upon restarting the process. In such a case, just go to Power Manager -> Options and uncheck the setting for the battery gauge to start with windows (if it is checked at all ). On "normal" reboot, the battery gauge shouldn´t be there. If you are sure that the explorer.exe hangs and the power manager are related to each other, you may be better off installing a different version of Lenovo Power Manager (and Power Management driver) (newer or older version). I have used XP, Vista, Win 7 (and all of them both in x86 and x64) and have never experienced explorer hangs due to Lenovo Power Manager, hence my guess that you have a bad version of it. BTW, do you use any registry cleaners?

Marin

Marin85 wrote:Yes, there has been always this side effect -> if explorer.exe stops responding, the battery gauge reappears upon restarting the process. In such a case, just go to Power Manager -> Options and uncheck the setting for the battery gauge to start with windows (if it is checked at all ). On "normal" reboot, the battery gauge shouldn´t be there. If you are sure that the explorer.exe hangs and the power manager are related to each other, you may be better off installing a different version of Lenovo Power Manager (and Power Management driver) (newer or older version). I have used XP, Vista, Win 7 (and all of them both in x86 and x64) and have never experienced explorer hangs due to Lenovo Power Manager, hence my guess that you have a bad version of it. BTW, do you use any registry cleaners?

Marin

I very much suspect the hangs are caused by the power manager gauge, but I can't be 100% sure. I am thinking of uninstalling it completely (since I rarely run on battery anyway) and see if I still keep getting the hangs.

I've been using the very latest version of all the Lenovo tools... I keep things pretty well updated.

I have "Revo Uninstaller" installed, which works pretty good and I've always heard things about. Do you suggest a particular one?

- Tim

Sorry, I´m not aware of any tweak in this specific case when explorer stops responding. But what I described, should work in any other case. BTW, exactly the opposite happens of the battery gauge is enabled. Upon explorer hand and consequent process restart, the battery gauge sometimes disappear and won´t appear until reboot.

Regarding the explorer hangs, I think you should look more in details as to what might be causing them.

Regarding registry cleaners, I was actually about to suggest not to use registry cleaners If you have problems uninstalling a particular program, just use windows installation cleanup utility from M$. It will remove the corresponding registrations, but you will have to manually remove any remaining folders/files. I sometimes use CCleaner but with great caution. I don´t let it "clean" the registry automatically because it often breaks something... I only use it to search for the problematic key(s) and if I think I found them, I clean it/them.

Cheers,

Marin

Marin85 wrote:Sorry, I´m not aware of any tweak in this specific case when explorer stops responding. But what I described, should work in any other case. BTW, exactly the opposite happens of the battery gauge is enabled. Upon explorer hand and consequent process restart, the battery gauge sometimes disappear and won´t appear until reboot.

Regarding the explorer hangs, I think you should look more in details as to what might be causing them.

Regarding registry cleaners, I was actually about to suggest not to use registry cleaners If you have problems uninstalling a particular program, just use windows installation cleanup utility from M$. It will remove the corresponding registrations, but you will have to manually remove any remaining folders/files. I sometimes use CCleaner but with great caution. I don´t let it "clean" the registry automatically because it often breaks something... I only use it to search for the problematic key(s) and if I think I found them, I clean it/them.

Cheers,

Marin

I'd actually heard that explorer.exe hangs *are* often caused by the Power Manager Gauge showing up. So we have conflicting info.

I almost never use registry cleaners - I've only used Revo to uninstall programs that had to be killed mid-install, and for which Windows won't allow ANYTHING to be done to it because it thinks the installer is still running. In general, I do all registry edits by hand.

Thanks for all your suggestions, in any case!

- Tim

tbessie wrote:I'd actually heard that explorer.exe hangs *are* often caused by the Power Manager Gauge showing up. So we have conflicting info.

It now occurred to me that I had misread your previous post... I didn´t know that the battery gauge is a prime suspect for those explorer hangs though.

Marin85 wrote:It now occurred to me that I had misread your previous post... I didn´t know that the battery gauge is a prime suspect for those explorer hangs though.

I've seen it mentioned here a few times. Of course, it may not be true.

- Tim

tbessie wrote:I've seen it mentioned here a few times. Of course, it may not be true.

After your first post, it remained somewhat inconclusive to me whether you have stated any correlation between the battery gauge and the explorer hangs. In your next post, when you were saying that you think there is a relation, I misread that you think there isn´t such relation. I hope my communication issues are now really cleared!

Now, since this particular version of Lenovo Power Manager is causing for you such issues, you may want to consider down/up-grading to another version. If you are lucky, it won´t exhibit the same problem.

Cheers,

Marin

EDIT: some non-sense...

I posted under a similar thread recently that I have the lastest version of Power Manager (1.51a) and have no problems with it.

My machine has few additions to vanilla XP except for Avira and Comodo Firewall. I use IE rather than Firefox.

Maybe it is worth considering what S/W might be causing conflicts with Power Manager?

tbessie wrote:Hi all...

I know that we all know the Power Manager has issues; I was wondering if anyone out there sees what I've been seeing... I turn the Power Manager Gauge *off*, and it stays off, mostly, through successive reboots.

Then, as if by magic, that setting gets reversed, and explorer.exe hangs on startup. I kill explorer.exe, run it again, and there is the Power Manager Gauge on the taskbar again!

Freaky! Anyone seeing this?

- Tim

Why not simply go back to v1.48 until Lenovo rolls out v1.52 in a few weeks with the fixes ..... I did and all was good again (no sense beating your head against a wall for now):

http://www.thinkpads.com/forum/viewtopi ... 18&t=73894