Can charging thresholds be set on new ThinkPads?

[yak]

Back when T410 was about to be released, I read somewhere that because they switched to the batteries from SL series, controlling of the charging thresholds would no longer be available.

I never saw any confirmation of that. Is that really the case?

How does this look for other series? Do X201 and X220 have this feature? What about T420?

I haven't used any of these newer ThinkPads but I know I use this feature a lot on my X200 and would hate to loose it when upgrading.

[dr_st]

T410 has an option to set custom charge thresholds. I use it all the time.

And unlike on the T60, they actually work too.

Disclaimer: the preceding rolleyes emoticon does not refer to this topic in any way, mainly it is a way for me to express my disappointment with Lenovo due to the inconsistent operation of charge thresholds on what is otherwise my favorite Thinkpad series, the T60.

[yak]

Thanks. That's good to hear/read.

And unlike on the T60, they actually work too.

What do you mean? What's wrong with T60 in that regard?

[dr_st]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=93294

[ThinkRob]

And unlike on the T60, they actually work too.

What do you mean? What's wrong with T60 in that regard?

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=93294

I'm pretty sure that's just a software issue. All of my T60-series machines have fully-functional hardware support for charging thresholds.

Back on topic, I can also confirm that the T410 supports charging thresholds as well.

[dr_st]

I'm pretty sure that's just a software issue. All of my T60-series machines have fully-functional hardware support for charging thresholds.

Do you frequently dock/undock your T60s? Which version of the Power Manager software do you use (if in Windows)? What do you use in Linux (if at all)? Which BIOS version?

I kind of became skeptical about the idea of software issue, when I saw that both under Windows and under Linux (tp_smapi) the thresholds were misbehaving.

[ThinkRob]

Do you frequently dock/undock your T60s? Which version of the Power Manager software do you use (if in Windows)? What do you use in Linux (if at all)? Which BIOS version?

I do dock/undock the T60 every day.

As far as software:

Kernel: based on 2.6.32-31, uses my own patchset which includes a backport of thinkpad-acpi-0.24-20100516
tp-smapi: latest from Debian stable, installed via DKMS
and nothing else (I use gnome-power-manger, but I don't think it comes into play for this issue)

I kind of became skeptical about the idea of software issue, when I saw that both under Windows and under Linux (tp_smapi) the thresholds were misbehaving.

What sort of misbehavior?

[dr_st]

Where it just ignores the upper threshold (I usually set it to 96%) and charges to 100%. Typically happens if I go between docked and undocked, plugged and unplugged but haven't found a consistent pattern to it yet.

[sarbin]

^^^
interesting...
i used to see some flakiness with power manager under xp, but all of my machines from the t60p and up are now running win7 ult or pro 64bit, with the newest lenovo power manager and power management driver. none are showing any issues complying with my threshold settings.

fwiw...

[ThinkRob]

Where it just ignores the upper threshold (I usually set it to 96%) and charges to 100%. Typically happens if I go between docked and undocked, plugged and unplugged but haven't found a consistent pattern to it yet.

That's really odd. I assume you're running Windows?

[dr_st]

Most of the time yes, but it happened to me at least once with tp_smapi on Fedora 14.

[ThinkRob]

Most of the time yes, but it happened to me at least once with tp_smapi on Fedora 14.

Now *that* is odd. I run tp_smapi on all of my ThinkPads and I've never seen that. I don't use Fedora though -- I've got Debian deployed on everything -- so I'm wondering if it might not be a kernel regression.

If you can come up with steps to reproduce it I'd like to try my hand at debugging the problem. Plus, if it's reproducible it should at least be reported to upstream.

[dr_st]

I'll try to look into it further when I have time.

[ThinkRob]

I'll try to look into it further when I have time.

Thanks. I appreciate it!