Cisco EnergyWise in Power Manager 3.52: Do Not Want

[gsl]

So my T400 has been running a little toastier than usual on the GPU and CPU over the past week--I'm thinking it may have something to do with a mysterious graphics driver update that came over System Updates a few days ago--and was looking through Process Hacker to see if any applications or processes had maybe ran away with some CPU time and caused the heat increase. I didn't find anything, but I did notice a new pwmewsvc.exe listed and identified as the "Cisco Energywise Enabler." I generally run a pretty tight ship and am pretty familiar with most of the processes and applications running on my system, so this was a bit concerning. I did a bit of searching and turned up the following post at Lenovo:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-pri ... a-p/439107

So let me get this straight: Cisco Energywise is a utility that lets a company's IT department monitor power consumption for all company Thinkpads with Power Manager 3.52 or higher over the network, and shutdown, hibernate, or sleep individual machines as needed. Great. I can't imagine a company where such fine control over laptop power use is essential either to their image or power bill, but whatever. But am I correct in understanding that if you happen to be a non-corporate Thinkpad owner, you're just stuck with this program running in the background anyway, broadcasting data over whatever network you happen to be connected to unless you manually configure your firewall or other program to block this data?

Am I missing something, or is this a huge presumption on Lenovo's part by not allowing a user to configure this program (or keep it from being installed entirely)? Is there any reason why I shouldn't run screaming back to 3.48? I love my Thinkpads, but in this instance I have the horrible feeling that the manufacturer is making decisions over how my system should behave without giving me any say in the matter--which is generally why I've steered clear of brands like Apple. I really hope I'm just misinterpreting this in some manner.

[mariol90]

But am I correct in understanding that if you happen to be a non-corporate Thinkpad owner, you're just stuck with this program running in the background anyway, broadcasting data over whatever network you happen to be connected to unless you manually configure your firewall or other program to block this data?

That's what it sounds like to me. I never noticed it before, but I did disable it, it's in Services (just change it from automatic -> disabled).

This doesn't really help with the whole "manufacturer is making decisions over how my system should behave without giving me any say in the matter" part, but it at least makes it so you don't have to downgrade your power manager.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Meh. You can disable it or nuke the process and executables entirely. Shouldn't make much of a difference (unless you actually use those features).

[gsl]

Yeah, I discovered that the program was loading as a service and have disabled it with no ill effects. I also reverted to 3.48 and noticed the program unfortunately continues to run. I'm still not happy about the situation, but at least I have a bit more control over it than I first anticipated.

Now to figure out if these Power Manager changes have anything to do with my GPU running about 5 degrees warmer than normal for the past week or so...