T42, slower performance on battery power?

[Twiggy]

Alright,

So my recently acquired T42's battery still has 90% capacity, and still lasts a long time. I noticed that when running on battery performance in games is much slower as there is a noticeable drop in frame rate, when compared to running on AC power.

Of course I expected this to be because of some sort of power saving mode. I did recently go into the BIOS Setup and under the "Conifg" menu, went to the "Power" sub menu and set it to "Maximum Performance" for both AC and Battery, and I also did the same under Intel Speed Step, so as far as I know that should have fixed the issue. However I still notice the same thing, so it is clearly still present.

Is there something else I need to do which I may be missing, or what else could it be?

[ajkula66]

Is there something else I need to do which I may be missing, or what else could it be?

If you have the Power Manager installed you'll need to adjust the settings there accordingly as well.

[Twiggy]

Thanks,

I checked but it doesn't seem I have anything like that installed, just the regular "power options" in the XP control panel, but there's no options to do with performance there from the looks of it.

[Twiggy]

So I tried some more things,

I removed the lenovo power management driver and then tried playing a game, but the same thing happens, much higher frame rate / performance when plugged in, and also the screen is a little brighter, on batter there is a lower frame rate, and slightly dimmer screen.

However I have done everything I know to get it to work at full capacity even on battery, I downloaded the driver again from lenovo's website and installed it, but the same thing is still happening.

A friend of mine thinks maybe the GPU uses too much power and the battery can't provide enough for it to work at full speed?

Is there anything else I am missing?

I cannot seem to find where to change the settings for the lenovo power management though, it just shows up in "add/remove" programs and gives me the option to remove it, but it's not in any program folder or menu, is it just a driver, or a program with settings to change?

The "power options" in the control panel doesn't seem to have anything in it to do with performance, but more so when to stand by, hibernate, turn the screen and hard disks off, etc.

Any other T42 owners able to weigh in on this?

UPDATE:

So I found and downloaded the Battery MaxiMiser Wizard and installed it.

When I go to "Battery Health" it comes up in green and says "The battery is in good condition"

Full Charge Capacity 46.77Wh
Design Capacity 47.52Wh
Cycle Count 16

I also set the scheme for maximum performance, but the same thing still happens, again.

So it seems the battery is still in quite good condition and has little degradation, so I don't think the battery is the issue, but I am not sure, waiting on someone more knowledgeable or experienced.

[dr_st]

It's possible you need to change some power management settings in the GPU driver. Do you have ATI Catalyst Control Center installed? If so, check there.

[Twiggy]

Not Catalyst Control Centre no, but when I go to "Add/Remove Programs", "ATI Control Panel" is in there, and so is "ATI Display Driver", etc.

Thanks to this forums driver archive, I have found the proper drivers to download, would it be worth a shot to uninstall what is currently installed and install the drivers from the archive?

UPDATE:

I decided to do it, however it installed the exact same things, however then I went to "Advanced" under "Settings" in the system properties, and it showed me the all the ATI stuff, and there was a tab called "Powerplay" it said it was running in high performance mode when the AC was in, and after I disconnected it, but I decided to disable Powerplay entirely, and that did the job, there is no more performance difference between AC and battery, except for the screen being brighter on AC.

issue resolved then.