Battery draining in standby; bottom of laptop is warm

[imekul]

I have a T42p running XP Pro SP3. I have noticed for some time now that the battery drains severely while in standby mode.

I know some degree of battery drainage is normal in standby, as the computer draws a little bit of power to keep the RAM active, but this gets pretty extreme. I might lose 10% in a single hour.

I have tried two different batteries, and the laptop behaves the same with either of them. Additionally, I have tried doing a diagnostic startup through msconfig, and then going into standby. Same behavior, though.

If I turn the computer off or go into hibernate, the draining problem stops. Also, what's interesting is that oftentimes, I'll have put my laptop into standby at the end of the night, and in the morning the bottom of the laptop will be warm, and the battery will have drained quite a bit.

Any ideas? This is really puzzling! And it's frustrating, because I love the convenience of standby over hibernate, but the battery draining is really bothersome!

[sjthinkpader]

During standby, the RAM goes into self refresh mode. May be your RAM is not working correctly. Try a different set of RAM.

[basketb]

Make sure "Wake-on-Lan" is disabled (if enabled this might be responsible for your computer waking up briefly and going back to sleep and thus draining the battery).

[Johan]

Make sure "Wake-on-Lan" is disabled (if enabled this might be responsible for your computer waking up briefly and going back to sleep and thus draining the battery).

... it's under Config --> Network in the BIOS as also seen in the BIOS simulator - ThinkPad T42/p with fingerprint reader. Does altering this setting this solve the problem?

Johan

[imekul]

Thanks. I forgot to mention that I had already disabled Wake On Lan.

I noticed that the warm spot is right under the touch pad. Maybe I'll try swapping out the wireless card. If that doesn't work, I'll try different RAM.

Thanks for the ideas.