Thinkpads Forum

On the T61, there's a little green light next the DVD drive. I noticed that even when the laptop is in the sleep mode, that light is still on. I suspect that means the DVD drive is still receiving power (since I often found that when I wake from sleep mode, my battery is drained by a lot). Is there a way to adjust the settings so that the DVD drive doesn't receive power ( and the green light is off) when in sleep mode???

You can always "eject" the dvd drive via software (no need to remove it physically, it will show up as a removable drive in windows) before putting the laptop to standby.

Hmm... that's theoretically possible but, it's a manual process (was hoping for an automatic one). Also, when i awake from sleep mode, wouldn't I need to to physically pull out the drive and reinsert it to get the OS to recognize the drive again???

The green light isn't the DVD power light...that's the Ultrabay in-use indicator light. It lights up to tell the user not to jack with the Ultrabay until whatever is in the Ultrabay is allowed to be removed with the system's blessing.

Anything (i.e. an optical drive, HDD adapter, 2nd battery, parallel/serial adapter) that's plugged into the Ultrabay and recognized by the system will cause the green light to do it's thing whilst the system sleeps.

still weird tho how your system consumes so much power while sleeping. What's "so much"? I'm just wondering if you mean like 3% over 8hrs or more like 20%. If it's higher than that then yeah there's a problem but it's not the DVD using up that much power it's either the system isn't sleeping or waking up from sleep or something else.