Power manager on Windows 8.1

[pgoelz]

Got a catch 22 here I think. I just upgraded my X61s from Win7 to Win8.1. The Win8 upgrade assistant had me uninstall several Lenovo utilities that were not compatible with Win8 but Power Manager was not one of them.

The upgrade went well although by the time I did all the updates and upgraded to Win8.1 and then did all THOSE updates I had chewed up the better part of a day.

The machine is running great..... faster than on Win7 and with a couple tweeks like AeroGlass and Update Notifier and Classic Shell, I am happy with it. But there is one issue.

Windows informed me at one point after I upgraded to Win8.1 that Power Manager was not compatible with Win8.1. That was a bit of a surprise because Power Manager seems to be running great. However, on Win8.1 it has an EXTREMELY annoying trait of putting up a dialog box that must be dismissed informing me that I don't have an OEM battery. WAY WORSE than the popup on Win7. So I figured I'd just uninstall it and use the Windows functions. WRONG. Although Power Manager seems to run OK, the Power Manager UNINSTALLER doesn't seem to be compatible with Win8.1. Uninstaller starts but then I get a message that it "cannot run on this system". Both Win7 and Win8.1 were / are 64bit OSes.

Anyone got any ideas how to uninstall Power Manager? I don't want to resort to brute force tactics like deleting files and going through the registry if I can avoid it. Windows is no longer reporting it is not compatible so I guess I could just leave it alone. But it (and the dialog) bug me.

Paul

[pgoelz]

Well, a couple days have passed, Power Manager (v6.64.1) seems to be running perfectly and Windows has not claimed that it is not compatible again. I am tempted to just leave it as is.

I have done some more reading and it seems that it is not supposed to be compatible with Windows 8.1. I see references to being able to install it by using compatibility settings for Windows 7 but like in my case, once it is installed it cannot be uninstalled because the uninstaller won't run.

I downloaded Revo Uninstaller Pro but stopped short of a forced uninstall. I have a full backup of the Win7 installation but I invested the better part of a day going from Win7 to Win8.1 and I'd hate to screw something up and have to do it all over again.

Any feedback? The machine seems to be running perfectly, power and battery settings are working, it sits near zero CPU when idle and can play 1080p Netflix videos at 50-70% cpu. So I don't think anything is wrong. It just worries me that Power manager is installed and can't be uninstalled. And of course the "non-OEM battery" dialog that has to be dismissed on each boot really bugs me.

Paul

[pgoelz]

Well, the point is moot for now.

Short version.... I went back to Win7

Long version.....

Because I was worried about subtle incompatibilities, I used Revo Uninstaller to force uninstall Power Manager. And THAT really screwed the pooch! The uninstall went fine, but after the next restart...... the system would no longer boot, complaining about an unavailable boot device. After some head scratching and research it looks like Power Manager was responsible for the AHCI driver for the hard drive. And when it was force uninstalled, it took the driver with it. That left the system unable to boot after the initial stages because the AHCI driver was either disabled or missing. Took me a while to figure it out because while it complained about an unavailable boot device, it clearly was able to read the hard drive. I had to switch to compatibility mode in BIOS to get it to boot again. Some research revealed how to get the AHCI driver back, but after it once again was able to boot correctly, it complained about two PREVIOUSLY UNINSTALLED programs not being able to start. Not sure where that came from.

At that point I threw in the towel and restored my Win7 image and all is back to normal. If I ever do this again, I will uninstall Power Manager first before I upgrade to Win8..... or just do a clean install instead of an upgrade. I'll also probably put in an SSD, which would I imagine have cut hours from the upgrade process

In the end, Win8 didn't really give me anything I valued. I despise the Metro look, so I installed Classic Shell, AeroGlass and Windows Update Notifier. That got me back to the Win7 look and feel. Beyond that, I didn't see much improvement. I had fun (most of the time) but the little issues eventually outweighed the urge to stick with something new.

So never mind, folks. All's well that ends well.

Paul

[pgoelz]

In case anyone else is following this....

I put an SSD in (still Win7) and liked the performance so much I decided to go back to Win8.1... the install was much faster with the SSD than is was with the spinny drive. But this time I did a clean install, with no leftover Lenovo drivers. Worked fine.

But in a fit of masochism, I decided to install Power Manager using the Windows 7 compatibility settings. Worked great, actually. And here's the interesting bit.... the annoying "Non-OEM battery" warning dialog on boot is GONE.

And I don't think it is my imagination.... the machine runs cooler than it did using Windows power settings. That might be because the fan seems to run a bit faster under Power manager than it did under windows alone.

Only remaining problem (and one I was trying to solve by installing power manager) is that under Win8.1, I can't toggle bluetooth on and off.... it is permanently on.

Haven't tried an uninstall yet.... that might still be an issue. But Windows isn't complaining this time around, so hopefully I don't have to.

The end

Paul