Thinkpads Forum

For some reason the latest BIOS available for download is now 1.10 instead of 1.11

gosh, it must be something wrong with the 1.11 Version which i have already upgraded

The 1.11 bios (which I also installed) is 7buj09us = 7BET51WW

I just did a Google search for 7buj09us, which returns a Lenovo site
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-63144

The cached version of the Lenovo site takes me to 1.11. The current version of the site goes to version 1.10.

Uh, oh... Don't know if I should go back to 1.10. The stated fix in 1.11 compared to 1.10 is "(New). Power management enhancement". I've not noticed a substantial decrease in wattage on battery, or a decrease in palm rest temperature.

Whatever BIOS version you are at, I would stay there until the next version comes out - that is unless you are having specific problems that a BIOS version change may fix.

Haven't noted any problems with 1.11 here...except for the slight crackling which seems to be a trade off against the much much improved power consumption. I don't think I want to use a BIOS that doesn't give me the 8 hour battery life this notebook is capable of.

Can't seem to find 1.11 anywhere. If someone that has already downloaded it could upload it somewhere that would be great.

hrdc69

I saved the 1.11 file and would be happy to email it to you but I'm afraid IP issues might prevent me from doing so. Frankly, I'd wait for an update if I were you even though 1.11 has not caused any hiccups on my x60s. Haven't experienced the cracking sounds described above either.

Have to admit, the lenovo website has a plethora of bad links. My x60s out of the box couldn't connect to the ThinkVantage "get web support" link because of a missing page error.

rkuo wrote:Haven't noted any problems with 1.11 here...except for the slight crackling which seems to be a trade off against the much much improved power consumption. I don't think I want to use a BIOS that doesn't give me the 8 hour battery life this notebook is capable of.

Can you give us more details about the settings that give the improved power consumption?

With 1.11 on my X60s I am drawing about 13-16 W. 4:00-4:40 predicted battery life. Wireless is 25% transmit power with highest power saving.
Power manager at "Maximize battery life" with display = 4 bars
Firefox and multiple IE7 windows and 4 Adobe windows open. Zone Alarm's vsmon.exe running in background, as is Symantec Client Antivirus. Average CPU usage ~ 20%

ozmann wrote: Can you give us more details about the settings that give the improved power consumption?

With 1.11 on my X60s I am drawing about 13-16 W. 4:00-4:40 predicted battery life. Wireless is 25% transmit power with highest power saving.
Power manager at "Maximize battery life" with display = 4 bars
Firefox and multiple IE7 windows and 4 Adobe windows open. Zone Alarm's vsmon.exe running in background, as is Symantec Client Antivirus. Average CPU usage ~ 20%

You're drawing a lot more power than me....

With everything turned on, ie:
Wireless LAN (intel) switched on (set to maximum transmission power, power saving mode set to "medium");
Bluetooth on;
Screen backlight set to maximum;
Thinklight on;
Power manager set for CPU speed to "lowest", fan control to "balance all parameters".
I get about 9.5W to 10.5W idling.

With the optional stuff turned off:
Wireless LAN off;
Bluetooth off;
Thinklight off;
Screen backlight set to minimum;
everything else the same.
I get about 6.5 to 7.5W idling.

Right now, typing this message in firefox, screen at 3 bars brightness, wireless lan on, thinklight off, I'm seeing about 8.5W to 9.5W. (I think all the animated emoticons on the left side on this forum are partly to blame for the higher power drain).

I'm using BIOS 1.11 but I don't think it made very much difference compared to 1.10.

Other power-related settings you can check into:

• Screen refresh rate (I have 50Hz, but 40Hz and 60Hz are available)
• "Intel(R) Display Power Saving Technology" (Press the "power settings" button on the "display settings" tab under the "graphics properties" applet) I have it set halfway between "quality" and "savings"
• Make sure "CPU" and "PCI Bus" are both set to "automatic" in the "advanced" settings of power manager.
• Switch off in BIOS setup devices you don't use (I turned off the modem, serial port, parallel port)
• In BIOS setup, set display brightness to "normal" not "high". (Can also do this under "LCD" in the "Thinkpad Configuration" windows program).
• Are you using any Bluetooth devices?
• Do you ever use USB devices? There's a known problem with windows XP with USB devices waking it up too much for it to let the processor sleep. This can happen even after you have unplugged the USB device. There's a MS hotfix that partially solves the problem in some but not all circumstances:
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918005
• I disabled the "1394 network connection" in the control panel. Don't know if it helped at all.
• I also disabled "USB BIOS support" in the BIOS because I know on certain laptops that can cause increased power usage, though I'm not sure if it makes a difference on this X60s.
• Depending on how you connect to the wireless network, that might change things. I'm just using WEP encryption, but WPA and WPA2 are more resource-intensive.

Having said all of those things, I think what's actually causing your higher power drain, is the 20% CPU usage you've got. With that much usage, your CPU will be drawing a lot of that power. I'd go through and see which things are using CPU, that you think you can do without. A good tool for this is process explorer from http://www.sysinternals.com . If you set it to "Show Fractional CPU" you can see things that are using less than a percent of the CPU. And also, if you add the "Context Switch Delta" column you can see processes that aren't actually using any CPU time, but which are nevertheless forcing the CPU to wake up many times per second (google talk was a big culprit for me, so I removed it and went back to the old gmail notifier, since I don't actually use the talk feature anyway. I've heard skype has similar problems. Cygwin/X isn't too good on this front, either).

My machine has a 7200RPM drive and the maximum 2GB of RAM, which should if anything be more power hungry, so I don't think my lower power draw can be explained by that side of things.

Good luck getting your power draw reduced. You should be able double your battery life at least. Please report back if anything helps.

lev wrote:
Wireless LAN (intel) switched on (set to maximum transmission power, power saving mode set to "medium");

Mine is set on Maximum. Power transmission of 12.5%.

It reduced the right palm heat by 3 degrees (56 C to 53 C).

I might try the lowest setting later.

lev,

Thanks for an enormously helpful post. I'm trying your suggestions. Process Explorer is great.

My biggest power drain was an instance of IE7 with 6 tabs, both in CPU usage and context switching. For institutional reasons I may be stuck with Zone Alarm and Symantec; they both munch CPU cycles. Still, you've helped me get my power drain down to 9-10 W with wireless and FF, Adobe and 1 IE7 window. I'm chasing down multiple other processes now. I'll let you know.

Allan

ozmann wrote:lev,

Thanks for an enormously helpful post. I'm trying your suggestions. Process Explorer is great.

Process explorer is extremely useful for many things. Sysinternals file monitor and registry monitor have helped me solve tricky problems before, also.

My biggest power drain was an instance of IE7 with 6 tabs, both in CPU usage and context switching. For institutional reasons I may be stuck with Zone Alarm and Symantec; they both munch CPU cycles. Still, you've helped me get my power drain down to 9-10 W with wireless and FF, Adobe and 1 IE7 window. I'm chasing down multiple other processes now. I'll let you know.

It's great you managed to shave off such a big fraction of the power usage. As far as symantec goes, you said in a different thread that you were using the corporate edition AV, which is what I use, and I don't see it being especially CPU hungry, except when there are actually new files for it to be scanning. (I'm talking about the situation after I got rid of ThinkVantage Away Manager, which was conflicting terribly with symantec and drawing lots of power, as you also noticed). Of course there are a whole lot of configuration options for symantec AV, so maybe that's why yours is more CPU hungry. Or maybe something else on your system is making a lot of files, which symantec feels compelled to scan. If that's the case, you can find out what those files are you could exclude them from symantec's scanner, or, even better, remove the process that's making those files in the first place.

Anyway, seems like you're most of the way there in getting the maximum battery life out of your machine.

Screen refresh rate (I have 50Hz, but 40Hz and 60Hz are available)

Does refresh rate set on 60 decrease battery life? If yes, is it substantial?!?!

I am running 1.11 and my x60 runs much cooler and the battery lasts longer.

jamess wrote:

Screen refresh rate (I have 50Hz, but 40Hz and 60Hz are available)

Does refresh rate set on 60 decrease battery life? If yes, is it substantial?!?!

I am running 1.11 and my x60 runs much cooler and the battery lasts longer.

Yes, a higher refresh rate will decrease battery life. On my machine the difference between 40Hz and 50Hz is 0.1 to 0.2W. Since I find that 40Hz is noticably lower quality, I generally prefer to use 50Hz and trade with the marginally lower battery life against the better display (same reason I don't set "Intel(R) Display Power Saving Technology" all the way to maximum savings, and I usually don't have the screen brightness at zero). However, ThinkVantage Presentation Manager sometimes likes to override me and set the refresh rate back to 40Hz for reasons best known to itself.

As for the difference in power between 50Hz and 60Hz, I'm a bit confused now. I'm sure I used to have 60Hz as an option but right now I can't find it, neither in the regular windows advanced display properties monitor tab, nor in the intel applet. The only way I can activate 60Hz refresh rate at this point is by setting the laptop to display on both LCD and external VGA (even though I don't have an external monitor). If I do that, then I can choose 60Hz, and the power draw is some 3W higher(!)

... However I think that this significant extra power draw is mostly due to having the external VGA port active, as opposed to the 60Hz itself. It's strange -- I don't recall reading anywhere in the instructions or online help that switching on the external VGA display would add 50% to your power usage. You'd think that would get mentionned somewhere.... is anyone else seeing this behaviour, or is it something funky with my setup? ThinkWiki suggests that 0.5W is more typical:
http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce ... n#Graphics

lev wrote:I find that 40Hz is noticably lower quality

In what way(s) do you notice? I just tried setting 40Hz and can't tell the difference.

I don't know about others, but the flickering makes me feel ill.

jon wrote:

lev wrote:I find that 40Hz is noticably lower quality

In what way(s) do you notice? I just tried setting 40Hz and can't tell the difference.

It's most noticable (to me) with horizontal scrolling.
For example the text scroller here:
http://www.appletcollection.com/horizon ... -text.html

Lev

Well this 1.11 bios was probably pulled becaue it leaves issues unhandled. Example. my laptop does not continue chargin the battery after returning from standby or hibernation. I am running 1.11 and this problem exists. I think im going to downgrade to 1.10.

At least ill know the difference between the two.

Someone please PM me if you have 1.11 and ill give you my email.

Thanks.

Edit: Can get it here. Click on the blue ???
http://download.it168.com/xinhua/files/ ... erID=88111

Saml01 wrote:Well this 1.11 bios was probably pulled becaue it leaves issues unhandled. Example. my laptop does not continue chargin the battery after returning from standby or hibernation.

I have 1.11 and I cannot reproduce that problem. But indeed it's disconcerting to be running 1.11 and have seen it withdrawn, as no doubt there's a good reason.

SkiBunny wrote:

Saml01 wrote:Well this 1.11 bios was probably pulled becaue it leaves issues unhandled. Example. my laptop does not continue chargin the battery after returning from standby or hibernation.

I have 1.11 and I cannot reproduce that problem. But indeed it's disconcerting to be running 1.11 and have seen it withdrawn, as no doubt there's a good reason.

Weird. Heres an off topic question for you.

When your laptop is done charging does your battery indicator light shut off? mine stays on. Even after unplugging and plugging the adapter back in it would go off for 5 seconds and then return. Battery is charged 100% according to the battery meter.

Saml01 wrote:When your laptop is done charging does your battery indicator light shut off?

Nope.

Same for my T-series (which of course has a different bios than the 1.11 on my X60).

For both machines, they're not charging the batt.

Saml01 wrote:When your laptop is done charging does your battery indicator light shut off?

On my systems the battery indicator changes color and blinking vs continuous state depending on the amount of charge, but it's on when the battery is in the computer.

Saml01 wrote:Well this 1.11 bios was probably pulled becaue it leaves issues unhandled. Example. my laptop does not continue chargin the battery after returning from standby or hibernation. I am running 1.11 and this problem exists. I think im going to downgrade to 1.10.

At least ill know the difference between the two.

Someone please PM me if you have 1.11 and ill give you my email.

I installed 1.11, but then Power manager refused to work and I had to reinstall factory system. I cannot claim it was due to 1.11, but might well be.

Downgraded to 1.10. Now wattage is 6.3-7.5 W on battery, right palmrest temperature and noise are minimal and battery life reports as over 9-10 hours at full charge. I think I will stick with 1.10 for now until better options. As the saying goes, "The best is the enemy of the good".