Thinkpads Forum

When I had WinXP on X60s and hibernated my computer, It was just the same as if I shut it down. That means battery power wasn't needed to keep it hibernated. However, with Vista, when I hibernate, my computer eats battery life... X61 T in hibernation ate 3% of my battery in just 1 hour (in hibernate mode).

Is this normal?!

jamess wrote:When I had WinXP on X60s and hibernated my computer, It was just the same as if I shut it down. That means battery power wasn't needed to keep it hibernated. However, with Vista, when I hibernate, my computer eats battery life... X61 T in hibernation ate 3% of my battery in just 1 hour (in hibernate mode).

Is this normal?!

I've never made the experience that hibernate-mode drains power on my X60T, but standby-mode drains a lot of it. When you have hibernate it, are all led's off? Don't forget that the hibernating-process itself pulls heavily on the battery cause of the harddisk access while storing the disk-image, and the wake-up is also a battery-eater, so if you close the notebook with 30% you can't expect there are 30% after starting up again.

I've set my power manager to start charging when below 90%. This is the scenario I tested that hibernation really does drain my batteries.

1) 100% full battery connected to AC charger
2) Fn+F12 --> going into hibernate mode
3) all LEDs off, disks stop spinning
4) unplug power cord
5) ==== an hour wait or so =====
6) plug in AC
7) power on the laptop
voila, 97% battery, that means 3% gone !!!?

So yes, all LEDs are off, of course. It definitely is in hibernate mode...

It may be normal - depending on how fast your computer goes through the battery normal and how long the hibernation process takes. Let's say 1min=1% of battery (not so far fetched, if the CPU/HD is in full-crunch mode). If the wakeup from hibernation takes around 3 minutes (a bit extreme, but possible), there is nothing strange in losing 3% of battery. Also, there is a small charge loss on a fully charged battery even when it's unplugged.

Granted, 3% is way more than I'd expect, but it is still reasonable. Test it for a longer period of time and see what happens.

You might have understood me wrong. The power cord is connected all the way until all LEDs turn off. That means going into hibernation should draw 0 power from the battery. When all leds are off, I disconnect. And when I connect the AC power back, only then do I press the power button.

However, I will try repeating the process tonight and will leave the computer hibernated over night.

From my experience on X60s and WinXP, once the PC hibernated, there was absolutely zero power drain,

You could try the experiment with removed battery. If you get the same result, the battery drains itself somehow, otherwise your thinkpad is responsible for it.

Good idea, will try that too. But won't that destroy my bios settings or something due to internal battery power "loss".

jamess wrote:Good idea, will try that too. But won't that destroy my bios settings or something due to internal battery power "loss".

Honestly, I'am not really shure about the draining of the internal battery, but when a notebook is shipped, the main-battery is removed also, so it shouldnt harm your bios setting, when you remove the battery for a day or so.

p.s.: but you should avoid to let you mains-battery lay around in an empty (or nearly empty) condition for a reasonable amount of time, cause it could make the battery unusable!

Yes, you are right about that. I guess it has enough capacity for a few days at least.

Cheers

I thought I heard that Vista changed the "hibernation" mode around a little bit.

IIRC, it still saves the data to the hard drive for situations when all power to the computer is removed (AC cable unplugged from the desktop, etc), but also keeps the data in memory as it would in standby-to-RAM for a short period of time (three hours?) for faster wake-up if desired.

qviri wrote:I thought I heard that Vista changed the "hibernation" mode around a little bit.

IIRC, it still saves the data to the hard drive for situations when all power to the computer is removed (AC cable unplugged from the desktop, etc), but also keeps the data in memory as it would in standby-to-RAM for a short period of time (three hours?) for faster wake-up if desired.

Thats new to me - as far as I know it saves data to disk too, when you go into standby in order to restore it in the case of power-loss, like it is realized in mac-os10. But in difference to mac-os it doesn't seem to work, cause when I swap my batterys while in standby, I have to start from scratch. Perhaps some wrong setting in my vista - do not know.

As far as I know:

Stand-by puts session into memory and is supposed to drain the batteries but resumes quickly

Hibernation puts session onto HDD and shouldn't drain the batteries, however, it takes a bit to resume....

Cheers

It is called Hybrid Sleep, and I had it turned off when I recieved my x60t.

Just FYI, a similar topic is also being discussed in the T2x conference:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=47929

The differences are that it's with non-Vista OS (XP in my case) and a T23. Rick the Green has measured the battery drain of a system placed into hibernate and saw 4.5ma. Removing the battery and putting it back into the hibernating system reduces the drain to microamps.

So, if you are concerned about the battery being drained while in hibernate, I would suggest that after the system has been shut down, wait a few seconds, then remove the battery for a couple of seconds and re-install. See if that helps.

zaimek wrote:It is called Hybrid Sleep, and I had it turned off when I recieved my x60t.

How/where can I completely "disable" this hybrid sleep, so that I have the normal (xp style) hibernation, which won't drain my batteries but on the other hand would enable me to resume work faster than from "fresh start".

you probably have to do a drive cleanup and then check to remove your hybernation file. This will free up some disk space also. With Vista i sleep or shut down, no hibernate at all.

jamess wrote:Good idea, will try that too. But won't that destroy my bios settings or something due to internal battery power "loss".

Where did you get that idea?

I've been running without battery most of the time, and nothing bad has happened.

Well check out this link

OK - now I'm having this problem.

When I hibernate - I lose about 6-10WH overnight. Does not happen on shutdown. Tried 2 batteries - so I think it must be the machine. Yes I'm sure I'm hibernating.

I am running an X61s with XP pro.

Any ideas?

OK - IBM tech support says that a 4-cell battery dropping form 100% to 60% overnight in hibernate is normal.

Does anyone else think this is normal?

awolfe63 wrote:OK - IBM tech support says that a 4-cell battery dropping form 100% to 60% overnight in hibernate is normal.

Absolute nonsense. It will stay at 100%.

In Vista 100->85 is my case with Hibernation; in win XP power drain over very long period of time it was 0%.

Do you mean it drops to 0% or that it does not drop at all?

awolfe63, I have received your pm and will get back to you once I have some results.

I friend has a X61t. He encountered the same problem as OP. He found out on some forum saying it's due to the driver of network card, which I doubt it. He downloaded a different driver for network card and battery does not drain out that quick anymore in hibernation mode.

awolfe63 wrote:Do you mean it drops to 0% or that it does not drop at all?

With WinXP it should NOT drop at all. At least it didn't with my X60s WinXP OS.

You might have a bad/dying battery. I had a battery that failed that would do that. I used it, put in hibernate at 60%, turn it on and it would say 5% or it wouldn't turn on at all. Then when I tried to reset the battery, it died.

After it died, this utility:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 67765.html

confirmed the failure and I got a free replacement battery (though it was older than a year).

I'm not sure if the utility will identify a failure prior to battery death.

You could try a reset and see if that corrects or kills the battery.

smvp6459 wrote:You might have a bad/dying battery. I had a battery that failed that would do that. I used it, put in hibernate at 60%, turn it on and it would say 5% or it wouldn't turn on at all. Then when I tried to reset the battery, it died.

After it died, this utility:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 67765.html

confirmed the failure and I got a free replacement battery (though it was older than a year).

I'm not sure if the utility will identify a failure prior to battery death.

You could try a reset and see if that corrects or kills the battery.

I doubt it. As I said, I tried 2 new batteries.

The network problem may be it. The ethernet network sometimes fails to come back up after hibernate as well.

awolfe63 wrote:OK - now I'm having this problem.

When I hibernate - I lose about 6-10WH overnight. Does not happen on shutdown. Tried 2 batteries - so I think it must be the machine. Yes I'm sure I'm hibernating.

I am running an X61s with XP pro.

Any ideas?

I have the same experience on my X61s running Vista: a discharge of 2% of my 4-cell battery per hour (roughly 0.6 Wh/h) as measured over a whole weekend in hybernation. Had the same problem on my A31 and briefly removing the battery is the workaround I used since 2002.

Originally, I thought it may be related to the wake-on-LAN feature, but after disabling it in both the BIOS and the Device Manager the discharge remains the same. It does not occur in shutdown (or after briefly removing the battery, as already said). Thus, I believe it is not a feature (as claimed by the hotline), but a bug.

Summing up this thread to this point: this problem does not seem to be related to new features of Vista (machines running XP are affected). Neither does it seem to be the feature of a smart battery (which rather discharges slowly than get damaged; in that case, the discharge should also occur after a proper shutdown).

Given that I had the same problem with another TP five years ago, it seems to be some IBM/Lenovo policy not to worry about this problem. The Level2 folks at IBM actually think that 2% is a good performance figure?!

As long as there is no better solution, I briefly disconnect the battery after all LEDs are off.