XP standby eating up a LOT of battery

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holdrege · #1 Post by **holdrege** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:35 am

I've never noticed much battery drain when I leave my previous Thinkpads in standby mode. But the X300 drains very fast in standby mode. I've checked around in power management but I don't see anything related to standby that would cause this?

Has anyone else seen this problem?

SHoTTa35 · #2 Post by **SHoTTa35** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 3:20 am

well what's alot? got some percentages? Put it to sleep at 100% and then you wake up 8hrs later and it's down to 50% or what?

Eitherway, check to make sure your system is actally sleeping as well as that it stays sleeping. If it wakes up in the middle of the night to download stuff or scan or whatever some program might have it doing then that could be the cause of the power drain.

holdrege · #3 Post by **holdrege** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:09 am

OK, I just took a short flight and after about three hours or so of standby just now, I'm down to 82%. That never happened with my X60s. And yes, the little crescent moon is lit so I'm pretty sure it is in standby mode.

#4 Post by **ryengineer** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:00 am

You should be putting your thinkpad to hibernation instead of sleep mode that consumes significant amount of power. You should also disable Wake-on-Lan both from Device Manage and the BIOS of X300.

sjthinkpader · #5 Post by **sjthinkpader** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:03 am

Big part of standby power use is in the DRAM refresh. The more DRAM you have the more power use. Your new computer likely has much more RAM in it.

holdrege · #6 Post by **holdrege** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:54 am

Obviously Hibernation mode works, but it takes longer than standby. And like I said, standby doesn't suck battery on my X60s.

I don't think wake on lan is an issue since the PC isn't plugged in to the ethernet.

As for DRAM, I have 2GB on both the X60s and the X300.

It's gotta be something else.

qviri · #7 Post by **qviri** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:23 pm

holdrege wrote:As for DRAM, I have 2GB on both the X60s and the X300.

It's gotta be something else.

Just making sure: same OS?

pianowizard · #8 Post by **pianowizard** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 12:48 pm

holdrege wrote:As for DRAM, I have 2GB on both the X60s and the X300.

Then the difference might be due to the X300 having an optical drive. Try standing by with the drive removed.

Another thing. Does this X300 use a 3-cell battery whereas the X60s uses an extended battery? If that's the case, even if both units lose the same amount of charge over 3 hours (e.g. 5 Wh), as a percentage, the X300 would appear to lose more.

#9 Post by **gator** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 1:03 pm

pianowizard wrote: Another thing. Does this X300 use a 3-cell battery whereas the X60s uses an extended battery? If that's the case, even if both units lose the same amount of charge over 3 hours (e.g. 5 Wh), as a percentage, the X300 would appear to lose more.

I was just about to post this ... this probably is what is happening.

holdrege · #10 Post by **holdrege** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:23 pm

Yes both OS's are XP Pro.

I'm not sure how the optical drive would use power when the notebook is in standby?

I didn't have the larger X60s battery. I had the small one. If the small X300 battery isn't as good as the small X60s battery then I guess that would suck.

Interestingly, I see from poking into the power manager details that this battery is made by Sony!

manufacturer date: 2008-02-14
FRU part number: 42T4518
Design capacity: 27.33 Wh

and lots more details if anyone is interested.

pianowizard · #11 Post by **pianowizard** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:41 pm

holdrege wrote:I'm not sure how the optical drive would use power when the notebook is in standby?

When my R50p is on standby, the LED for the optical drive is lit, so I think the drive does draw some power. You should try removing the optical drive from your X300 and see if that helps.

Greg Gebhardt · #12 Post by **Greg Gebhardt** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:45 pm

How much did it loose over how much time. I can leave my T61p in sleep mode for hours, may 3-4 hours and it will only loose 1 or 2%. Overnight can be 15% but no more!

This is what sleep is for and I prefer over Hibernation

qviri · #13 Post by **qviri** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 6:07 pm

Greg Gebhardt wrote:How much did it loose over how much time. I can leave my T61p in sleep mode for hours, may 3-4 hours and it will only loose 1 or 2%.

He said it was 82% after three hours of standby. Assuming it was at 100% before standby, on a 27.33 Wh battery this means standby draws around 1.6 W which does seem a bit high.

phazlehurst · #14 Post by **phazlehurst** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 11:14 am

I'm having the same problem... the X300 stinks on battery life in Standby... stinks REALLLLY BADLY.

See my post over here: http://forum.lenovo.com/lnv/board/messa ... ad.id=1008

tx

P

dualboot · #15 Post by **dualboot** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 11:31 am

Same here. Overnight standby (8-10hrs) drops the battery to less than 60%. My solution was to get an extra AC adapter ($40) for home and to simply shut down. I haven't tried hibernation since boot times are 40s or less.

Lenovo had to compromise somewhere. They chose a fully functional machine with all the ports and even an optical drive, but they took the hit on the battery. The MBA compromised elsewhere...

Zender · #16 Post by **Zender** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 11:39 am

Just a thought: disable always-on USB ports, if this fuction is present?

phazlehurst · #17 Post by **phazlehurst** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 3:19 pm

Yup, disabled that. And disabled the wake on lan stuff.

No dice...

still battery life stinks. My guess is that it's one of two things: the old bug from the x60 not forward ported to this bios; or SSDs suck in standby.

Nothing else makes sense.

P

akao · #18 Post by **akao** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 4:57 pm

It shouldn't be the SSD, since the drive is suppose to be completely shut-off in standby.

gandini · #19 Post by **gandini** » Thu May 01, 2008 2:07 pm

I am finding standby battery drain to be a real problem too. I have the 3 cell bay battery and the 6 cell extended battery and when full I can get 10hrs out of the X300. I clearly don't have optical drive drain, but do have 3Gb ram. The drain is very high (50% over night, fully done in a day).
Anyone found the culprit, and hence a solution? I am running the latest firmware.

cheers,
Philip

Weez · #20 Post by **Weez** » Tue May 06, 2008 5:49 pm

After a couple of months to test and use I too am very surprised at how quickly the battery drains in sleep mode. I am kinda unhappy with my normal battery performance as well. All in all I love the laptop and would order another one tomorrow but I do wish the battery life was better.

#21 Post by **erik** » Tue May 06, 2008 6:09 pm

have those of you with power drain issues during sleep disabled the "USB always-on power" feature in the BIOS?

gandini · #22 Post by **gandini** » Wed May 07, 2008 12:02 pm

I have followed all the recommendations here and still it eats batteries for dinner. I am running XP but have 3Gb ram. My x60s was a real miser in standby in comparison.

Not happy...

akao · #23 Post by **akao** » Wed May 07, 2008 6:34 pm

Yum... Lithium Ions on a bid of pilaf.

Weez · #24 Post by **Weez** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:41 pm

erik wrote:have those of you with power drain issues during sleep disabled the "USB always-on power" feature in the BIOS?

Yes I have. I am unfairly comparing it to my x60s which lasts forever (with the extended battery) but I honestly did expect to get much better battery life with the ssd, I dont know why I expected it but I did.

obpsym · #25 Post by **obpsym** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:53 pm

I posted in another thread, I have the same problem with Vista 32.

From a full charge in the evening to next morning I lose around 50%

I'm using hibernate now, but would like to hear if anyone has a fix.

jflamm · #26 Post by **jflamm** » Thu May 08, 2008 3:16 am

From the Lenovo forum. I tried this and got about 5% drain overnight:

hey mate

ive recently(today) worked out how to fix this.. i was always wondering why when i booted up my laptop in the morning having had it hibernated all night it was already down to 90% battery left.. turns out it's Vista's fault (surprise surprise).

The way to fix it is to go into "Device Manager" in Control Panel, click on network adapters, right click on your Intel Gigabit Network Connection adapter.. go to properties.. then to Power management .. then uncheck the box "allow this device to wake the computer"... and hooray you no longer lose power all over the place... also you may want to do the same thing with the Intel wireless adapter too.. that is possibly also a problem.. although that box was already uncheck on my X61T

hope that fixes your problem

Jeremy

XP standby eating up a LOT of battery

XP standby eating up a LOT of battery

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