T400 an Windows 8.1 power management

[pointyhat]

I've installed Windows 8.1 on my T400 2768. All seems ok but battery life has fallen though the floor. On a 6-cell I was getting 3.5-4 hours on Windows 7 with Lenovo Power manager doing whatever it does. This is quite respectable because the battery is quite old. Now I'm getting 1.5-2 hours in 8.1

I've disabled the ATI graphics in device manager and am using the Intel graphics only (I don't have any massive graphics requirements).

Tried to install Lenovo power manager on 8.1 and all it does is blue screen so I killed it and am using built in power management in windows.

Any ideas on how to improve this or get Lenovo Power Manager to install?

[RealBlackStuff]

AFAIK the only way is to go back to W7.
Or try to install W7 power mgr.
If you ask me, W8 is the same P.O.S. as ME and Vista.

[pointyhat]

Tried W7 version and it died with a kernel trap.

Windows 8 *is* a piece of junk. Windows 8.1 isn't. It's actually really nice and stupidly faster than 7. I haven't seen Metro once after 5 mins work with secpol.msc, gpedit.msc, PS and dism. The only thing I have to live with is the start screen and that's just the apps view now which is actually better than W7's start menu when you get used to it. Oh and the [censored] battery life.

Although I'm thinking about canning this laptop and buying a new one now...

[pointyhat]

Actually I retract my comment.

8.1 is bearable on new hardware that was designed to run 8.0+, that is all.

Apart from that it stinks. Battery life is terrible, the machine gets hot, I'm getting display corruption and it has blue screened twice.

Back to 7. Needed a clean install anyway.