Battery priority (UltraBay vs regular battery)

[textpxy]

By default, the UltraBay battery gets drained first, then the other battery starts draining.

Is there any way to reverse this? If you have 1 UltraBay battery and 2 regular batteries, it would be really nice to be able to use up the regular battery first, then be able to swap batteries from Suspend Mode...

[textpxy]

bump...

[asiafish]

You can always swap batteries from hibernate mode, and even from suspend you can probably get away with it on a drained ultrabay battery as they are designed to leave a very small amount of charge to maintain the RAM contents in suspend mode, which is the default when the batteries are drained.

Hibernation is fast enough that I use it exclusively (avoiding the problem even when no battery is installed) as stadbye has simply proven unreliable in Windows. Even with full batteries or plugged in, there are often problems resuming from standbye on just about any PC. If you haven't had a resume failure yet, you will.

[GomJabbar]

Even with full batteries or plugged in, there are often problems resuming from standbye on just about any PC. If you haven't had a resume failure yet, you will.

I run standby all the time with no problems. I've been using standby for the last 3 years or so, starting with my 600E running W2K. I've had my T42 for about 6 months, running WXP PRO with no problems.

The only time I've seen a problem is when I remove a hardware device while the computer is on standby. This can be as simple as unplugging a USB mouse, or a PC card.

[asiafish]

Then you are very lucky, as I've tried it on many machines over the last decade, ThinkPads, Toshiba Portege and Tecra, etc. It never mattered what machine or what version of Windows, occasionally it would simply refuse to resume from standbye. I'll never trust it until there is a major revamp of windows, and even then, only after 100 or so consecutive wakes.

It is possible as Mac OS X sleep (essentially the same thing) works every time and is much faster than even suspend on Windows.

Are you sure you aren't confusing suspend with hibernation, which is dead-reliable since Win2K?

[GomJabbar]

Are you sure you aren't confusing suspend with hibernation, which is dead-reliable since Win2K?

No, I can assure you that I am not confusing the two.

When using ThinkPad Configuration, Under Power Management, Advanced Settings, on the Hibernation tab the box is unchecked, and on the Advanced tab only Stand By or Shutdown is chosen.

I will say that Stand By was easier to set up on the ThinkPads. On my desktop PC, I have an ABIT IC7G Max II motherboard. I had to change some settings in the BIOS to get 'Stand By' to work. And then, I can only resume by using the Power On/Off switch.

P.S. I will admit I was a little confused with my Win 2K 600E, as the choices were Hibernate, Stand By, and Suspend. Trying to determine the difference between Stand By and Suspend was a little difficult.

[simscitizen]

Stop being averse to new features and you'll be fine. If you are afraid of Suspend, just use Hibernate (this will save everything from RAM to hard disk and *no* power is being used) and you could leave your batteries out for a week, swap in new ones, and they'd still work.

In any case, if Suspend doesn't work you should check out your configuration. Sounds like some misconfigured hardware or bad driver (perhaps).

I guess it would be nice to have this option, but IBM (and other manufacturers--never saw a notebook with this option, or with a different draining strategy for multiple batteries) probably thought it was more likely that a user would swap out the modular bay battery for another modular bay device than a primary batter for another primary battery.

[Ground Loop]

I don't use Hibernation -- with 1GB+ of memory, it can actually take longer than a cold boot.

The fingerprint boot/login makes it easy to log in at power-up.

I've had repeated problems with suspend/hibernate when hardware changes while the machine is suspended -- PCMCIA cards removed, undocking, network disconnect, WiFi, battery/CD-ROM swapping..

I have to agree with the post above that says Suspend never worked quite right. It requires that every driver and software in the system do a good job of suspending and restoring, and with all the 3rd party junk, it's hard to do.

It's funny to watch at work -- most people go from meeting to meeting carrying the laptop with the screen open so it won't sleep and disconnect them from the WiFi VPN.

[asiafish]

Its not a question of being "afraid" to use standbye, just that as mentioned above it is unreliable once you have anything more than the factory load. I don't have any PC cards in my T42p, but between virus scanners, anti-spyware, firewall and all of the other software on my T42p, not to mention device drivers updated (using IBM Software Update) and Windows components (Microsoft Update), there are just too many things trying to interact on a resume command. The result is that resuming from suspend works "most" of the time, but not "all" of the time, which or me is critical.

As for resume time from hibernation, I have 2GB of ram in my T42p right now and it doesn't take anywhere near as long as a cold boot (and no, I don't have the fingerprint reader). Resume from hibernation takes at most 20 seconds, with the first 10 seconds being the POST checks. When doing a cold boot, the same 10 seconds for POST checks is required and a lot more than an additional 10 seconds is required to get to the Windows desktop. Add in time required to reopen work in progress and the time savings of hibernation over shutting down are significant, even on a machine with 2GB ram.