How to get Battery MaxiMiser running on pre-A/T/X ThinkPads

[monty cantsin]

On older ThinkPad systems like the 570, 600 or 770 series, installing
the recommended "Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management features"
software package

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-44226

from IBM will only add some rather superfluous power management
properties, but not the Battery MaxiMiser itself. Also, when trying to
activate this application manually by starting it with the command

rundll32 pwrmonit.dll,StartPwrMonitor

a nice battery gauge will indeed appear on the taskbar, but
unfortunately the display will not change and thus it won't show the
actual battery level, only the charge status at the time the
application has been started.

If you can live without the aforementioned power management property
pages (the settings they refer to can still be altered in the BIOS
setup), you might want to take a look at another revision of the
"Battery MaxiMiser and Power Management features" package tailored to
a different range of systems, as can be found here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-44224

This software (although not officially released for these systems)
will install fine on some older, pre-A/T/X ThinkPad systems and will
provide them with a functioning Battery MaxiMiser application and
battery gauge in the taskbar, just as it is common with the newer
systems. It lacks the function to read out extended battery
information, as this is not wholly supported on the older machines,
but I don't regard that as a major drawback.

Best regards,
Monty

[jimj]

Can someone tell me why IBM could not make this information available on their website? It could have saved me hours of messing around trying to get the thing to work...

[catnap1972]

Wanted to bring this topic back up as I'm having a strange issue (positive?) with my 770X. Before I was having the infamous problem where the battery would run down fairly quickly from full charge to 70%, then drop to zero, and die altogether 10 or 20 minutes afterward.

Now all of a sudden, after I reformatted the drive (clean install of XP), and the installation of this, the battery is back up to "sort of" normal behavior (been going for over an hour and it still has 40% left on it).

Is there some issue with the "correct" application (the one IBM specifies) that was eating the battery life or could something on the old install have caused it?

Strange to say the least...

EDIT: made it down to 33% (around an hour) then it dropped to 0% and went into hibernate...not fabulous, but still better than what I was getting before

[glgermain]

Anybody get battery maximizer to run on a Thinkpad 240?

[RobertM]

Hi,

I have been having the same battery falloff issue with my Thinkpad 600.

Assuming the problem is the same as the one I and other 600 users are having, hopefully this will at least point you in the right direction (or at least point out the actual culprit in this problem).

In reading numerous sources online, the agreed upon conjecture is this is the result of some sort of bug in the BIOS routines that manage charging (the various people who tested this and came to this conclusion after dissassembling a few batteries and testing the cells, the charging circuits and such). Certain (older - though still update release) BIOS revisions seemed to alleviate most of the problem (while restoring older ones in other system areas that the BIOS' were correcting).

You may want to do a search on Google for this... problem reports have already been opened with IBM - I'll try to dig out the info if I still have it and will post it if so... (there wasnt yet a solid resolution, so I might not have kept the info).

- Rob