Battery Life change? huh?

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Iceman404 · #1 Post by **Iceman404** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 9:23 pm

Ok, so I did a fresh install of vista business which solved most of my problems, installed the majority of the lenovo software, but all of a sudden my battery life dropped from 4+ hours to just over 2.

Has anyone else experienced this or am I just going crazy?

thanks everyone

#2 Post by **ryengineer** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 12:02 am

Sir, make sure you have Thinkvantage Power Manager installed with appropriate profile selected. Screen brightness contributes a lot to the battery life, you can adjust the brightness level via Fn + End (decrease) / Home (increase) keys and I assume you do have hot key drivers installed as well.

Lastly you did not seem to mention the type (4/6/7/9 cells) of the battery?

itzcoolz · #3 Post by **itzcoolz** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 12:51 pm

iceman, in my experience my battery life dropped from about 4.5 hours to around 3 hours when i installed or reinstalled Vista. sometimes it'll work it's way back up to 4 hours, but nothing much more than that.

it's strange and i've heard a lot of different reasons (some people say it's the indexing that takes place, especially when the os is first installed).

in my most recent experience, my battery life is still around 3.25 hours, and it's kinda disappointing. you might want to try recalibrating your battery. that helped me the first time, but not so much the second time.

XIII · #4 Post by **XIII** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 1:30 pm

Make sure you install Lenovo ACPI driver. Don't use the default one that Vista installs for you.

Iceman404 · #5 Post by **Iceman404** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 4:10 pm

It's a 7 cell battery, sorry about that!

I'm assuming that the lenovo ACPI drivers aren't installed with the power manager? I took a look around the drivers website and found this: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4GXPEG

How exactly do you recalibrate your battery? I've looked around a bit but haven't found much info...

thanks for the help everyone

SHoTTa35 · #6 Post by **SHoTTa35** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 4:23 pm

in power manager you go to the battery info tab and then click battery maintainance and then click reset. The sytsem will max out everything to run the battery down and then charge it then run it down again then charge it one last time. It'll tell you it will take hours (since your battery lasts hrs) so just do it overnight.

Iceman404 · #7 Post by **Iceman404** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 7:10 pm

SHoTTa35 wrote:in power manager you go to the battery info tab and then click battery maintainance and then click reset. The sytsem will max out everything to run the battery down and then charge it then run it down again then charge it one last time. It'll tell you it will take hours (since your battery lasts hrs) so just do it overnight.

so simple! I'm not sure why i didn't see that...

thanks!

Iceman404 · #8 Post by **Iceman404** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 8:25 pm

sorry to dredge up a really old topic, but where exactly are the Lenovo ACPI drivers located on their website? I found these: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4GXPEG
but I'm not 100% sure if they're it. I'm still using the generic windows drivers and was kind of hoping I could (finally) fix this.

thanks in advance

-Ice

SHoTTa35 · #9 Post by **SHoTTa35** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 8:33 pm

umm did you read the thread? the link above specifies the samething.

However yes those are the drivers. I dunno how much it benefits but i'll say on my T60 and Vista (it downloaded the driver from Windows Update i guess cuz it's there and i know i dind't install it)
but i got 3Hrs and 25mins. I think that's respectable for this type of machine with the power it has. With a 9 cell i could probably get 5 1/2 hours which is great in my book

Iceman404 · #10 Post by **Iceman404** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 8:43 pm

actually, I made that post and no one responded to that question directly.

I just downloaded the driver again, installed it, but in device manager I'm still getting the generic microsoft drivers. Is this right? Does anyone know where the Lenovo drivers are extracted to?

Peak2Peak · #11 Post by **Peak2Peak** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 8:24 am

Iceman404 wrote:Does anyone know where the Lenovo drivers are extracted to?

Can not say where for sure in your T61, but in my T60p it extracted to: C:\DRIVERS\WIN\IBMPM

Iceman404 · #12 Post by **Iceman404** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 6:15 am

that's the location I've found too, but vista thinks they're not the right drivers. I should be looking at IBMPMDRV.INF, right? Is there another way that I should be trying to installing these drivers?

Battery Life change? huh?

Battery Life change? huh?

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