Battery, Disabling Hardware, other general questions

[BigMacSangwich]

I bought a T41 used on eBay and when I first discharged the battery, it ran for over 3 hours but MatteryMaximiser became in accurate after it reached 5%. It said I had 6 minutes left at that point but it really ran for over half an hour. So I am wondering if I should depend on the BatteryMaximiser reading before I start charging the battery again after a full discharge... or should I do it after the battery is completely drained and shuts off the system. I read that you should fully drain the battery before recharging at least every month to maximize the life of the battery, but if the gauge reads 1% (2min) and there is in reality 20minutes left, would it matter all that much? The cycle count is currently 189 and 43.67Wh. Is it worth replacing a battery with those numbers?

Also, I was wondering if I disabled hardware components like Serial Port, Modem, Infrared, and basically everything I never use, would it increase battery life? Or would it not matter since I don't use them anyways? Also, I have an Ultrabay Slim CD drive and the LED is always lit, even in Suspend mode. Does this mean this is constantly using power if I don't stop it in the "Remove Hardware Safely" thing?

Are there any IBM programs that I can disable in 'msconfig' that would speed up my computer? I think the only thing I use are the functions with the Fn key. I have the Active Harddrive Protection installed but it is disabled. The problem is, I have no idea what all the IBM programs listed in the startup correspond to.

Finally, the hard drive LED indicator sometimes become constantly lit even though I have nothing running that uses the hard drive intensively. What does this mean? Do I have defective indicators?

[ryengineer]

1. What you read about was true for Ni-MH batteries, thinkpad T41 uses Li-ion battery. I suggest you not to deep discharge Li-ion batteries but charge them more often.

2. Take a look at the following thread and document, X61 batteries are alike in a way with T41 since both use Lithium-ion batteries:

battery only charged up to 98%.

How to extend your battery life - ThinkPad.

You'll only gain around 2-5 mins max by turning off those devices. Turning off Ultrabay Slim won't make any significant difference as much as not using it.

4. Always lit can be malfunctioning, for diodes to get sometimes lit means that the machine (HDD) is onto something. You should check in the task manager for some activity.

[BigMacSangwich]

cool thanks for the info