T400 Vista 64 battery issue.

[halski]

Hi guys,

Recently I have upgraded my T400 to 4GB of RAM + replaced original 160GB 7200RPM drive with a WD Scorpio Black 320GB 7200RPM.
In order to take full advantage of the memory - I installed a clean Vista Business 64, installed all the drivers, OS fixes and registry patches from Lenovo download site and no Thinkvantage software apart from Power Manager (to keep it clean).
Now, my battery (9 cell) lifetime - on power saver plan - is limited to around 5.5 hours , whereas it used to be (old drive,3GB RAM + Vista Business 32) around 8 hours before the upgrades.

Have you got any ideas where this decrease in lifetime came from ? I had a 7200 drive before, so there should be no difference in power consumption of the drives..
Does Vista Business 64 make it more power consuming ?
Any idea where is the Energy Star power plan gone ?

cheers!

[Marin85]

Did you also install the Power Management driver? It´s necessary for Lenovo Power Manager to work properly. Also, if you have switchable graphics, you might have notices those 8 hours running on the integrated Intel graphics. But if you have accidentally switched to ATI graphics (maybe due to the reinstall of Vista and subsequently of Power Manager), this would change the estimated battery life. I don´t believe that the new HD may decrease your battery life by so much (but I don´t exclude that possibility). Also, Vista x64 or x86 shouldn´t make that much of a difference, nor RAM power consumption.

Marin

[halski]

Marin, cheers for the reply. I had the power management driver installed and it was running on the integrated graphics. I cannot understand as well how this could have decreased the battery life. Any other ideas ?

[Marin85]

Marin, cheers for the reply. I had the power management driver installed and it was running on the integrated graphics. I cannot understand as well how this could have decreased the battery life. Any other ideas ?

If I got your point correctly, you see "only" 5.5 hours estimated battery life even when running on integrated graphics?

Vista x64 shouldn´t make that much of a difference to the battery life either unless the Power Management Driver for Vista x64 are somehow worse (or if you want to say crappier) than that for Vista x86

[halski]

That is one possibility - the driver can be [censored] comparing to x86.
Another thing is, the 'energy star' power plan missing - do you know why is it gone and how can I install it back ?
On x64 I use Power Saver plan - which I dont believe would make battery run out of power in 2.5 hours less comparing to Energy Star on x86, or would it ?

[Marin85]

I believe you could create your own "Energy Star" Plan (somewhere under Advanced Settings in Power Manager, I don´t use the newest version of PM like the one you probably have). IMO that would be the most easiest way to go. When creating the power profile, just set everything to max power saving and you should be then good to go

Cheers

Marin

[halski]

Marin85, cheers for the tip, I have done that but still cannot get more than 5.5 hours of battery, at the beginning on battery it shows, say 7 hours, but soon updates it to around 5-5.5h. I have no idea what can be causing it, I am quite disappointed with this battery life, especially that I was getting 7.5-8 hours just before the upgrade...

Any people running Vista x64 on T400 here ? What sort of battery lifetime are you getting ?

[Marin85]

Marin85, cheers for the tip, I have done that but still cannot get more than 5.5 hours of battery, at the beginning on battery it shows, say 7 hours, but soon updates it to around 5-5.5h. I have no idea what can be causing it, I am quite disappointed with this battery life, especially that I was getting 7.5-8 hours just before the upgrade...

Sorry, I couldn´t help.. I have to admit that I was quite surprised to hear that your T400 was able to achieve battery life up to 8 hours, so I can understand your disappointment now and I hope that you´ll get your problem resolved eventually

Marin

[Marin85]

Reading another thread, just something that came on my mind: check what programs are loaded on startup. Since you have reinstalled Vista, your new setup might be not exactly the same as the one before. If you have more things starting with Windows, this could also affect battery life. For that matter check also if you have applied the same "tweaks" to x64 (you might have tweaked Vista x86 like turning off indexing and prefetch/superfetch, which results in less HD activity throughout and hence in longer battery life).

Marin

[Tony Chan]

I have been running Vista Ultimate 64 on my T400 since last October. Depends on what I do, the battery can last from a bit over 4 hrs to just a bit less than 6 hrs. I don't consider I am a heavy user when the laptop is on battery, mostly wifi web browsing, emailing, VPN, and a bit word processing. I configure my wifi setting to 100% strength even on battery to pickup the best signal at home and hotel/airport.

I fresh install my Vista SP1 ( not Vista then upgrade to SP 1 later ) and update Lenovo drivers that I think I need ( I would say 3/4 of their drivers/utilites ). Didn't do any of those "tweaks" like disabling indexing as I find the performance is good enough.

My T400 has integrated graphics, LED screen, camera, 320Gb Seagate 7200.3 HD, 2 Gb ram.

I would say you should have more than 5.5 or 6 hrs with a 9 cell.

[halski]

Marin85 - I did some of the tweaks already you are talking about - windows search off, superfetch off. Found someone recently saying to remove igfxtray.exe and igfxpers.exe from startup programs as they tend to hug cpu, tried this as well. I noticed that my optical drive does not turn off, after manually switching it off - it run for couple of minutes over 6 hours. Still 2 hours less than before. Any idea why the dvdrom is not being switched off even though the power plan says it should ?
Also - a lot of the times when I check power options of my power plan it switches back wireless mode to 'maximum performance' when on battery(initially set to maximum power saving), has anyone had that problem ?
Tony, I assume, you have a 6 cell battery, right ?
Cheers guys !

[Tony Chan]

Yes, I have 6 cell battery. When mine is on battery, the optical drive does turn off itself after few minute ( when that first happens it gives a couple "ding" sound which I didn't know what it was. Took me a while to figure out that's the sound of turning off optical drive ). I don't have to do anything manually in order for that happens, so I'm beginning to think this has more to do with power management drivers and setup rather than hardware.