A few necessary tweaks

[aeschylus]

I love my new t400 but I encountered a few rather serious issues that I thought I would describe (and include the solutions for) for anyone else who has recently purchased a T400/T500.

1. After utilizing switchable graphics CPU utilization hovered around 50%

I encountered this problem after installing the latest graphics drivers on the Lenovo website for both the intel and amd graphics solutions. If I restarted my laptop while using one or the other solutions CPU usage remained around 1-3% but as soon I switched from discrete to integrated graphics or vice versa from the desktop the CPU usage would increase to 50% and remain there until I restarted my computer. Following the steps included in the following post

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/mess ... ge.id=7406

I was able to avoid the CPU usage problems and retain the ability to switch between graphic solutions on the fly (The only startup program you have to disable is igfxpers.exe). I have no idea if this is a wide spread problem but I only found out about this by randomly checking out task manager. The decrease in performance at 50% CPU utilization was unnoticeable while I did random tasks on my laptop but did have a negative impact on my battery life.

2. My free hard drive space rapidly decreased on the C: partition.

After installing all of the latest Vista updates and updating the power management drivers etc I noticed that I suddenly had taken a large bite (20 GB) out of my already small 100GB of free space on C drive. This was caused by an apparent issue where Lenovo is sending out Thinkpads which are unrestricted in the amount of space the Vista System Store program can utilize in creating shadows copies. Normally, the space allotted to shadow copies cannot exceed 15% of total hard drive space. The solution is linked to below.

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/mess ... 2289#M2289

3. My brand new t400 was taking around 15 seconds to enter standby mode.

I suppose this normally wouldn't be an issue except for the fact that t43 which I used previously went into standby only a few seconds after closing the laptop lid. This drove me crazy until I found a solution. In addition to fixing the cpu utilization issue listed at the top the setting which I have found to have the largest effect on standby times is located within the power manager utility (note: this is using the latest version of power manager utility). Under the Global Power Settings in the Power Manager within the Events collapsible tab there is an advanced button next to the Lid closed function. By deselecting my network from the list of the connections to "stay online" while the laptop lid is closed I reduced the standby time to 2 to 3 seconds at most.

I hope these tweaks are useful for some of the new Thinkpad users in the forums!

[2cool4u]

Thank you very much for your post. I wondered why my new T400 got that hot even while not doing anything. After disabling this intel graphics thing it got much better.