Power Manager thresholds not working under Vista

I have configured the Power Manager on my T61 under Vista Business to custom charging thresholds:

- start charging when below 60%
- stop charging at 80%

However, with these thresholds above enabled I have noticed that when I reach the "Stop" threshold, the battery capacity always remains ~ 80%. It hovers between 79 - 80%. I expected it to discharge until about 60% capacity remained, at which point it should start charging once again until it reached 80%.

Am I missing something? Have I misunderstood how these charging thresholds are supposed to work?

Running Vista Basic with all updates applied; latest Power Manager (v2.11) installed. I even tried uninstalling and then reinstalling the Power Manager software but this behaviour seems to persist.

 

Yeah, that's what I thought would work at first as well, but sadly the battery won't discharge while AC is plugged in.

The situation you described is exactly how mine works, where plugging in the AC if battery is below the low threshold will start charging up to the upper threshold.

This is probably done to eliminate unnecessary cycles done to the battery. Although I don't get why would there by an upper and lower threshold? Wouldn't a single threshold suffice?

 

The behavior you are experience seems normal. Think of the "Start at" as the minimum and the "Stop at" as the maximum. In this case you have 60/80.

What this means is that when your battery charge is below 60% and you have the AC plugged in, it will charge until 80% then stop. Now let's say you're charging it and you pull it out at 70% and plug it back in. Well, now it's going to stay at 70% because it's not below 60%, which means it will not charge higher.

So basically, you're setting a charge freezing point.

 

Thanks for the info guys! I completely misunderstood how Power Manager works and I also just assumed that the battery would start discharging the moment it reached the Stop/max threshold. It's nice to know that this new battery is still holding it's charge well.

For a moment last night I thought that perhaps I had a defective battery or worse yet something else was defective in my new T61!

I have one more question: do the Power Manager threshold settings stay in effect when the system is on standby or sleeping? Or do they only work while the laptop is running and active (i.e. not sleeping or on standby)?

Thanks.

 

The thresholds are also active while your computer is in standby (aka sleep).