Power Manager vs Win 7's Power Management

Hi...

Just wanted to know if it is necessary to keep the Lenovo Power Manager utility. What advantages does it have over the Win 7's native power management system?

Thanks

 

Custom thresholds on battery charging, very specific statistics on your batteries current state, some additional features like battery stretch.... just to name a few.

 

In other words, I should keep it, right? Am also curious as to whether there can be conflicts between them.

Thanks

 

Good question. I would like to know the answer as well.

 

Power Manager from Lenovo will almost always be the dominant setting. If you change a setting via Windows power manager that setting will remain in effect until the next time you switch power plans in Lenovo's Power Manager.

It's a very useful utility to have and I would definitely recommend that you keep it. You'll get longer battery time and also a healthier, longer battery life as well.

 

Thanks! But there is a word you use - "almost" - when you refer to the Power manager being the dominant setting. Is that intentional? If yes, then under what circumstances will Power Manager not be the dominant setting? And, since we are on the topic, would you please tell me what the optimal settings would be (1) when the machine is attached to a power source and (2) when the machine is running on batteries only? Obviously, I want to max battery life when operating solely in battery and for that I am willing to sacrifice screen brightness.

Currently, in the Win 7 power management setup the machine is set to Power Saver (both when on the mains (full screen brightness) and when on battery (screen brightness on half). I have not done anything to the Power Manager settings. I have also not enabled Battery Stretch in Power Manager.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

I'm a thinkpad lover and I have reasons to use Lenovo's utilities... but I think Power Manager is crap. It wastes resources, and it doesn't provide any noticeable benefits. Want to use Stretch? Turn down your LCD, turn off wireless.

The only thing it is good for is finding out technical details of how many full cycles your battery has gone through. The percentage indicator is a minor benefit, but I find the default Win 7 battery indicator to be less distracting.

The only utility Lenovo has that isn't bloatware is the fingerprint reader software and the hotkeys. Your experience may vary.

 

Out of curiosity, other than the obvious one (the disk space it takes up installed--which I presume is rather negligible unless you're sporting a 32gb SSD), what resources would you say it wastes?

 

I don't run Power Manager all the time either. I have it installed for battery maintenance and to adjust power plans since it does offer some settings that Window 7's doesn't. But beyond that I don't have it running in my taskbar or anything.

I don't know how much measurable resources it takes up, but it is doing stuff if you have it running. It takes up a bit of memory, is always surveying your battery's capacity and is calculating remaining battery life at regular intervals. Something that Window's already does and Power Manager doesn't do it any differently, it just samples your power drainage at a given instant and divides your remaining capacity by that number, exactly what Windows does but at shorter intervals.

 

Like aznguyphan says, it's duplicating work performed in Win 7. Power Manager was awesome when I was running XP because it provided significant control over power management that XP did not provide.

However, starting with Vista, Windows has offered better power options. If the built-in solution is good enough, why bother with the Lenovo utility? I feel the same way about Lenovo's backup solution and hard drive encryption as well.

Back when IBM created the Thinkvantage suite, it was great because Windows had poor utilities. Since then, the built-in programs have become much better. The Thinkvantage suite is yet another piece of third-party software that can have issues or requires regular updates.

 

Hmm, looks like it's more of a Bloatware than a useful feature. Anyway, will check it out on my W510, before reformatting.

 

Thanks. My machine does not have a finger print reader, so that is out for me. But what is this "hot keys"? What does it do? And where can I get it from? Also, would you not find the System Update utility useful?

Cheers!

Edit: Also, what machine do you use?

 

I don't use the system update only because it hasn't always been accurate in the past. I recall an occasion where it had the wrong driver for a computer a long time ago or wasn't as up to date as the driver matrix on IBM/Lenovo's site. I tend to use just the driver matrix. I only check it again if I experience a bug or problem.

Hotkeys are the on screen displays when you click the brightness, volume control, etc. buttons.

I am using an X201s.

 

OK. Thanks. Did not know there was a separate utility for this Hotkey thing. But I seem to have it enabled in my machine. I do use System Update and till now it has worked fine for me (touches wood!). The only thing that I have installed is the Acess Connections since Win 7's equivalent seems to work ok, but I guess that is precisely the arguement you were making about the Power Manager!

Edit: I should have said that the only thing that I have NOT included is the Access Connections!!

 

Access connections had a cool feature to change the default printer etc based on your network, but that has been included in Windows 7 as well.

 

So, I haven't experimented much with Windows 7 and it's power meter, but one thing I've had particularly bad experiences with in Windows is the accuracy of what they report. On all my work machines that aren't Lenovo's they'll hit some percentage battery remaining (10, 15, 20 percent) and then simply shut down due to the battery running out (it will just drop suddenly to nothing left). I know that even on Vista the Windows manager often was different then what the Lenovo power manager reported. Again, I haven't experimented with Windows 7 yet, I will now that we've talked about this. Where the Lenovo power manager is nice is you can run a calibration cycle where the machine stays plugged in and runs down to 0% so it knows how much power is in the battery. For the accuracy, the easy visibility vs the windows taskbar icon, etc, I have no issues with it.

As for being bloatware, sorry, that's just not true. I've got process explorer open on both the Lenovo power management driver and the task bar dll that runs. I've seen ZERO processor activity, and a whopping 4 megs of memory used. Even plugging in and unplugging the machine at most I see a very brief blip of 1%, followed immediately by a return to 0%. I completely disagree that this falls under the classification of bloatware. It uses minimal system resources and provides useful functionality. If you feel you don't need it, that's fine, don't run it, but don't bash it either, it doesn't have the negative impact you make it out to have.

 

I have, like "infinus" also noted a small discrepency between Lenovo's Power Manager and Win 7's power management utility. While discharging there is always a difference of about 30 minutes or so between the two with Power Manager giving a greater amount of time left than Windows. I've always wondered about that. Going by what "infinus" says, I would presume that Lenovo's Power Manager is probably more accurate.

 

We could argue about this all day. In the end, the question is whether the Lenovo utility performs enough to be more useful that the Windows 7 built in power management. Some people will want it and others will not. I personally think the tools have outlived their usefulness and I think I have a computer that performs better because of it.

 

Have you checked their critical battery level and critical battery action in Window's Power Setting?

And as for the processor usage %, that is a %, so it shows it's doing very little work, but for something I don't need, it is still doing work.

As for different time reportings, Windows and Lenovo estimate battery life in the same way. For the first few weeks I had my laptop I ran Power Manager and BatteryBar at the same time along with Window's Power Manager. The three rarely agreed on a time because Lenovo's would sample more often than Window's and BatteryBar estimates based on statistical usage (calibration). I've never seen an option from Lenovo to calibrate though, where is that?

 

I tried everything. The levels were all set appropriately. I tried doing battery "calibrations" by letting the battery run down in the bios, I tried letting it run down in windows until the machine simply turned off. Every time however it'll be going normal, 25, 24, 23, 22, 5. No rhyme or reason. Happened on my previous HP, 2 Dell's, only my Lenovo machine running the Lenovo power drivers and an occasional calibration has ever been accurate from 100 percent down to 0. I find that invaluable.

I monitored those processes for a significant period of time and the accumulated "work" they did was near nothing. I understand if you simply don't want to run it, I just don't want people to incorrectly think this software is bloat. It consumes so few system resources I don't see any way you'd ever notice it. Just putting it out there so people use the right reasons to load or unload it. If you like it, run it without fear that it's slowing your system down, if you don't like it, don't run it.

 

I use Lenovo Power Manager simply because if my T61 was left to its own devices than it would simply just fry up over time. On idle it would run around 50-60 degrees with the fan constantly on. With some tweaking on the Lenovo Power Manager schemes I was able to configure the CPU mutliplier, fans and others to cool down my system while working. Now it's running around on average 45 degrees while I do some browsing, multimedia as well as other work too.