Slice Battery Question

Hey all, I have a quick question about the slice battery - 57Y4545. Does anyone know if the slice drains completely before the computer switches to the main battery? I remember this being a problem on my old T42p. I ruined the ultrabay battery after only a few uses because it always drained completely, and couldn't be set to stop at 7% or something.

I've searched the forums and google for an answer to this question, but have found nothing. I'd hate to spend $180 only to ruin the battery because I forgot to disconnect it a couple times...

 

Not sure what your getting at here because I havent owned any previous Lenovo's besides the x120 and x220(on order) but from my experience with an HP Envy slice battery is it'll drain till 7% or whatever the threshold set in Win7 is then it'll move on to the regular battery. As for charging... there is a bios setting for "fast charge mode".. which basically charges up the slice to 90% or so, then charges the regular battery, then the slice back to 100%.

I actually already received my slice for the x220t and just waiting on the unit scheduled to hopefully ship this week. I am impressed the the quality of the slice... it looks and feels good. and I'll definetly test it out when it gets here!

 

Hey thanks for the input and quick response. To be clear, I'm asking whether there's any built-in protection against over-draining the slice battery. On the old ultrabay battery, it would just drain 100%, only then switching to the primary battery. Draining completely ruins batteries, so I'm hoping there's some mechanism to avoid that.

 

If there's a way to get it to automatically switch over earlier I don't know how to do it. On my W520 as far as I can tell it'll try to drain the slice battery entirely first. There is however a switch on my slice battery that I can flip back and forth to turn it on and off. I just try to flip it at some point after using 25-50% of it to try and balance my usage.

 

Hey thanks, that's the info I was looking for. I guess it just requires a little diligence. But man, you'd think that would be an easy thing for Lenovo to fix.

 

I thought I read somewhere that you can choose which battery to discharge first with the X220 Slice battery. Don't remember where I read it though...

 

I don't see any options in power manager. I wouldn't imagine the implementation to be different between the X220 and the W520 but maybe......

 

Lenovo doesnt seem to understand that secondary batteries should be allowed to have a stop use threshold....

I ideally i would like a balanced use:

Secondary discharge to 35%
Primary discharge to 35%
Secondary discharge to 5%
Primary discharge to 5%
Hibernate ...

 

Agreed. Flipping it by switch isn't bad but it's such a simple thing to automate.

 

I cant check this now but I thought windows did have seperate threshold for primary and secondary batteries..

 

Agreed. Glad there is something to prevent killing the secondary battery, but come on lenovo its 2011 and this problem is many years old. But at least there is a switch...

 

Nevermind Win7 doesn't have an option to change the charge threshold. I was thinking about something my Sony had, which was an App that set the charging to stop at the certain percentage. The Envy doesn't even have anything like that in their factory install either! Looks like Lenovo's Power Manager is one of the better softwares for this purpose. Maybe they come out with an update to set the threshold on both the slice and main batteries. That'll be cool if they did.

 

You can set the thresholds separately but only for charging, not discharging :-(