T400 Win7 x64 Battery Drains While Sleeping

I have a T400 running a clean install of Windows 7 64-bit Professional with just about all Lenovo drivers installed. Everything has been running fine for a while, but a couple of days ago I noticed that if I put it to sleep overnight not plugged in, the battery is dead in the morning. The computer does go to sleep, but when I wake up, the battery is either just about empty, or the computer has shut down. I only noticed this recently, as I usually leave the laptop docked overnight.

Anyone else notice a similar behavior? I'm fairly sure this is not normal, and it is important, as I use the laptop at law school and put it to sleep between classes.

 

I can not help you with your problem, but you really should use Hibernate and not Sleep for this kind of purpose. Hibernate completely shuts down the PC but saves the current session to the hard drive - so next time you turn it on it'll boot faster and restore to the exact state it was in before Hibernating.

Sleep just switches to a low power mode - useful to save some power if you don't feel like Hibernating (I use it when unplugging the laptop to transport it a short distance). I'm not familiar with battery life while in Sleep though, sorry.

 

I don't think sleep should completely discharge it overnight but I have never let is sleep for that long so I can't say for sure. I, like houou above, always use hibernate for the reasons he stated.

 

Do you have switchable graphics or just integrated?

 

on Win7 my W500 uses about 1% battery life per hour during Sleep mode.

If there's anything else connected to your laptop, it could be draining battery life, eg USB devices with 'always on USB enabled' or even turning the laptop on every now and then.

 

What's "sleep" anyway? MS-speak?

My observation: Suspend to ram should drain ~1% battery per hour. Suspend to disk (aka hibernate??) obviously none.

 

Sleep=Standby.

 

I have switchable, and I know Lenovo has really been slacking on making a GOOD driver for Windows 7. I disabled the switchable graphics and have it set only on integrated, and I uninstalled Power Manager. Now everything seems to be working fine. Therefore, I'm blaming the problem on something on Lenovo's end.

 

do you have any usb devices plugged in?

under normal usage, how long can your battery withstand without plugged to the wall or does it drain quickly too? try with different power modes. this helps to gauge if your battery is indeed healthy

 

Joined these forums just to find this answer. I'm having the same issue.

No. Nothing's plugged in. I charged my laptop overnight and unplugged it this morning to move it. Didn't use it at all. When I got back from work about 9 hours later, it was at around 5%. Never did that on Vista. Before upgrading to Windows 7, during that time, my battery would only go down 5-10%.

So for now, I have my laptop set to hibernate when I close the lid. Would love to find a solution, though, since I'd rather just sleep my laptop.

 

I'm having the same problem in the last week, though it's happening with my laptop in hibernation. On one occasion last week, it drained to about 20% over an 18-hour period (from full charge). This past weekend (a 64-hour period) it went from full-charge to 40%. Again, in hibernation, not sleep/stand-by.

I have a T400, T9900 processor, 8GB RAM, Win7 x64 Ultimate and a 9-cell battery. All new as of 23-Dec-09.

When fully charged and running on battery-only, it lasts as long as I expect (5 - 7 hours, depending on settings).

On a sort-of related matter, the reason I use hibernate rather than sleep/standby, is I was discovering it would wake up all by itself (i.e. when packed away in my briefcase). Not only does this obviously drain the battery, but it also is running when it can't breathe/ventilate properly, which can't be healthy.

Anyone else run into any of these issues?

 

Battery drain issues are usually a misbehaving driver that doesn't put his device into full suspend mode (ACPI S3 sleep). Hard to diagnose, especially if you don't have access to the source code.

Make sure you have WOL (wake on lan) disabled in the bios!