The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    T400 replicate Power Manager features with Windows 7?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by houou, Dec 10, 2009.

  1. houou

    houou Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    53
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Basically, Windows 7's built in power manager is awesome and Lenovo's Power Manager UI and memory footprint leave a lot to be desired, but it does have at least two features I'm not sure I can replicate without having it installed: Switchable Graphics control and setting battery charge thresholds (charge from a certain percent/charge until a certain percent)

    Any way to do these things without the lenovo Power Manager?
     
    houou, Dec 10, 2009
    #1
  2. lenardg

    lenardg Notebook Evangelist NBR Reviewer

    Reputations:
    331
    Messages:
    513
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Those things are very Lenovo/ThinkPad hardware specific. I doubt you will be able to control them without Lenovo Power Manager.
     
    lenardg, Dec 11, 2009
    #2
  3. MidnightSun

    MidnightSun Emodicon

    Reputations:
    6,668
    Messages:
    8,224
    Likes Received:
    231
    Trophy Points:
    231
    Yep. Both of those are Lenovo Thinkpad-only implementations that cannot be easily replicated in Windows 7. I do not know of any tools that people have made to interact with either of those settings without Power Manager.
     
    MidnightSun, Dec 11, 2009
    #3
  4. houou

    houou Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    1
    Messages:
    53
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Sigh.

    Obviously it *is* possible though (as the power manager driver is installed separately from the software) but someone actually needs to code it.
     
    houou, Dec 11, 2009
    #4
  5. lenardg

    lenardg Notebook Evangelist NBR Reviewer

    Reputations:
    331
    Messages:
    513
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Well the threshold setting would probably be possible to implement with a custom program that reads and writes the setting through the driver.

    But I am unsure about switchable graphics. There is a lot involved there, not just powering on one adapter and switching off the other. The user interface programs (ati ccc, intel's graphics control panel) need to loaded/unloaded, etc. I doubt that would be easily replicateable.

    I sometimes look at the processes running but I never saw Power Managers resource usage jump out at me. Is it really that much that you think it affects system performance?
     
    lenardg, Dec 11, 2009
    #5
  6. RealStranger

    RealStranger Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    116
    Messages:
    28
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    RealStranger, Dec 11, 2009
    #6