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    T61 - Battery and sleep mode.

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by jjfcpa, May 30, 2007.

  1. jjfcpa

    jjfcpa Notebook Evangelist

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    Something kind of bothersome happened yesterday.

    I use my Thinkpad T61 all day at the office via an Advanced Dock and an external LCD, mouse, and keyboard. Yesterday, I undocked it, put it to sleep and didn't turn it on till this morning.

    With all previous laptops, this would typically consume a very small percentage of my battery life. However, when I got to the coffee shop this morning, there was only 27% of my battery life remaining. That is HUGE amount of battery drain while sitting there overnight with no activity.

    I'm going to test this again tonight just to see what happens. I'll post tomorrow what my results are tonight.
     
  2. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

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    Vista or XP?

    Did you previously use sleep (suspend to RAM) or hibernation (save to HDD)?

    I think Vista has some hybrid sleep mode which saves a copy to the HDD and then suspends to RAM for speed of restarting. However, I have set my Vista so that hibernation does what it used to do and the computer is completely off.

    John
     
  3. jjfcpa

    jjfcpa Notebook Evangelist

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    I'm running Vista Ultimate and I'm use sleep as in suspend mode. I never use hibernate because I might as well just reboot.
     
  4. jjfcpa

    jjfcpa Notebook Evangelist

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    Ok, there is definitely a problem with suspend mode and the battery drain. Can someone else suspend their laptop for a few hours and see what kind of drain you experience.

    It's 9:30 p.m. and I undocked my T61 from the Advanced Dock at 5:00 p.m. That's 4 and half hours and my battery is down to 35% when I resume from suspend mode.

    That is ridiculous! This is not good if I have to shutdown my laptop every time I need to go some where.
     
  5. myrudehand

    myrudehand Newbie

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    I have the same problem with my T61. Last night I left work at 6pm with the computer in sleep mode. (Ethernet and speaker cable plugged in, but not power supply). The battery was at 64% when I left. This morning the battery was COMPLETELY drained. Computer would not power on. When I plugged it in I got the "did not shut down successfully" message where you can choose to start in SAFE MODE, etc.

    Something's wrong with sleep mode.

    If you find a fix, please post it. I'll do the same.

    Brian

    Here's a post discussing this...
    http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166856
    b.