T61 Hibernation

I have a new T61p running Vista and instead of making cold restarts I've been hibernating it with a full battery charge. For the last couple of days, when I have booted my battery charge has been about 90% and the system has to charge.

Does anyone know why this might be?

 

Hi Renee,

First question is when it is hibernating I am assuming the unit is plugged in?

Second, what is your power manager profile set to when you hibernate?

Third, do you have an peripherials attached that are charging?

On my T61 I have it hibernating and I do the same thing. When I reboot I am about 98 or 99 percent which is acceptable to me. 90 percent seems a bit extreme if you are plugged in, and are rebooting.

 

Ok I called Lenovo, and their answer is, "It could be a faulty battery." If the unit is indeed plugged in -- they have no recorded instances of your problem in their database. That being said -- I would like to think this is a software problem with the power management software. I can't believe you are actually down to 90 percent. Although if the machine believes it is down to 90 percent I would surmise when you hit 0 on the meter the machine will turn off even if the battery is at 10 percent in reality. Is this making sense, or am I losing my mind?

Phil

 

Ok here is an experiment you can see if you can replicate. On full power hibernate the machine then wake, then hibernate, then wake 5 times -- reboot, and see what your power is at. I did this, and I got to 87 percent power on the battery plugged in. Odd -- this is on the t61.

 

I guess my question is the following....

Is anything on when I am hibernating? I thought all power was off.

What I am reporting is the system is hibernated at night with the power on (plugged in)

Over night, the system is not plugged in, has no peripherals attached as it is in my laptop case.

The system is booted in the morning with the power on plugged in.

Ten percent of the battery has been used. How? What is using the power.

 

I am not sure, but the problem in speaking with my wife is not just you or the T61. She has an X61, and with it hibernating not plugged in overnight she has almost drained the battery. This is definitely not a good thing. I guess it is time to call Lenovo, and ask -- I doubt front line tech support can answer this. As you have questioned what is drawing the power???

 

Vista or XP? If it's Vista you need to find out if you're using Deep Sleep or Hybrid Sleep, or whatever Vista calls it. Basically - WinXP had two low-power modes: sleep(hibernate to memory) and hibernate(hibernate to disk).

A machine in XP's SLEEP mode would write out anything it had to RAM, "pause" the OS(for all intensive purposes), but still be "on" so that yanking the drive or powering it off by removing the battery or holding the power button would cause a number of "you didn't shut me down right, retard" problems. This mode used some power to keep the machine's current "working set" in memory and keep things powered up.

A machine in XP's HIBERNATE mode would write out anything in RAM and SWAP to disk, and power off the machine. It would be totally off, so that if you were to power it back on, you'd go through the standard BIOS bootup, etc. This mode uses no power, since it effectively powers the machine off.

Vista changed these two modes from Sleep, Hibernate to be a single "operation" You need to specify(I don't have my Vista laptop w/me at the moment) which of two modes you want to use. Look in your power settings.

 

Do you have any USB devices plugged in while the machine is hibernating? I seem to recall in the BIOS a setting that would allow the T61p to charge/power USB devices even if the laptop is suspended or hibernating or off. Not sure if the T61 has this in BIOS or not. I also can't get the sepcifics from my machine at the moment as I'm in the middle of a software install and can't boot to BIOS.

 

I have absolutely nothing plugged into it.

 

Very strange. Mine will do the same thing. I did notice that even in hibernate, with the network cable plugged in , the LEDs were active and flashing (related to wake-on LAN I'm sure, but I was pretty sure I had these turned off). My USB ports did turn off (at least the optical mouse went dark).

This could be an issue. I'll have to hibernate my machine tonight before I go home and see what happens in the morning. With my old Compaq, I'd use hibernate all the time. It wouldn't be unusual for me to hibernate the machine for 2-3 weeks between business trips. Hmmmmmm.....

 

If there is any exterior lights on the machine when in hibernate that could cause battery drain, no?

 

Not that I have ever seen...unless the machine is plugged in.

 

Seems Vista is running something related to memory when hibernating. If you let your mouse over the hibernation button, you will see a message "keeps your session in memory and puts the computer in a low-power state so that you can quickly resume working"

 

There is a simple solution to this. In the past there was a seperation between a computers OS and it's BIOS. Today that isn't so much true. The BIOS in your computer is as much a part of the OS and vice versa. In your computers BIOS you will find options to wake on lan, keep the USB powered on, etc, etc.... First step is to make sure you disable all of those so that the BIOS default is to power down everything when you shut off your computer. There is a second piece to the puzzle however. Vista/XP is capable of over riding your BIOS settings, whether it be for fan control, adaptive vs full performance settings on the CPU, and, the settings for the wake on lan and so on. So step 2 is to open up your device manager, and go through every item. If it has a power management tab, make sure you set it so that the check box for "Allow device to wake the computer" is NOT checked. If that box is checked then Vista will set it to allow wake and over ride whatever you've set in your BIOS. The BIOS settings are simply default settings, Vista/XP can and will over ride these if you set things up differently. I had the same issue as you Renee with my default out of the box T61P setup. By disabled everything at shut down I now see nearly no battery discharge when hibernated. The ones that are most likely left to allow the power up of the computer are things like network cards, modems, sound cards, usb ports. Take a moment and go through your device manager and check out all the settings in your power management tabs and make sure you are turning everything off. Also make sure the BIOS defaults turn everything off. If you do that it should take care of your problems.

 

Infinus,

I don't think that explains what phil is seeing. I will that a try.
Thank you.