T61 battery discharge by 5 to 10% over a night?

Hi all,

I got my new T61 and it is an awesome machine indeed. One thing that puzzle me is that the battery seems to discharge of about 5 to 11% each night when it's left turned off, in hibernate mode (i.e., it is really off and no power should be drawn).

I don't recall observing such behaviour on my old Toshiba Satellite. When it was full, it would remain close to full for days, if not weeks.

Is the above a consequence of the way the ThinkPad recharge their batteries or is it abnormal? The recharge process seems to be done wisely on the ThinkPad.

I was amazed how fast this thing recharges my 9 cells. It takes about 2 hours for a 75% charge and another hour to full. It seems to charge exponentially... Fast at the empty state and it slows the cadence toward the top. This makes me thing you can save your battery life quite a bit by charging before you it the bottom.
Anyway, what do you think about the night discharge I observe?

Thanks for the inputs.

 

Have you disabled your ethernet's 'Wake on Settings' and 'Wake on Link Settings' in device manager? It's under the Advanced tab when your double click your ethernet driver.

 

Yes, it is turned off. The only thing I left checked is "allow the computer to turn off the device" for power optimization while on battery. I had forgotten about this after thinking of it, thanks to make me verify.

So you are saying yours doesn't exhibit this behaviour?

Let me know all if you think of other details such as the wake up on LAN things I should double check.

Thanks

 

Good catch Arkit3kt! I'm not used to Vista so I was looking at the wrong place. The Wake on parameters for the 1GB controller was set to magic ... something. Let's hope it was that. Still, that sounds like a huge consumption for such an on sleep feature.

Anything else that I should check?

Thanks

 

I had the same problem, and the following suggestions fixed it:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=196757

 

Thanks Bg... I just checked the BIOS and sure enough, the default for wake on LAN there was enabled. Turned it off as well as withing Vista's device manager... Now I will need to wait over night to see That sounds unbeleivable that it draws so much energy in only about 8 hours!

Btw, have you guys saw that you can make the Fn key sticky from the BIOS? That is really handy as you don't need to hold it... useful when using one hand only.

 

Hopefully all those suggestions fixed your problems. Other things to check (to disable allowing them to wake the computer and save more power) would be modems, mice, keyboard, and usb ports in the device manager. Anything with 'allow to wake the computer' may have a small power draw.

 

Thanks all. What I did:

- turned off wake on LAN for the 1 GB Ethernet controler from within Vista's device manager (it was on by factory default I duno why)
- turned off wake on LAN at the bios level (which was also ON by default)

This morning, I had 99% of battery while hibernating all night... sounds about right.

I find it hard to beleive that this feature alone can draw that much power over a night. Surprising indeed.

Thanks again.

 

Hi

is your notebook stop discharging when powered off?

 

Hi,

Yes, the problem was indeed the Ethernet 1 GB controller that was set for "wake up on LAN".

..And funny enough, the problem resurfaced a few days ago after I applied a driver update for the 1GB controller... It seems they set this ON by default. Luckily, that time I knew right away what to check

I can now hibernate and the battery remains 100% full in the morning.

 

Not only drivers, installing SP1 on Vista also reset it for me back to on. I think it's lame that the drivers and Vista default this to on. If a laptop is on battery and plugged into a LAN I would think that few people would want it to wake on lan.

 

Good for you

Actually I have exactly sampe problem with My Asus, unfourtunatelly disabling WOL in device mgr seems doesnt help. my BIOS also locked, and there is no power mngt tab there [sigh]

 

Yesterday, I checked Lenovo software updates through ThinkVantage and there was a patch related to WOL. Check for a patch name referring to a Windows patch.

I'm not sure but I think it related to adding separate settings for AC/battery modes to WOL tabs or something. You may want to double check this. Personally, I want it always off. It is indeed a bit of a non-sense that they put it on by default.

 

There must be something that drains power. 5 to 10% of battery over one night is significant. I doubt it could be a faulty battery alone... but you may consider this if all else fails.

What do you mean by BIOS is locked? You should be able to access it and edit BIOS settings. I suspect that if you did not forget anything in the OS, it may well be default WOL parameters in your BIOS. These can override the OS settings while in hibernate or sleep.

You did not mention when this happens, are you hibernating, sleep or turned off? Try with the PC fully off... if the battery still drains, then its probably a hardware issue.

My guess right now would be that you may have left a device with WOL active. Double check all Ethernet controllers (WiFi and RJ45 ones) and the modem device. Then check these same devices on the BIOS side. Then, try a night with laptop fully off.

 

appreciate your advice mate,

I have setted WOL to off on device manager.
I can acces BIOS, is just no power management tab there

my laptop keep discharging even when powered off. The only solution is to remove the battery briefly, then it would stop dicharging

 

humm. So it discharge even when fully off (no hibernate or sleep)? Here is another thing you could try. Full charge it to 100% and then unplug it from the laptop for 8 or more hours. Then plug it back and check if it has discharged by itself. How old is the battery pack? Rechargeable batteries do lose power by themselves more and more as they age.

If it doesn't lose its charge left on a table, it could be a hardware problem on the laptop that leaks power from battery even when turned off.

If you're still on warranty, I would take it to a technician and ask him to check for battery current leakage, etc.

Regarding the BIOS, check under "networking" maybe. I assume you checked all sub-menus in there anyway