W520 battery drains even when off

I've noticed that Power Manager reports significantly less available power when left shutdown for a few days. After leaving it in shutdown for about 5 days my battery reported 57% charge upon logon. I distinctly remember leaving it with about 97% charge when I last shut it down.

Has anyone else observed this? Also the fingerprint reader appeared to have a green light ready upon opening the lid. Does shutdown not completely power down the W520? I also have a T410 but its used daily so I never noticed this.

update: okay might be power manager that's confusing me. Windows battery icon reports "90% not charging" while power manager says "100% in Maximum Lifespan mode". Which do you trust?

 

Turning it off doesn't cut all power. The battery will always drain over time, even batteries not plugged into anything do this. That's why if you change the memory you have to pull the battery out, to cut power 100% in the system.

I would trust power manager over Windows as it would have access to more information about the batteries and charging.

 

I can understand some drain but should it really drain that fast?

 

40% over 120 hours doesn't really surprise me. If you had the battery out of the laptop, then it would.

 

I've left my laptop off for a few days and lost about 4% and I'm pretty sure it was due to the fingerprint reader which is always on unless you manually turn it off. Have you gone through your power settings to make sure you don't have your USB port set to always on? Those are the two most obvious reasons that I can think of which is causing your battery to drop.

 

Power Manager: Global Power Settings:
x Beep when power state changes
x Enable Always on USB
_ Enable even when computer is in hibernation mode or turned off.

Seems I have the yellow port only enabled when laptop is turned on. So I don't think it should be draining with that. Did you turn yours off entirely?

 

I have my power settings set the same as yours. I wanted to make sure you didn't have the last option checked. The always on USB option, based on my understanding, keeps the USB 2.0 (blue) always on and doesn't let your power manager turn it off on battery mode to save power.

I would expect your fingerprint reader to drain your battery some but 40% over 5 days seems excessive to me considering I see about a 4% drain over 2 days. Maybe some other people might have some ideas of what could be causing it.

You could also try to recalibrate your battery in the power manager to see if that helps.

 

I posted this in another thread, but it seems applicable here too RE: battery discharge due to the fingerprint reader.

 

Run this from the command prompt:
powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

It should list a few devices.

Go into Device Manager, open the device's properties, go to it's Power Management tab, and uncheck the wake checkbox.

 

Fact: Rechargeable batteries wear from cycling.

This should be fixed as it is a class-action suit waiting to happen.

 

intriguing, is it still taking away 10% per day for you?

powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
returned:
Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection <-- wanted to keep that, BIOS says WOL 'AC Only'
HID-compliant mouse <-- bluetooth mouse, turned it off, can wake on ultranav

So you think it kept bluetooth running even with laptop turned off? Going to try it out to see if it improves.

There weren't many additional options in BIOS 1.21 from what's accessible in power manager.

 

So... You're going to sue a fact now?

Next time after you plan to leave it off for a while, try unplugging both the AC and the battery, then plugging the battery back in (without turning it on) before leaving it to sit.

 

You definitely have something that's not going to an off state. I can leave mine unplugged for several days and my battery won't budge even 1%. I have my fingerprint reader turned off however when the machine is off.