green light adjacent to optical drive

What does the green led adjacent to the optical drive on the t61 indicate?

 

Look in your manual if you have one. It should be in there on a diagram.

 

That light indicates the status of your UltraBay. In your case, it is the optical drive that is in your UltraBay. The UltraBay can be used for other things too, such as housing another battery for extended battery life, a hard drive for more storage, or if you dont think you would use either of these 3, you can get the Travel Bezel, which is basically just a cover. It lightens the load.

The light indicates that the bay is powered on and connected to the device that you have in it. You can remove the UltraBay device by pulling the switch next to the light, out pops a lever, pull the lever and out pops your device. To put it back in, just slide it back in and push the lever back in.

 

Yeah, I looked in there...it is not the most comprehensive manual.

 

Thanks for the info acaurora!

 

If it's on it means your ultrabay device is in use. Safely remove it and the light should turn off, and you can take it out.

 

in use eh? Mine is on all the time...should I be concerned?

 

The light just indicates that you have something plugged into the UltraBay and power is going to it. That's all. You can turn the light off easily by safely removing the device via the system tray just as if you were to remove a flash drive.

This is what I do when I'm on battery so I can squeeze some extra life from it. I just single click on that green arrow icon and safely remove the optical drive. I don't even have to pull the drive out, I just leave it in since no power is going to it anyways since I just "removed" it and cut all power going to it. It's a neat trick to get some more juice from your battery.

 

Why dont you just buy the Travel Bezel and use that... ?

 

I could...

...but would you buy a separate printer if you had an all-in-one printer, faxer, and scanner?

Besides, I don't mind carrying around an extra ounce or two of weight.

 

Arkit3kt, how much power do you think you get from "removing" the ultra bay DVD drive? In minutes of battery life, I guess.

 

Very minute if I had to guess. I know that everytime you open up My Computer the computer will check to see if a disc is in place, so the amount of times you access My Computer or just Computer for Vista would affect power usage.

If I had to guess, I'd say maybe about 10 minutes. And that's a generous guess.

 

If you have the Thinkpad Power Manager software, go in battery stretch, it says how much time you can gain by disabling the optical drive.
Mine says 1 minute

But actually removing the optical drive might win you more minutes, as Arkit3kt says.

 

Do you happen to have a link for it? I could never find it on the site...

 

Yup. Mine says +1 minute if I enable battery stretch as well. I'm not sure if I believe that though, it should add more than a minute.