Power Manager Request: More control over battery use

[akgrown]

Hello -  I have a Thinkpad X301 with a 6-cell main battery and the 3-cell UltraBay battery.  I have not been able to find a way to balance the load between these two batteries so they are depleted (percentage-wise) at the same rate, or, at a bare minimum, a way to control which battery is used first.

As it stands, the UltraBay battery will always be used first, resulting in complete discharges, and charge cycle count increases out of proportion with the main 6-cell battery.

A humble request for the team in charge of the Power Manager software:

The ability to:

-Change the order of battery use (which battery is considered "primary")

-Choose to deplete batteries at the same rate (so a 6-cell and 3-cell would reach 0% at the same time)

-Specify charge thresholds at which the system would switch from primary to secondary battery, if battery use is sequential - much like the current ability to select at which point charging starts/stops for each battery.

-Specify whether, if both batteries have reached their specified low-end threshold, the system then continues to deplete them to 0% or if it goes into hibernation.

For those of us who use the ultrabay battery as a secondary power source, these types of options would truly be ideal!

Thanks for reading.

[t61_owner]

Those would be nice features to have, but apparently it's working "as designed" so you're out of luck.  I'm having the same problem and went through 2 ultrabay batteries.

Lenovo wants you to destroy your Ultrabay battery so you'd buy a replacement from them.  I'm starting to hate Lenovo and may never buy from them again.

Message Edited by t61_owner on 03-15-2009 09:47 PM

[okyko]

will anyone from lenovo actually respond to these messages?

akgrown has put my point across much better than i could have done..

is there a reason why we cant have these settings incorporated? im using x300, with the bay battery, its better but still not enough battery life.. so why cant I set it so the system will use the main battery first, so i can at least swap the main battery without power down? or am I supposed to buy 10 bay batteries and keep swapping those?!?!!?!

continuous computing? who on earth would want that? maybe all us power hungry battery bashing road monsters who need uptime all the time, hence we bought top of the line business machines that can cope?

LENOVO...youll sell more batteries!!!!

[JaneL Community SuperMod]

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okyko wrote:

will anyone from lenovo actually respond to these messages?

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Welcome to the forum!

While there are a few Lenovo employees roaming around in here helping out on a volunteer basis, this is not an official support channel. Instead, this is designed to be a user-to-user support and discussion forum. You may or may not get an answer directly from one of the Lenovo employees as there are way more of us than them and all of them, even Mark, have full-time jobs doing other things.