Possible solution to low battery capacity in Win7

[Rumi]

I tried disabling the Power Manager in services, didn't change anything for me.  Also, even tried uninstalling ThinkVantage Power Manager, but that didn't change anything either, Windows still only reporting 6 hours of battery life on my 9-Cell in Power Saving Mode.  I still have roughly 95% of my battery's original capacity... I should at least be getting 7 hours.  Using the Windows Power settings though does seem nicer.

Still waiting on driver updates Lenovo.

[lee_tvt]

ThinkVantage Power Manager is likely to improve your battery life and has tools to help improve the life span of your battery

[Jeho]

Powermanager always worked for me in Win XP but in Win 7 .... it seems to be broken or maybe there are some bad interactions with the Win 7 powermanagement.

[dixis]

sorry, but this is not the answer to our problem.... please read the thread!

[Rumi]

So there are quite a few reviews out now about Windows 7 and battery life with netbooks.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/stick-with-xp-windows-7-battery-life-worse-on-netbooks

I'm guessing this is a Windows 7 problem, although anything Lenovo can do to help with more efficient drivers would be great too.  Hopefully Microsoft will release some kind of SP2 or something to improve battery life.

[Sayuuk]

yes, but that's about the difference in battery life between XP and 7 (and Vista actually, since there hasn't been much change there...)

what we are experiencing here are a few very specific issues that have nothing to do with the general power management of the OS

Stefan

[dixis]

I have experienced something interesting lately.... when I had the Power manager GUI open, I immediately lost nearly one hour.... when I checked Taskmanager..... pwmgui.exe uses 50% of my CPU!

But with switching several times between descrete and internal grafics and finally staying on internal, plus no USB-drives attached....no usb-mouse connected.... and dimming the display to 3-4 stripes i nearly had 5 hours of "up-time" which is about the same as on vista...... considering that my battery wore down from 84 to 69 Wh in one year....

Model - W500 - 4063-A45

[Sayuuk]

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dixis wrote:

...

considering that my battery wore down from 84 to 69 Wh in one year....

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did you try a battery gauge reset on the battery maintenance screen already? I was down to 72 after 6 months, did a reset and it's back to 80, which is pretty good =)

Stefan

P.S.: the fact that the PWM-GUI uses a lot of CPU (for no appearent reason...) is well known I think...  nothing too major though since you normally don't have it open that much...

[dixis]

actually when i recalibrated i had 69 instead of 70..... but still i am quite happy

[bemymonkey]

I'm having similar battery life problems with an SL500 - ~25W power draw instead of the usual 16W under XP... not really acceptable. in my case, removing the Power Manager didn't help

-edit- Win7 Professional x64, BTW.