Ultrabay Battery is used first and drains to ZERO

[t61_owner]

My gripe is that my T61 drains the Ultrabay battery first and drains it to ZERO before going to the main battery.  It substantially reduces the lifespan of the Ultrabay battery.  It's really a shame that Lenovo cannot/will not provide a decent BIOS or driver to allow the user to select how the batteries are used.  Why is it so difficult to provide this capability?

[trapdoor]

Agree 100%. When I'm out and about I have two 7-cell standard batteries and an Ultrabay Advance battery. I want the standard battery to drain 1st, so that I can swap it out when it has run down and the T61 switched over t the (standby) Ultrabay battery.

Surely the primary battery should be drained first followed by any accessory battery? What 'branos' designed the power schema in the BIOS to operate this way? Or as you say, why can't there be a section in PowerManager tha allows you to customise the discharge order?

The way I HAVE to work is to ensure that the Ultrabay battery is out of the machine when running on my 1st primary battery, and when that warns me it's going to run flat, I then have to install the Ultrabay battery, wait for it to switch, and then swap out the primary battery for the 2nd charged one.

Come on Lenovo, please fix this idiotic situation. Write and issue a BIOS update and PowerManager update. I mean, in the year that I have owned this T61, there must have been 4+ BIOS updates and perhaps the same number of PowerManager updates for trivial fixes.....

[t61_owner]

It's ridiculous that to have to manually monitor the battery.  What's the point of having a power manager?

Someone mentioned that Dell's power manager allows you to specify the order and cutoff level (although I have not verified this).  Are you listening, Lenovo?

[Mark_Lenovo Former Administrator]

T61_owner,

Thanks for starting this discussion!  

I've checked with engineering and it seems that this is working as currently designed, however I can certainly see that you make some very logical points.   I can't promise if or when this might change in the future, but maybe we discuss this a bit more and hopefully some other members will join in and share their first hand experience and opinion.

Let's see if we can reach some consensus on how we would like this to work instead, or put another way, what the desired features / controls would be.

I think I heard:

•  Customers would like to be able to select the order of use of the batteries - primary first, or ultrabay first

•  A start using / stop using percentage control might be helpful to keep the battery from going to zero.

What else?

If anyone has first hand experience on other systems, how is this handled?  What features did you find valuable?

Best regards,

Mark

[t61_owner]

Hi Mark:

Thank you for bring this issue to the attention of the right people.  Although it may be working as designed, I believe that it's a flawed design.

I'd prioritize my desired features as follows:

1.  A start/stop using percentage control for each battery.

2.  Battery usage order selection.

3.  The same functions for charging.

One thing I would like to add is that people may not be aware that this is the case.  I did not know about this for months until I check the capacity of both batteries and did some testing.

Cheers.

[trapdoor]

I'd agree with t61_owner and say that I believe this is a flawed schema if you cannot select charge/discharge order and thresholds.

My wife has a Dell provided for her work, and I believe the default position is that it discharges primary then secondary batteries but the order can be changed.

I also agree that many people don't know about how the charge/discharge order works with primary and ultrabay batteries - I don't actually know anyone else who has a Thinkpad that uses an Ultrabay battery as they are quite rare beasts in the UK - presumably because they are very expensive!

With a machine that is supposed to be a 'premium brand', regardless of whether this is how it is designed, surely IBM/Lenovo should be giving their buyers the choice of how they want their batteries to be used. I find it totally ludicrous that I have to ensure that my Ultrabay battery isn't installed when I start to use my machine and only plug it in when my primary battery reaches say 10% to allow me to swap out that battery.

Would very much appreciate if Lenovo can look into this. For me, it would be one of the best software upgrades yet!

[mades]

Please note, that there is a workaround for this in linux , read more here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_use_UltraBay_batteries .

[t61_owner]

I learned about the Linux solution some time ago while researching this.

First, the applications used on the laptop is Windows only, so no Linux.  Second, if some developers can hack together a solution without official documentation or technical support for Lenovo, why can't Lenovo develop its own solution?

Even if Lenovo believes that the current way is the correct way, it still should recognize that users may want options.

[stealthth]

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Mark_Lenovo wrote:

T61_owner,

Thanks for starting this discussion!  

I've checked with engineering and it seems that this is working as currently designed, however I can certainly see that you make some very logical points.   I can't promise if or when this might change in the future, but maybe we discuss this a bit more and hopefully some other members will join in and share their first hand experience and opinion.

Let's see if we can reach some consensus on how we would like this to work instead, or put another way, what the desired features / controls would be.

I think I heard:

•  Customers would like to be able to select the order of use of the batteries - primary first, or ultrabay first

•  A start using / stop using percentage control might be helpful to keep the battery from going to zero.

What else?

If anyone has first hand experience on other systems, how is this handled?  What features did you find valuable?

Best regards,

Mark

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If I could have it where it would use the ultrabay battery until ~10% then automatically switch to the main battery, I would buy an ultra bay battery in a heart beat. The fact that it fully drains the battery before switching is not good for sustaining charge capacity.

[mades]

I think that ANY solution is better than the current one. Just checking my new battery: design capacity 29.16, full charge capacity 27.55, cycle count 25. The main one has like 3 times that big gap between design/current but with 250 cycles already.