11. Battery Grooming And Power Conditioning

What's unique in Lenovo notebooks is the ability to control how full to charge the battery, right inside Windows XP. This is not simply a technical gimmick, because the right setting can help increase the overall lifetime of a battery. That's because the battery tends to reside inside the notebook most of the time, even when it's fully loaded and the notebook is plugged into a wall socket. Keeping the battery in a hot notebook, fully charged, reduces its life.

The Power Manager lets users establish the charge level at which the battery should be stored over the long term.

This technique for setting battery load levels prevents the battery from being continuously charged and recharged when only small amounts of battery power are actually being used. As a result, the average temperature of the battery cells stays lower, and as you already know - especially if you've read our article Squeezing More Life Out of Your Notebook's Battery Part II - this stretches the aging process of a battery and helps it last longer.

A large indicator in the task bar assures that battery load level is always visible.

By default, the Z60m battery isn't recharged until the long-term storage load level diminishes to 95% of its actual setting.

It's a good thing that the Battery Manager is pre-installed on the notebook, because you can't find this tool on the Web site at all!