ThinkPad Helper - Lightweight control tool for Lenovo ThinkPads

Small and lightweight Lenovo Vantage alternative for ThinkPads, offering the controls you actually use with a much smaller footprint. A single exe that doesn't install anything on your system and doesn't ship any kernel drivers. Built and verified on a ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 - X1 Extreme Gen 2 and other models using the same power management driver are expected to work, feedback welcome.

💾 Download

Linux build - fully self-contained single files, no runtime prerequisites. Optional camera-based ambient light downloads separately from within the app (~34 MB).

⭐ If you like the app - please spread the word about it online

🎁 Advantages

1. Just one exe to run. Doesn't install anything in your system, runs no services, ships no drivers.
2. Battery charge limit that lives in the embedded controller - survives reboots even with the app closed.
3. Performance modes switchable right from the tray menu.
4. Keyboard backlight automation plus optional camera-based ambient display brightness.
5. Simple and clean native UI that follows your Windows light/dark theme.
6. Small: ~45 MB self-contained, and the camera feature stays out until you ask for it.
7. Fully open source (MIT).

⚡ Features

1. Performance modes: Quiet - Balanced - Performance (Windows power plans, Linux platform_profile)
2. Battery charge threshold: set start % and stop %, applied instantly and kept by firmware
3. Battery vitals: live wattage, voltage, remaining charge in Wh, design vs full capacity, health % and cycle count - the numbers Vantage shows, without Vantage
4. Keyboard backlight: lights up on any input, goes dark after idle timeout, never fights your Fn+Space
5. Ambient display brightness: camera samples room light on an interval (optional ~34 MB add-on, downloaded from within the app only if you enable it)
6. Display brightness control
7. GPU monitor: model, power limit and temperature via nvidia-smi
8. Theme: follows OS light/dark live, with manual override
9. Tray-friendly: start minimized, close to tray, launch at startup, update checks

Fan curves are not here yet: these machines have no user-mode fan interface, and shipping a kernel driver just for that is its own project. The investigation notes live in docs/FINDINGS.md.

Note

🔖 Important Notice

ThinkPad Helper is NOT an operating system, firmware, or driver. It DOES NOT "run" your hardware in real-time anyhow.

It's an app that sets values that already exist on your device - charge thresholds, backlight levels, brightness, performance mode - through the same interfaces Lenovo's own software uses: the IBMPmDrv driver that arrives with Lenovo Vantage's power management component, BIOS-exposed WMI methods, and standard OS APIs. Nothing here invents new hardware states.

If you use equivalent settings as in Lenovo Vantage - the behavior of your device won't be different.

The role of ThinkPad Helper for your laptop is similar to the role of a remote control for your TV.

Building

dotnet publish src/ThinkPadHelper/ThinkPadHelper.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 `
  --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true `
  -o publish

Any recent .NET SDK works (scoop install dotnet-sdk). Tags starting with v produce release binaries automatically via GitHub Actions.

The reverse-engineered hardware protocol notes (including which interfaces provably don't exist) are documented in docs/FINDINGS.md; read-only diagnostic probes used during discovery live in tools/.

Acknowledgements

• pspatel321/auto-backlight-for-thinkpad - the IBMPmDrv keyboard-backlight groundwork this project grew from
• wesmar/lbm - independent documentation of the charge-threshold driver protocol
• TPFanControl community - decades of ThinkPad EC knowledge

License

MIT