On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 11:16:02PM +0200, Anders E. Andersen wrote:
> Could anybody give some advice on my battery situation. I own an ASUS A1
> laptop and a while back I began having trouble with the APM system.
>
> The first thing that happened was that my battery would only charge to
> 60% of maximum power. It was quite suddenly and exactly 60%. After that
> I have been having increasing problems with recharging and power supply.
> A lot of times the system seems to shut down quite suddenly and
> unprovoked, also battery life has decreased to about 30 minutes max,
> even when mostly idling.
I've had that too (albeit on a different make & model):
http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop/2002/debian-laptop-200209/msg00343.html
I ended up writing a tool to record battery charge over time, just to
keep track of it. The URL is in the archives too.
Batteries seem incredibly complex these days - there is quite a bit of
circuitry in them to prevent over-charging and under-charging (weird,
but true). And figuring out the charge in a battery is (seemingly)
fraught with errors - it seems to largely depend on the battery type
(nicad, li/ion, whatever) history and how the battery circuitry
interacts with the BIOS.
But I'm not (yet) willing to discount factors such as temperature,
humidity, G-force, phase of the moon or time of the month...
> Sometimes the battery wont charge when I plug in the power cable, if I
> remove it and plug it in again it starts charging for a while but then
> stops.
>
> Do I need to replace the battery?
If the battery life has gone down to 30 minutes, then: Yes, quite
likely (assuming off course that the battery life was much longer before).
> Is there something more seriously wrong with my system?
Could be - Check for BIOS updates (I'm not familiar with ASUS; is the
BIOS upgradeable at all?). The kernel version should matter much (if at
all).
> I was wondering if the switch inside the power plug is bend so that it
> does not detect that I plug in the power cord. It also seems if I jiggle
> the cord it will sometimes start to charge, however if I measure the
> voltage with a voltmeter and then jiggle the cable it doesn't appear as
> if there is a breakage in the cable itself.
How about an oscilloscope (whatever way you spell it)? If the "jiggling"
results in a very short (milliseconds) power failure, it is likely to be
seen by the bios, whereas a voltmeter wouldn't necessarily notice.
Disclaimer: I'm not a battery expert in any sense of the word. I've just
done a lot of reading.
--
Karl E. Jørgensen
karl@jorgensen.com http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything.
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