Hi,I've a Li-ion battery on my laptop that says that it's capacity is of 3600mAH, but i've compiled my kernel with acpi and i've been reading the proc fs under /proc/acpi/battery/0/info and it says that my battery last charge was only of 596mAH. This is bad since i can only use my laptop during 30 minutes...I'm using the debian kernel-source 2.4.18 from stable and with acpi + acpid i can only shutdown my laptop, i can't even suspend it. I've tryed the acpi patches from acpi.sf.net (the latest for 2.4.18) and with that my kde doesn't recognize the acpi subsystem. (it recognizes with the default acpi subsystem, without patches)Does anyone know how to charge the battery to the maximum? thanks. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-laptop-request@lists.debian.orgwith a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
If your battery is more than 12 months old (could be more or less depending on how often you charge/discharge or run on just AC and whether or not you completely drain it before recharging) it may just be time for a new battery. Li-ion batteries develop a memory over time which prevents them from holding as much charge as when new. The "gas guage" in the BIOS could also be out of calibration.
The best thing you can do is first double check your BIOS settings and make sure you don't have anything out of the ordinary and that the machine is not set to auto power down at certain battery charge level. Then fully charge your battery (or as full as you think it will get). Then completely discharge it by booting (with a floppy) to an OS without any power management (Win 95, 98, or NT4.0 or any version of DOS is what I recommend) and let the machine run until it shuts down on its own at the end of the battery. Recharge and repeat the cycle 3 or 4 times.
If after all that, you are still experiencing the same behavior, your battery is either bad or old. In either case, it is time for a new battery. If it worked, your battery should be holding a better charge.
Hope this helps. -Roberto Sanchez _________________________________________________________________STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail