Re: Laptop battery
john gennard wrote:
Just before Christmas, I bought a secondhand T20
Laptop and installed Sarge which works fine.
So far so good, as the man said when he fell past the
twentieth floor.
The vendor said there was a battery which 'worked
well'. Embarrassingly, I have so far always used the T20
with the AC Adapter. However, last evening I decided to
use the battery to see how much time I would get from it.
[it looked like not much]
It would seem that I've been 'sold a pup', but
before getting a new one (assuming one can be found), I
just wondered if anything in the Debian software could be misconfigured.
The battery itself seems in almost pristine
condition to my inexperienced eyes.
This means nothing.
Can anyone offer any suggestions (solice is perhaps
too much to hope for). I've never had anything to do with
Laptops before, so I'm in the dark.
First, let's get a real idea of how long that puppy will
run on battery. I suggest you shut down, then bring it
up to the BIOS config screen, and proceed no further
in the boot. Leave it there, until it actually does run
down.
NB: This is NOT A GOOD THING for the battery, but
in this case it is (since, I presume, you have no equipment
to check the battery otherwise) the only way actually to
measure the batttery capacity. You don't want your system
"up" when it runs down.
NB: This may cause you to lose your BIOS configuration data;
I suggest you write it down before trying this.
Time how long this takes. If it takes more than 11 minutes,
something like 2 hours, then you know that the monitoring
hardware or software or firmware is miscalibrated. If it
takes 20 minutes, then you probably need a new battery.
Try recharging, preferably for 12-14 hours, and try again.
If it fails in 20 minutes again, then you *know*. If it
sits at the BIOS screen for at least an hour, then I suspect
that the battery is really ok.
Mike
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