Re: Laptop battery
Sorry the sent button took me by surprise and for a change it had to work the
first time.
On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:07:46 +0200
Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:51:59 +0000
> john gennard <joney@clara.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > Just before Christmas, I bought a secondhand T20
> > Laptop and installed Sarge which works fine.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Debian's monitor told me the battery was fully
> > charged, but, on starting I got a message 'Running off
> > Battery - 11 minutes left', two minutes later
> > 'Battery running out 0 minutes left'. It did give me
> > enough time to close everything and shut down.
> >
> > I've just recharged the battery which took just
> > over 23 minutes to reach 'fully charged'. Then switching
> > to it, in one minute I got 'Running off battery 11 mins
> > left' quickly followed by 'running out 0 mins left'.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
You can try previous sugestions, it may buy you a bit of time but I doubt it.
If the battery is Li-Ion then their nice due to relatively high capacity and
presumably no memory but they have a lifespan of about two to two and a half
years without regard to usage (storing them half charged when not used is best
though).
One of the problems (although this can also be viewed as a good point) with IBM
is that they run constantly through the battery and not directly of the input
power. At least newer ones don't work without the battery even if you have
power. This is done for surge protection and to function as a UPS AFAIK but
eats the battery a bit faster. You may want to try charging the battery with
the computer turned off to make sure that it charges properly.
Also, like mentioned you may want to run the battery check in the bios mode
since disk access can reduce battery life.
I am not sure which system the t20 uses but if its acpi (check if you
have /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/info) then its not debian thats reporting the
battery state. I'm not sure how apm works.
BTW, if you need a new battery, one option is ebay, I ran a check and there are
several sellers offering batteries for the t20 (between 30$ and 80$ IIRC),
there are probably other options.
I just replaced the battery on my laptop that after three years started lasting
25 minutes on a charge. Now the new one reads
design capacity: 65140 mWh
last full capacity: 76560 mWh
Strange hah?
> > Regards, John.
> >
> >
> >
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