Battery won't charge past certain percent

[brixish]

Hey, I've got Win7 and 11.04 (Unity, if that helps) dual-booted on my 1 year old Dell Inspiron 1545. Battery might be a 6-cell (don't remember) and usually lasts 4-5 hours if not heavily multi-tasking. In the past week, I've noticed that when on Ubuntu, pulling out the power cable when the battery is "fully charged" shows a pop-up for only having reached 66% or 67%, and never past that. This also means that the battery is only estimated to have 2-3 hours, instead of 4-5. I know that batteries lose their ability to keep a charge as they age, BUT when I switch over to Win7, pulling out the power cable after a charge session will show somewhere in the neighborhood of 96-99% charge, with the 4-5 hours intact.

What sort of problem could this be? Would a new battery not fix anything? Anything else I could do?

All help appreciated. Cheers!

[!!DocMartens]

Hello brixish,

it's the same here. I've been using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for about 1 year on my Dell Inspiron 1545 (6 cells battery). The battery got always fully charged. After charing, the run time was about 5-6 hours depending on my activity.

Now, for about three weeks I have the same problem. The battery gets charged until about 60% is reached. Then the charing process gets stopped the charing light switches off. The resulting run time is about three hours. I'm not sure if the problem appeared after a system update. Is there a way to set up the charing treshold values? Perhaps there is something wrong with these values?

Could somebody please help us? Thanks in advance!

[nipunshakya]

Guys, i had the same problem with my dell inspiron 1440... problem is, my battery was healthy on win7 but ill on ubuntu..., my laptop battery would charge upto certain percentage(72% i guess), and after some weeks, the charging % would get down to 59....46...and such...until one day, i got an error message that my battery doesn't work and that ive to hit F2 to continue ...it was on ubuntu....

I ended up with a dead battery and help replace it with new one...... i guess its a dell thing regarding this battery problem...i suggest you guys run win7 on battery and ubuntu only when u are plugged to a source...
reagarding the solution, i would also like a solution from someone on this problem to avoid my current battery's health being degraded furthurmore...
Regards, WinuxUser

[manco]

Yeah I'm having a similar problem on my Inspiron 1525; my battery won't charge past 41%.

But charging the battery shouldn't be OS independent. I.e., you should be able to charge the battery completely with the laptop off but plugged in.

I'm going to try mine with a live CD and see what happens.