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Thread: Laptop Battery Advice

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
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    Question Laptop Battery Advice

    I've just bought a new laptop battery for my old T41 IBM Thinkpad. It seems to work fine and I get about 3 hours from it. However the power management in Ubuntu states that it is only charging to 41% of it's capacity.

    Can I rely on the power management in Ubuntu? Should I return the battery?


  2. #2
    -grubby is offline May the Ubuntu Be With You!
    Join Date
    Aug 2007
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    Re: Laptop Battery Advice

    laptop batteries usually last that long. It is strange that it states there is only 41% of the battery being used. I suppose that if it does something else weird you should return it, otherwise, it's probably the fault of power manager

  3. #3
    Join Date
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    Re: Laptop Battery Advice

    I have a HP tablet which the battery manager reports 63% capacity. But then this battery is well used. My Dell's battery shows as 100% because it's never been used.

    I would return your battery as faulty.
    "Knowledge is power. Who said that?" - Dave Lister

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
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    Re: Laptop Battery Advice

    I've got an HP laptop and bought a new battery a month or so ago, and Power Manager claims it's 49% capacity. it lasts at least two and a half hours though.
    Last.fm | Linux User#449102 | Ubuntu User#15213
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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
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    Re: Laptop Battery Advice

    What battery you have? If you have a 12 cell and you are REALLY lucky you could be getting about half the battery life, but seems unlikely.

    In any case if you wanna make sure, try to recalibrate it ( let it drain until it wont boot at all, then charge for several hours ) and try different OSes to see if it detects it the same way or not.

    If you still have windows and/or can find somebody with a model like yours you could swap batteries and check out.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    May 2005
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    Toronto
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    Re: Laptop Battery Advice

    Yeah, my thinkpad X40 says that i'm running about half mast on battery too, but that my capacity should be much higher. I'm going to see if recalibrating helps.

    First I had to tell the power management tool to 'do nothing' when it ran out of power and now i've been running for about 20 minutes on 'phantom' power that the power manager says shouldn't be there. it's been at less than 1% for a while now. hopefully, after a good long charge it will be back to its proper stats.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jun 2007
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    19

    Re: Laptop Battery Advice

    My laptop's BIOS has an automatic battery calibration tool in it; it would make sense for people to check that theirs doesn't have a similar feature before recalibrating manually, because you can just set it going and come back when it's finished.

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