mridkash
February 17th, 2008, 04:19 PM
A rather interesting thing happened to me sometime back, I was worried about the declining battery life on my year and a half old laptop (compaq). It used to be about 3 hrs but now it went down to just 1 hr.
Ubuntu power analysis shows that the battery life is 45% (poor).
So I decided one day to clean off any memory effect on the battery by discharging it until it dies. As the battery went down to 5% Windows hibernated, then I started Ubuntu and after some time it hibernated too. Then I started ubuntu but the bios screen did not let me and it displayed a message that the battery is critically low and the system cannot boot. Then I plugged in the charger and booted ubuntu and after a moment plugged out again.
I thought it wouldn't boot, but it did and the battery status indicator showed 0% left. (see the screen shot).
Amazingly, the system kept running for about 1 hr on 0% battery, I was shocked to see that. And during that time I played cpu intensive games like chess and vdrift.
After that I have now turned off automatic hibernation on battery discharge and regularly see the indicator going to 0 and laptop still running. I think it is the charge indicating mechanism in the battery which is broken, not the battery itself.
Screen shots attached. you can see the uptime value at top.
Ubuntu power analysis shows that the battery life is 45% (poor).
So I decided one day to clean off any memory effect on the battery by discharging it until it dies. As the battery went down to 5% Windows hibernated, then I started Ubuntu and after some time it hibernated too. Then I started ubuntu but the bios screen did not let me and it displayed a message that the battery is critically low and the system cannot boot. Then I plugged in the charger and booted ubuntu and after a moment plugged out again.
I thought it wouldn't boot, but it did and the battery status indicator showed 0% left. (see the screen shot).
Amazingly, the system kept running for about 1 hr on 0% battery, I was shocked to see that. And during that time I played cpu intensive games like chess and vdrift.
After that I have now turned off automatic hibernation on battery discharge and regularly see the indicator going to 0 and laptop still running. I think it is the charge indicating mechanism in the battery which is broken, not the battery itself.
Screen shots attached. you can see the uptime value at top.