[ltp] Re: Thinkpad battery exhausted in less than a year?

Heiko Rosemann linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Mon, 15 Nov 2004 22:07:34 +0100


Hi everyone,

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:53:46 +0100, Martin Gramatke <xmit@gmx.de> wrote:
> Brian Beattie wrote:
> 
> > it is best to be plugged in when ever power os available.
>
> My idea to remove the plug when the battery is fully charged was to avoid
> these mini charge cycles. As you said, the battery will be no longer
> charged when it is at 100%, so it discharges. At a certain point, maybe 98%
> the battery becomes charged again and again...

It's actually 95% when the battery starts charging again (at least for
my X30-battery)

Theoretically, Lion-batteries should be stored at about 40% charge -
frozen. That would keep them from getting old...

Of course you don't want to put your laptop in the fridge :-)

I've been using my laptop for about a year now, mainly on AC, with the
battery mounted as backup (already used it - funny to have 3 thinkpads
beep and turn down the brightness when power fails in an office...)
and the latest full charge was about 85% of the design capacity.
(40900mWh vs. 47520mWh IIRC)

Since a few weeks, I run down the battery to 40% and then dismount it.
Hope this will give me some extra time... Germany does not have that
many non-IBM-battery-suppliers, and IBM _is_ expensive. Actually, I
still get 3.5-4hrs while typing/surfing the web on ethernet/coding -
only the slmodemd takes too much CPU power and brings me down to
2.5-3hrs.

What I find really amazing is the sort of external battery I already
mentioned in a different thread - gives me 7.5hrs+internal, at a price
which is lower than the IBM original one. (I'll have to take a few
photos and upload them somewhere) Only "quality" is not as good - the
laptop thinks it is on AC, so no power-conserving is done, and the
remaining capacity indicator is not as exact as the intelligent
batteries' one - it said 75-100% for about three hours, 50-75% for
another three hours and then went down rapidly.

Regards, Heiko