[ltp] T21 battery charging and draining problems

[Robert Kleemann]

I just purchased a T21 from ebay.  The machine is old but the screen and 
battery were recently replaced.  There are two problems that I'm running 
into.

1) The battery never seems to be fully charged.   The LED indicator gets 
up to blinking green but never reaches solid green.

2) The battery drains while the AC power is plugged in.  When I run the 
computer for a long time (with gentoo CD in the drive and serial port 
operating) the battery drains until it is blinking orange.  If I power 
down the laptop and leave it plugged in it gets back to blinking green 
but never to solid green.

For now (while installing gentoo) I've just removed the battery 
completely as it seems to run fine on AC power alone.  I bought the 
machine to primarily be a portable desktop replacement so the lack of a 
battery isn't terrible but it would be nice to be able to have 
occasional battery power.

Any ideas?  Should I just leave the battery out of the unit and only 
install it when I want battery power?  Once gentoo is installed I 
suppose I could install some laptop utilities which may tell me what's 
going on.

laptop n00b
Robert.