[ltp] Battery life indicator very non-linear

[John Magolske]

When I bought a new battery for my X40 a year ago (paid extra for
the official Lenova replacement battery), I charged the pack to full,
drained it, then charged it to full again. As I understand, this
should do a reset and calibration for battery life indication.

An odd thing I'm noticing when running off the battery is that I'll
see the battery life indicator at something like 85%, then five
minutes later I notice it's dropped down to something like 34%. This
seems quite erratic, and it makes me wonder how much life is really
left in the battery. Is there some way of re-calibrating it other that
doing a total drain-till-it-shuts-off? From what I understand, full
discharge like this is hard on the battery, so I'd like to avoid that.

Mostly I use my machine plugged in to the AC adapter, occasionally
running off the battery. Only a few times has it dropped below 50%.

I'm not doing anything CPU intensive when noticing the erratic battery
life indication...editing a few files with Vim, idling @ 600MHz, etc.

I'm getting my battery life numbers from the output of `acpi -b`

Thanks for any help,

John

-- 
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact