[ltp] Aggressive battery diagnostics on T42p, should I return these?

[Daniel Baule]

Hi,

I got the same problems with my T43, which isn=B4t much older than 3months.

denkbrett BAT0 # cat info state =A0| sort | uniq
cat: =A0: No such file or directory
OEM info:                SANYO
battery technology:      rechargeable
battery type:            LION
capacity granularity 1:  1 mWh
capacity granularity 2:  1 mWh
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          discharging
design capacity low:     200 mWh
design capacity warning: 1456 mWh
design capacity:         47520 mWh
design voltage:          10800 mV
last full capacity:      29130 mWh
model number:            IBM-08K8193
present rate:            18844 mW
present voltage:         12026 mV
present:                 yes
remaining capacity:      28210 mWh
serial number:             573

Telling something bout my problems would just be writing down the same=20
text ;-)

Is there any chance of getting a new battery from IBM?


Am Dienstag, 4. April 2006 08:14 schrieb David A. Desrosiers:
> 	Ever since Day 1 of using my shiny new T42p (bought new, direct from
> IBM), I have had pretty horrible battery life on the unit. When I bought
> it, I was told that the "extended" battery was the only option, because
> the "regular" battery (like my wife's T42, non 'p' uses) would provide
> less than an hour of life, so the extended battery was the only option.
>
> 	I bought two of them, since I travel frequently for work and other
> purposes, and I'd like to be able to use the laptop for at least one
> cross-country trip without losing juice.
>
> 	The *MAX* life I've ever gotten out of these batteries is just over 2h,
> while doing absolutely nothing. In fact, this laptop has been sitting
> overnight, powered off, charging in the dock. When I came in this
> morning, I booted up, and 'acpi -V' shows the following:
>
> # acpi -V
>    Battery 1: discharging, 97%, 02:19:58 remaining
>    Thermal 1: ok, 34.0 degrees C
> AC Adapter 1: off-line
>
> 	If I launch a few applications, anything that hits the disk, it'll cut
> that value almost in half. Play a DVD? Forget it. I won't even get
> through 1/2 of it.
>
> 	Right now, the laptop is running at 600Mhz, using the powersave
> governor, and laptop_mode is enabled. I'm also using hdparm -B to turn
> the powersave features of the drives on as well. I've done just about as
> much as I can do to save and extend the battery life, except turn off
> the LCD proper. The LCD dims when on battery, as it should, and dims
> when idle.
>
> 	I've also configured X with the proper "PowerSave" and "DynamicClocks"
> values, so I'm not sucking too much juice there either.
>
> 	Here's what shows up in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/
>
> # cat info state  | sort | uniq
> battery technology:      rechargeable
> battery type:            LION
> capacity granularity 1:  1 mWh
> capacity granularity 2:  1 mWh
> capacity state:          ok
> charging state:          charged
> design capacity:         71280 mWh
> design capacity low:     200 mWh
> design capacity warning: 2714 mWh
> design voltage:          10800 mV
> last full capacity:      54290 mWh
> model number:            IBM-08K8198
> OEM info:                SANYO
> present rate:            0 mW
> present voltage:         12238 mV
> present:                 yes
> remaining capacity:      52190 mWh
> serial number:             103
>
> 	The curious part here, is the pretty big difference between "design
> capacity" and "last full capacity" on this battery. There's a 24%
> difference there.
>
> 	Just to be sure it wasn't a fluke, I ran BOTH of my extended batteries
> down as far as they could go, by running a simple 'dd' command to drain
> them (while /bin/true; do dd if=3D/dev/hda of=3D/dev/null; done;)
>
> 	The values you see above, are from an overnight recharge of one of the
> batteries, after this action.
>
> 	The other curious thing here, is that running the extended battery down
> to nothing, also drains the CMOS battery. When I completely run out of
> battery life and the laptop powers off because it has no more power
> left, I have to go back into the BIOS and reset the time, date, and
> other settings. CMOS seems to be tied to the main battery, for some
> reason.
>
> 	So my real question here is... are these batteries "damaged" in some
> way? Or do they really run down this much in life over less than a
> year's worth of usage? The second battery (my 'spare'), has just over
> 51000mWh in it, and its probably been used 10 times. Will IBM honor a
> replacement of these batteries?
>
> 	Shouldn't a Pentium M laptop running at 600Mhz be getting WELL over 3-4
> hours on these batteries? It seems unrealistic that a new battery would
> give me 2 hours of life, on a laptop designed to run for multiple hours
> at a time.
>
> 	I'd love to see the results of others in this area on similar
> hardware.
>
> 	Thanks in advance for any advice/ideas you can provide.