[ltp] Running with line power and no battery

[David A. Desrosiers]

On Sun, 2008-03-02 at 12:23 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> Whomever recommended you to use the full-drain tool on Li-ION or LiPol
> for anything else than a gauge reset doesn't know what he is talking
> about, so just ignore any battery advice you ever got from this
> person.

Funny too, that the tool detects that the battery is a Li-ion, and
happily continues onward, allowing you to "exercise" it in this
fashion. 

I can tell you from personal experience using this tool for the past few
years across 3-4 different Thinkpad models, that it DOES give me extra
life out of my previously thought "dead" batteries. All of them have
been using Li-ion batteries.

The tool will refuse to run on laptop models that it wasn't designed to
run on. I'd like to believe that IBM would have incorporated some logic
to detect the presence of Li-ion cells vs. NiMH cells and refuse to run
if it were really a problem of damaging the battery itself.

In any case, using it on my current two 9-cell T42p batteries has given
me about 45 minutes more life out of the batteries than before, and it
doesn't seem to have anything to do with "calibration" that I can see,
unless a mis-calibrated battery pack "locks" usable battery life from
being accessible to the hardware until you recalibrate it. 

That would be horribly asinine to implement.


-- 
David A. Desrosiers
desrod@gnu-designs.com
Skype...: 860-967-3820