Thinkpads Forum

My power manager icon keeps showing my battery at 4%, and charging. Nothing ever changes.

Everything worked fine until a day ago - I was using it unplugged and battery got low. Plugged it back in and left home.

The battery actually appears to be charged, I can unplug it and get no warning, and laptop will run fine for 1/2 hour or more - which it could not do with a 4% charge. I have restarted the computer a few times, I have downloaded the latest Lenovo Power manager version and rebooted. Swapped PS's (have two) to make sure that wasn't it. Currently I'm running the battery guage reset application from PM - it's been running an hour and seems to do nothing - icon still shows 4% charge. Within PM, it shows my battery condition as "good" and no problems (battery has been in service 2 years, litghtly used and working as new and still appears to).

My PM is set to start charcing below 80, stop at 86% - so it certainly should be charcing...

Ideas anyone?

My IdeaPad Z570 was acting goofy like that. No matter what I tried the Power Management indicator showed a very low percentage, stated it was charging, but it wasn't. I finally decided to take Windows and the Power Management Utility out of the picture by using a boot disk to run the laptop. I booted up a Linux disk and ran that for 10 - 20 minutes. When I rebooted back into Windows the laptop started charging again correctly. I haven't had a problem since.

I am beginning to think I need to do something like that.

It is actually not charging at all, the battery drained down. This all happened watching '80s mock "literal video" goofs on you tube with the kids on my bed. I have a hard time believing I jarred/banged/broke the 23 month old genuine factory battery while it sat on my chest in bed! Gotta be some Lenovo PM/Windows nonsense.

Thanks for the clue, I'll live on the a/c adapter a few days and experiment.