Battery claims it is at 0%, but still works.

[K. Eng]

update - now the battery is working normally again. I have no idea what was going on earlier.

This morning my battery had 32 watt/hrs of capacity left, but as I was using it, the meter went from 90% to 0%. The battery is obviously not at 0% - my machine continues to run, even though the battery LED on the montor bezel is flashing orange at me.

I've tried rebooting and everything, but I can't get the battery maximiser to display anything but 0% charge.

Any ideas?

[carbon_unit]

The last time I ran down me T23's battery (according to IBM's instructions) it ran at 0% 0:01 remaining for 45 minutes.... Go figure. But your problem sounds different than that.

[Leon]

try taking the battery physically off the system, and putting it back on, and then retry

[K. Eng]

I just tried that and it has no effect. The battery meter is stuck at 0%. The battery is trying to charge, but the meter claims that it was fully discharged (untrue) and that it will take 14 hours to fully charge.

try taking the battery physically off the system, and putting it back on, and then retry

[apoll0]

I have a similar problem with mine at the moment. This afternoon, my battery went from 75% to 0% without my notice. I looked at the gauge and it was charging at about 5 Watts, this means that the battery is actually almost full.. and it says it will take 10 hrs to recharge...

I tried removing the battery and reinserting like 10 times, no luck. Then I decided to drained the battery. While it was at 1%, i was able to play game for a couple of hours! Now the meter reading is at 0%, even though the battery is charged almost to its full.

Now I can't even boot up without an AC because it would shut down right away, thinking it's 0% in the battery.

Wonder if anyone else had a similar experience.

[apoll0]

update

After the battery finished charging, the gauge went from 7% to 100%, go figure!

[WilsonF]

How old are your batteries? In my experience, "cliff" discharging and charging precedes by a month or two complete failure to recharge, except in cases where reseating the battery fixes the problem.

[admsteiner]

I have a similar problem with mine at the moment. This afternoon, my battery went from 75% to 0% without my notice. I looked at the gauge and it was charging at about 5 Watts, this means that the battery is actually almost full.. and it says it will take 10 hrs to recharge...

I tried removing the battery and reinserting like 10 times, no luck. Then I decided to drained the battery. While it was at 1%, i was able to play game for a couple of hours! Now the meter reading is at 0%, even though the battery is charged almost to its full.

I've had two batteries go from 90+% to 1% on no notice. The battery also showed 'Yellow' in the battery health indicator. Neither battery had more than 20 cycles on it.

Called up IBM and they replaced them. If it happens again I'm going to try something else (like exchaning the AC Adapter).
--Adam

[apoll0]

my battery is at about 55 recharge cycles. This seems to be quite a common problem after searching through this forum. I don't think it has anything to do with the chemical properties of the battery, it's probably just the gauge within the battery. It also seems that the board has some kind of way to "refresh/reset" the gauge readin every so often. This has happened to me about 3-4 times. In the previous ocasion, it was stuck at 70%. It was resolved by turning off the computer or re-inserting the battery. But the recent one was quite irritating because it went to 1%, and that just mess everything up if you have your system to go on standby when the battery is less than 3%. Maybe I should call up IBM to replace the battery, it's still under warranty, and i get a "new" battery . Also, because the battery is kinda loose.

[simscitizen]

Have been a victim of this in the past week in my t43. Most annoying thing ever. I have tried to recalibrate the machine by manually discharging/recharging and choosing reset from the power manager to no avail. It sometimes randomly "figures out" that the battery is actually at 100% but once i unplug it it sometimes jumps right back down from 98% to 0% or something ridiculous like that. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the ibm acpi and other pm drivers...

Right now it shows 28% on the gauge, and then next to it 2:53 remaining...well, I wish my T43 had 12 hours of runtime, but the 2:53 is probably the accurate number.