ibm t42 power problem

[SolarisZen]

Hi,

I have an ibm thinkpad t42. This laptop was bought refurbished and had, what the store called, a 3 cell battery. Anyways. Since its purchase, I am having problems with the power. It does charge and the battery does work. However, if I move the laptop or do anything "heavy," like video editing. The system abruptly shuts off or there are random bios beeps (one high, one low, one high, one low, last one continues high unless the volume is off).

I checked my cpu, there is enough thermal past, and gpu, its not loose or anything, and both are installed fine. I also did a hardware check and that came out fine as well.

I suspect that i didn't charge the battery properly the night I bought it home and since then it has performed poorly. Could one "reset" the battery? Would I have to buy a new battery or power connector?

I am lost on what to do.

Any help would be great on this topic.

[richk]

The batteries are 6-cell or 9-cell. The 9-cell is 6600 ampere-hours and the 6 cell is 4400. It should be printed on the battery. If the normal thinkpad power software is installed, there should be an icon on the taskbar that looks like a power plug. If you click on that icon, one of the items should be battery information. That should tell you what you have and its condition. You don't say if it is plugged in or running on batteries when it is shutting down.

[Troels]

See pg. 69 in

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mo ... 192_01.pdf

and see if any of the beep codes sound familiar. I doubt it's the battery.

[Talon88]

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your t42 is old model & is refurbished.
So, the batt is mostly end of life.

Post the screen shot of batt power manager,
so we can tell you how's your batt condition.....



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