Thinkpad t40 sudden shutdown on battery power, no warning

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waymb · #1 Post by **waymb** » Mon May 31, 2004 12:18 am

Every few weeks my t40 will suddenly shut off when running on battery power. It usually happpens when the battery is over 90% charged. One time it happened at around 35%. There is usually no warning. The last time it said something about critical battery condition and then went dead. When I press the power button it boots right back up and will run normally until the battery is run down. The battery works fine the rest of the time. I am still getting about 3 1/2 or 4 hours out of the battery. It never does it when I am plugged into ac power. It might not happen again for three or four weeks. Once it happened twice in a row. Does anyone have any ideas what is casuing this? I have had this 237372u thinkpad t40 for about 11months now. It started doing it about 3 months ago. Has anyone else had this kind of behaviour?

WilsonF · #2 Post by **WilsonF** » Mon May 31, 2004 5:22 am

Me, too with T40p 2373G1U with 9-cell battery. I get a popup saying the system is hibernating because of low power, then it shuts down. In my case, this seems to be associated with hibernating / resuming several times while on AC and/or connected to a port replicator connected to AC before disconnecting and switching to battery power or resuming from hibernaton to battery power. But I have no idea what's causing this. As soon as my T42p comes, this is going to the help center.

If you find out what's doing this, post again.

Wilson

pramit · #3 Post by **pramit** » Mon May 31, 2004 4:02 pm

I have experienced this abrupt shutdown, although not with an IBM. I had a Armada M700 that would work like a charm when on AC. When on battery, it would abruptly shut down when at around 35%. All in all, this problem was narrowed down to a Windows XP ACPI error. Look in your system logs (Right-click 'My Computer' > Click 'Manage' > Click 'Event Logs' > Click 'System Logs'). If you see something like 'ACPI Error' (generally indicated by a red stop sign with a white X through it) read the error. It's a Windows power management issue.

The time of the error log will be generally right after you started the machine up.

As far as fixing this matter, I don't have a solution other than making sure that all the power management utilities etc are installed.

Hope this helps!

WilsonF · #4 Post by **WilsonF** » Mon May 31, 2004 10:42 pm

I looked at my event log, but saw nothing relating to power. Instead, I saw a message indicating someone had pressed a key to initiate power down, which I had not done. Very frustrating.