Thinkpads Forum

T61p running Windows Vista.

About an hour ago I noticed a little tool tip over the battery icon saying (something like) "Click here to recalibrate your battery ?" along with some stuff about how I'd get longer battery life. It sounded reasonable so I clicked !

The process is still going and when you float over the battery (which is showing two red arrows circulating around the battery) a tooltip saying "Your battery gauge is currently being reset. Do not disconnect the AC power".

Well the difficultly is I *have* to disconnect the power in 20 minutes (I'm in an airport and soon to get on a plane).

Maybe it will be done by then and in any case what's done is done (not too happy about the lack of warnings that I was entering into a multi-hour process) but does anyone know what the effect of disconnecting the AC power mid-process is going to be ? I mean assuming that it hasn't finished by the time I do that ?

FWIW the battery is showing 53% whereas when I said "Yes" it was on !00%. I presume the process is planning on draining the battery as low as it can go and then going to start recharging ?

thanks

R.

IIRC the battery will discharge/charge/discharge, during which time you should not use the laptop at all.
If you rightclick on the battery icon, start the Power Mgmt program again, and then cancel the recalibration.
There's also a box in that program where you can UNtick to get maintenance messages occasionally.
Don't think you damage the battery, even by disconnecting power.

definitely don't start a recalibration unless you have several hours for the laptop to sit unused, as it takes that long to fully cycle the battery all the way up, down and back up again.

Thanks for both your replies. As you can guess I did have to power the machine down and disconnect the a/c but as you're suggesting it doesn't seem to have done it any harm . Now that I know it wants to recalibrate I might initiate one myself over night some time to allow it plenty of time to complete. I do think the initial message it pretty dim though - no indication that several hours were requrired.

Thanks again for your comments.

I think if you read the warnings before you click to finally start the process it tells you that it will fully charge, fully discharge, and fully charge the battery to do this. I don't recall if it mentions the time required, but that alone should be an indication. I'd also not recommend doing any kind of maintenance in that type of setting, especially windows updates which can take quite some time to even shut down the computer. I recall many times being late for an appointment and getting "update 1 of 90 complete, DO NOT shut off your computer until done", with no option to abort and resume later. I've also had this occur when I was rebooting by request of my VoIP provider who was on the phone, and thanks to microsoft I had to abort the support call that took me over an hour to establish.