Thinkpads Forum

Hi. I set to recharge my batter under 40%. Why does the system keep charging to 100% even when I plug in with 80% of the battery? Would it not be supposed to be wait until it becomes under 40%? Am I getting something wrong here? Thanks for your help.

u need to plug the adapter in after windows have started or the thing will charge to 100%

Okay, thanks, I will give a try.

What would be a recommended % to start re-charging? I would think that closer to 0% left would be the time to start the re-charge. I have mine set at 10%. Thanks.

Randy

rk62 wrote:What would be a recommended % to start re-charging? I would think that closer to 0% left would be the time to start the re-charge. I have mine set at 10%. Thanks.

Randy

Yeah, I was wondering that too; any thoughts?

I don't think ANYTHING you do is going to markably change the life of your battery.

I find it best to just not worry about it and enjoy the laptop!

bitsoffish wrote:u need to plug the adapter in after windows have started or the thing will charge to 100%

I tried but it won't work. No matter what I do it kicks in and starts charging when AC is plugged. Don't know why.

Greg Gebhardt wrote:I don't think ANYTHING you do is going to markably change the life of your battery.

I find it best to just not worry about it and enjoy the laptop!

Yeah, that's what I thought before. But after using the 8cell battery for about 8 months I found it surprising that the original capacity plummetted to nearly 40% of it. I replaced it but not sure it was because of my habit or because of the alleged defect of it.

And when I was talking to one of the reps, surprisingly, he said, there still is memory effect in the batteries of today, which is different from what people are saying these days.

So I made my mind at this time to use it with more care.

for li ion batts, u have to do small recharges like 40-85% or 75-100%... completely draining a li-ion batt causes it to wear faster... also if u keep the charge at 100% it deteriorates much faster compared to like when it is 85%... if u gonna use ac more often... try to keep the charge at 40%

heiss wrote:Hi. I set to recharge my batter under 40%. Why does the system keep charging to 100% even when I plug in with 80% of the battery? Would it not be supposed to be wait until it becomes under 40%? Am I getting something wrong here? Thanks for your help.

hello,
i got an T60(2007-IQV) a month ago. Recently i found the same problem as heiss in my thinkpad. Still it seems that this 'constantly charging with AC pluging' problem exists in all current machines, especially the new 60's generation.

Although the system is not affected in this subtle 'fallacy', i really want to know what causes it. can anyone give me an answer? or the charging program will work well under what settings? frankly speaking, i am so scared to have my 6-cells battery fully chared after the battery recall from Lenovo.

yaoooo, if you are worried about your battery, check it...

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... ATT-LENOVO

And...if you want your battery to last, when you know you are going to be on AC for a while, just REMOVE the battery to avoid the charge/discharge cycle....

JohnDrake wrote:And...if you want your battery to last, when you know you are going to be on AC for a while, just REMOVE the battery to avoid the charge/discharge cycle....

As long as you are sure of the supply staying on until you have shutdown completely...

On the subject of discharge cycles, there was quite a long discussion I recall about a year ago. The general concensus seemed to be to set the charging to start at 90% and stop at 95%

I asked the same question and was wondering if I should simply remove my battery as I used with my older laptop. The answer was to charge when below 75% and stop when it reaches 95%. That's what I did and I am working mostly on AC, so my battery level is always around 93% or so. Once in a while I remove the power cord and go below 75% just to go through that small recharge cycle. I plugged it back in as soon as it is below 75%, the battery is getting such 'gymnastics' every ten days or so.

thanks for all your advice. But i guess my main concern is how to normally operate the 'battery maintaince' under the ThinkVantage sofeware 'Power manager'. the 'battery maintaince' is a prgram designed to customize the time to recharge by setting some lower and upper limits. If it works, the battery will be charged automatically when your battery level is less than the defined lower limit, and when the level reaches the defined upper limit the recharging process will be ceased.
can anyone solve this problem?

Open the power manager and set the charging start below 10%
and stop charging at 100%
then open the registry editer and change the REG_DWORD as shown at below
image

MODERATOR EDIT: No pics over 50k.

kintommy wrote:Open the power manager and set the charging start below 10%
and stop charging at 100%
then open the registry editer and change the REG_DWORD as shown at below
image

kintommy, thanks for your method. But the problem still exists after i loaded your settings in the Power Manager and Regeditor. In sum, there are two different results i found in my t60:

i) Plug the AC power before startup.
No matter what the battery level is, the battery will keep charging until the level reaches 100%. obviously the power manager program works inappropriately.

ii) Plug the AC power after startup (i.e. after the windows system is fully loaded).
the program will work as properly as we expected.

so.... what's the problem?
would you mind testing this in your thinkpad?
thanks.

I suspect that when you plug in the AC adapter when the ThinkPad is off, the Embedded Controller takes over control of the charging parameters. When you plug in the AC adapter after Windows is loaded up, then Windows (Power Manager) takes over control of the charging parameters. I also suspect that once the Embedded Controller has taken control, Windows (Power Manager) cannot wrest control from it. I don't know enough about it to say why.

The battery charging is primarily controlled by the logic microcontroller in the *battery* and only secondarily by anything else, including the EC and any commands that get sent to the logci controller through the ACPI from the OS. For whatever reason, I have seen the charge thresholds be ignored/followed on Thinkpads that use different, sometimes older, batteries as opposed to the ones they came with. There is always a memory effect in rechargable batteries, LiIons just have far less of it than do the older NiCads.

A similar issue is that, upon resume from either suspend or hibernate, the power manager will not re-initialize the power profile properly. Again, this is highly dependent on the battery that is on the Thinkpad at the time it resumes. The one time I encountered this on a Thinkpad, fiddling with the registry entries for the Power Manager fixed it, but it would still come up on that particular system for another battery.

thanks for your help, christopher and GomJabbar. does it mean that we still could not fix this problem at the present time? since i called the customer service but they have not replied me. maybe i should stop carping and learn how to accept it?