Eating up batteries on my X22

[thedguy]

Cliffs: bought used X22 with good battery, ran it for 2.5 hours till it died, now won't take a charge. Bought a replacement, it did the same thing. Old battery reports "4% charge" and won't change the replacement reported 95%. Opened both batteries, original battery reports a 11.19v at the batteries, but 0.04 on the leads to the laptop. replacement battery was checked cell by cell each one report 4volts or [censored] close.

Hey everyone,

I bought a an off lease X22 with no OS about 3 months ago and it had a working battery... for about a week. The battery was holding about a 2.5 hour charge if I pushed my luck, the last half hour the windows power management claimed it was dead. One day I was using it and the system completely shut off on me, no shutdown or sleep, just as if I pulled a plug. After that the battery refused to take a charge and reports it's at 4 % charge. According to the IBM software, which was only installed last night, it has 62 cycles on it and about 9 watt hours capacity.

About a month ago I bought another battery from the same company and the other day I was on the john and the system went off again. Now I was under the impression there was something in the hardware to kick the system into standby or hibernate before it can damage the battery, but it wasn't, I guess I didn't have the right drivers or software in :dunno: . Anyhow, now that battery is toast, it claimed to have a 96% charge, and I never took the opportunity to figure out how many cycles or anything were on the battery. It did seem to run for about an hour and half on a charge, at least that was the longest I went without plugging it in.

With either battery in the laptop if I unplug the power regardless of it's in sleep or running, it can't run on the battery, it dies instantly.

I recently pulled both apart, and the replacement battery I tore apparent completely and checked each cell, and they all have 4 volts coming out of them. So I decided to open up the old battery, and I checked the output voltage directly at the battery pack and got a 11.19volts from the entire pack, but I got 0.04v coming out of the circuit board. So obviously the cells are being saved, but something is causing the battery to still become a useless brick.

Any idea's? Obviously I should avoid letting the system die like it has, but if the cells are all still showing a charge, and were providing several hours of charge, shouldn't the battery still be usable? Both batteries are the Panasonic 6 cell p/n 02k6760 10.8V 4.0AH units.

Thanks in advance,
Dustin

[SHoTTa35]

i think that's something with the charging port or battery connection to the system.

[The Spirit of X21]

What about the AC adapter? Perhaps it is not supplying enough power to both power the system and charge the battery.

[thedguy]

Well it charged the batteries just fine until I let the battery run dead. Keep in mind one battery went dead and wouldn't charge, then I bought the other one, which worked fine until it went fully discharged.

The really odd part is the first battery seems to not take a charge, while the newer battery didn't want to give up it's charge. Right before I tore the 2nd battery apart it claimed a 95-96% charge but the system refused to draw from it, dying the moment I pulled the ac plug.

[rkawakami]

Symptoms sounds like it might be a blown fuse which is inline with the battery. I'm looking at an X22 motherboard and the fuse is located just above the battery terminals, underneath a black plastic flap. You have to remove the keyboard to get to it and it will still be difficult to get a soldering iron down in there without searing the back side of the battery terminals.

If you have access to an ohmmeter, then you can check for continuity (0 ohms) across the fuse. If you see anything other than 0, then the fuse has blown. It appears to be a 5A Littelfuse and can probably be found at digikey.com or mouser.com.

If the fuse does check out fine, then it might be that one or both of the inductors also located under the black plastic flap has worked loose from the motherboard. Getting at those will require removal of the plastic guide for the hard drive.

[thedguy]

rkawakami: I checked the fuse, it's reporting 0ohms. The inductors I assume were the 2 black boxes just behind it, those seemed to be secured. Admittedly I did not rip out the motherboard and the guide to the HD nor do I really know how to check to see if they are fine.

Thanks for the help,
Dustin

PS. I have another battery on order, luckily these things are cheap at about $15 a piece for 2nd hand original IBM batteries. That should be here in the next couple of days.

[thedguy]

Ok picked up another battery, this makes #3. It had "0%" charge, after about 10 minutes it reports an 8% charge.

Edit: I just (re)-checked the original battery that went "bad". The battery (as a whole) is not letting any power out.

As mentioned before I can get 11.19v out of the 6 cells combined before it goes into any electronics. The interesting part is when I check the voltage on connector OF the batteries electronics I get nothing.

Basically the output of the battery is not outputting the voltage thats going into it.

Circled in blue is the connector I'm talking about, no voltage shows up there. This is the connector to the laptop.

http://i7.tinypic.com/6c4c48h.jpg

Circled in Red on this pic are the wires coming off the 6 cells connected together. They report 11.19v from the cells.

http://i15.tinypic.com/4ujubrs.jpg