During Battery Gauge reset - Why need not use the computer?

[ComputerMinder]

When I am doing the battery gauge reset using the Battery Maintenance why does it always tell me I should close all open programs and not use the computer?

I assume there should be a good reason for that?

Reason I am asking is that on the X61s with 8 cell battery it could take a long time to full charge then full discharge and fully charge again.It's difficult for me not to use the computer for that during days of not much sleep.

[OldManClayton]

It probably allows for an accurate measurement of battery life when power usage isn't fluctuating. It's hard for it to guess what shape the battery is in when one minute you've got 2 hours left and the next you've got 4.

Also it could be because it doesn't want any unscheduled power suckage. If you start using wifi all of a sudden and draw a bunch in photoshop, it's suddenly going to use more power. The discharge can't go too far or your computer will crash! Probably not that.

That's my guess.

[Codefreeze]

I know why because I did the mistake to use the computer during the battery reset...

I played GTA while the battery was discharging to accelerate the process. BIG MISTAKE!

It somehow messed with the battery controller and nearly killed the thing. Some weird bug happened after which my battery would show 0% und would not charge up again. It said charging, but it was stuck at 0%. Weirdly the voltage was at over 12V so I think that the battery actually wasn't at 0% at all. It somehow set the new 0% to something that would actually rather be about 90%. So i thought the solution would be to discharge the battery. But since it thought it was at 0% the computer wouldn't let me discharge the darn thing. It took me a day of tinkering, removing and replacing the battery over and over, trying all sorts of things and thankfully, after a very stressful day, the battery came back to life.

But I wouldn't recommend doing what I did, it's playing with fire.

TL;DR: Using the computer may confuse the battery controller and mess up the reset process BIG TIME