Thinkpads Forum

This has been somewhat of an issue for a while, but I just had it happen to me twice so I felt it was time to make a thread. It is a little unusual, so I'll go ahead and list all the parameters.

It only happens on battery, never on AC.

It is an aftermarket battery, and after it first happened I complained to the seller I had bought it from, who promptly provided me with a new one.

How it almost always goes is somewhere between 70%-90% battery remaining...
The screen will go black
The battery light will flash orange
It will spend 10-20 seconds flashing the sleep and HDD icons saving the state
And then die

Thus far (months really...) I have been able to immediately start it back up, 7 will say "resume state" and I will be able to continue exactly where I was, as if Windows had been hibernated.

After this happens once I can run my battery all the way down to nothing and it will be perfectly fine.

Again, it just happened to me twice in the span of 10 minutes, so I felt it was time to ask for advice.

Most likely you have defective cells in the battery pack and/or the microprocessor in the battery pack is misinterpreting the remaining charge and is reporting a low/dead battery.

In either case, you have a malfunctioning battery pack which should be replaced -- there is no other "easy" solution.

If you search the forum (sorry, I don't know the particular thread), you will find someone who at one point claimed that he "solved" the type of problem you are experiencing by replacing the microprocessor inside the battery pack ... and he may well have done so. Nonetheless, I would think that there is not much point in going into the battery pack/microprocessor disassembly/repair business yourself ...

EOMtp wrote:Most likely you have defective cells in the battery pack and/or the microprocessor in the battery pack is misinterpreting the remaining charge and is reporting a low/dead battery.

In either case, you have a malfunctioning battery pack which should be replaced -- there is no other "easy" solution.

If you search the forum (sorry, I don't know the particular thread), you will find someone who at one point claimed that he "solved" the type of problem you are experiencing by replacing the microprocessor inside the battery pack ... and he may well have done so. Nonetheless, I would think that there is not much point in going into the battery pack/microprocessor disassembly/repair business yourself ...

That's pretty much what I expected and was what I was afraid of. As you said, it's a lot more trouble than it would be worth to try and replace the microprocessor in a $30 Chinese battery.

Curiously enough though it hasn't happened in a while (4 or 5 days of regular battery usage), so it might just be completely random. I overstated it a tad bit, I had used my laptop almost exclusively docked for months, and it only happened the first few times I started using it on battery (ignoring the past incidents).

So in short, I really have no idea what is happening. I suppose I'll open it up and replace the thermal compound some time, since I'm sure it hasn't been replaced in the 4-5 years this laptops been used.