Thinkpads Forum

Dear all,

I bought a OEM primary and a secondary OEM bay battery for my x301. For some reasons, the primary battery will stop charging at 46% even I set the threshold to charge as long as the battery is lower than 72%. Besides, if my x301 only has this primary battery, the machine will die when the battery reach around 10%.

As for my secondary bay battery, if I install both primary and secondary batteries, my machine will die after the bay battery is exhausted (reach 0%). That means my machine cannot switch to the primary battery.

Anybody can give me a clue what's going on? And is there a program that can check whether those batteries are good or not (The Thinkpad Power Manager says both batteries are in good shape)? Thanks a lot!

I'm bumping this because I've some battery issues with my X301 batteries too. Not exactly the same as yours, but probably related.

Here's the deal.

I've a halfways dead primary battery (capacity ~50%) and a good condition bay battery (capacity ~95%). The bay battery is only charged as far as the main battery can be charged. In other words it's capped at about 50% and never gets fully charged. If I take the primary battery out, then the bay battery charges up to 100%. I also noticed that if I put the primary battery in and bay battery out, I get a loud 2 second beep right after POST. I suppose the beep is a warning about the wear level.

Thinkpad Power manager for Windows claims that both batteries are in good shape, which I doubt. With Linux I get alerted about the wear level after login.

In your case the wear level ought to be non-existent if they really are new batteries. I'm not completely sure, but some types of batteries require a few full charge cycles in order to learn the boundaries of empty and full. Someone could confirm this in case it's still true nowadays