X200 - 2nd Hand Genuine Lenovo Battery - Ticking sound

[pedd]

Hi all,

I've just taken receipt of a 42T4387 which I bought from an eBay seller. I've installed it and plugged the laptop in and some time later I became vaguely aware of a ticking sound coming from the laptop. The ticking stops when I unplug the charger, but it is a bit of a worry, especially given some of the stories I've heard about laptop batteries over the years!

Has anyone any experience with issues like this? My old battery never made this noise when charging, I've just swapped them to confirm this.

The really annoying thing is that this battery has terrific capacity - looking like about 4.5 hours. Ig I can safely keep it I'd like to. So what I'm really looking for here is for someone to tell me not to worry, but as a rule I like to minimise the risk of explosions in my vicinity so if it needs to go back, I need to know.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[pedd]

Just an update on this. I've run the battery down a little and plugged the charger back in. The ticking seems to start sporadically at around 91% full, at 93% it was a lot more frequent (a sound like a small radiator expanding while warming up). The ticks come in bursts of 2-3 secs with gaps between them of about the same duration.

Oh, and at 93%, windows battery gauge told me that the the laptop was 'plugged in, not charging' . Now it's at 94% - still 'plugged in, not charging'.

Strange...

[Cigarguy]

Sounds like the battery needs to be recalibrated. Until then don't trust the capacity gauge. The "terrific" capacity that you suspect may turn out not to be so terrific.

As for the ticking, I don't know what may be causing it but I do know that I've never experience this before in any of my laptop batteries.

[pedd]

Thanks for the reply, Cigarguy. I'm going to recalibrate it overnight tonight. it's interesting that Lenovo's Battery Manager was coming up with different numbers to Windows...

I'll see how I get on tomorrow.

[pedd]

I think I'm going to have to research the battery calibration. It doesn't seem to do anything on my Windows 8 installation. It tells me to leave the laptop plugged in, but then just sits there continually charging the battery. It did get up to 100% eventually (maybe after I'd changed the power settings to try and get the thing to discharge), and the the ticking stops.

I've discharged the battery a couple of times since then and it looks like the capacity has come down to 3hrs 45, which I'm still very happy with, just need to decide if I'm risking an explosion

...Time for a little more searching on here...

[Cigarguy]

Charge the battery fully. Run the laptop on battery and leave it running until it hibernates. Once it hibernates, turn it back on, hit F1 to enter BIOS and let it sit there until it completely drains the battery and turn off. Then charge it for at least 4-5 hours to ensure it's 100% charged.

When draining the battery, it's not a good idea to leave it a long time in a completely discharged stage.

A program like HWMonitor is very valuable in tracking the capacity of a battery.

[siemer]

I got the same problem. My 2nd hand X200 (6 cell battery) makes noise when charging and full (or almost full).

Did you find a solution?

Btw, it's not one of the batteries lenovo recalls now. I checked.

[pedd]

I didn't find a solution, no, but I'm still using and charging the battery on a daily basis, and there have been no problems as yet. (If that helps?)

[siemer]

The noise is annoying, no? You just live with it?? - In my case it's a high pitch (but low volume) zirping which ends in a popping sound. The end might sound like a click to someone I guess, for me it's more like a tiny tiny explosion or puffing sound. Like a little bursting bubble. It is about half a second long and comes in a row of up to three/four. Then a pause of a couple of seconds.

[pedd]

The noise for me is almost like the ticking of watch. In an active office, it really doesn't prove disruptive. Sounds like you have a slightly different noise?

[siemer]

Once I had tp_smapi loaded (Linux), I could see that the computer was switching between charging and idle all the time at about 83%. The noise appered when actually in charging and stopped when idle. The system still believed it is getting something in the battery and gradually showed going to 85% (capacity going up in the smallest steps possible).

Eventually the controller was convinced that we're not going to reach 'last full capacity' and stopped, staying at idle and the percentage jumped to 100%.

I'm not sure this decision could have been made by itself or if tp_smapi was involved in more than showing what is going on.

Before that I was able to stop the noise by lowering the charging threshold to e.g. 83% (because it stopped charging). Now threshold is up at 96% again.

I guess the next time I'll hear the noise is when the controller finds out my battery lost more capacity.

I bought the X200 second hand, the battery is younger but seemed without use for a long time. It might be that the age related capacity loss was larger than expected by the controller.

[91011]

A x200/201 (and others) battery recall was started recently by Lenovo US.

None of my seven were affected but probably worth checking yours, just takes a minute.
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/
Look for the 'March 2014 Battery Recall' banner at the top of the page.