W510 battery annoyance.

[Adda]

The battery in my W510 has been acting up for a while now, maybe a year or so.

The problem is that the battery thinks it still has 100% of it's original capacity, no wear of any kind what so ever.
But the reality is different, once battery charge reaches somewhere in the 40's% charge instantly drops to 10%.

A common problem, I have had it many times before, but discharging and then recharging the battery a few times, would always fix it.
But not this battery, it stubbornly believes it is as good as new.

Seems like this problem:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/researc ... MIGR-75737

But my battery is a FRU: 42T4795 so it not supposed to be affected by that problem, and it's not one of the recalled batteries either.

Does anyone know a way of making the battery firmware realize that is has to keep track of battery health?

I have not used my battery a lot, but it has been used from time to time.

[dr_st]

It's a Sony battery. From my experience with other Thinkpads, Sony batteries tend to behave this way, at least up to a certain point. I have not found a way to force them to properly recalculate their full charge capacity. Maybe when it loses even more capacity, the number will change, eventually.

[Adda]

Thanks for your reply.

Well, just bad luck again it seems, after two faulty coolers, a defective Gobi 2000, odd optical drive behavior and lettering that wore off two keyboards in a row (took less then a year for that to happen to each keyboard), I guess I had to get the worst battery too, but one that isn't exactly broken.

If/when I decide to get a new battery, is there a vendor you'd recommend? Sanyo? Panasonic?

[RealBlackStuff]

There's none better than Panasonic.
I have some 9-cell (T6x) batteries from around 2009/2010 which still hold well over 80%.
Some with even more than 400 cycles!

[Brad]

There are some nice Panasonic celled 9 cell batteries here.

[Adda]

Thanks everyone, now I know what to do when I decide to buy a battery.
The one I have now still gives me 1-1.5 hours, decent enough, I can tolerate down to 45 minutes.

It seems my T43p battery is a Panasonic (92P1091) it still has around 75% of it's capacity.
I also have a remarkable A30 battery, it still has over 60% of it's capacity left, a Sanyo (02K6898).