IBM Thinkpad R40 Battery Charging Woes

[Timmer]

I'm currently using a like new TP R40 with a 1.8ghz processor, 512mb of ram, and a 20gb hard drive. Our IT department recently decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall XP on it. Before doing this the machine worked perfectly and the battery always held a good charge and recharged like it was supposed to.

Since reformatting and reinstalling the XP software the battery continues to drop in voltage and will not recharge itself? The machine works well on AC but I've noticed that all of the IBM ThinkPad software is missing on this as well. Did the original software that came on this machine have an application that controlled the battery being charged? If so then what software need to be re-installed to get this unit working again?

I'm still extremely confused as to why the thing was reformatted to begin with, this has just created two weeks of lost time with still no end in sight? Can you please let me know how I should proceed, as I would be extremely grateful for any help here at all.

Sincerely,
Timmer
"Extremely Frustrated"

[Jim Walker]

It looks like your IT people used a source for XP that didn't have the IBM specifice software. To fix this you will need to obtain a recovery disk with XP from IBM for about $40.

[JHEM]

Timmer,

If you have Administrator rights for the XP install presently on your machine you can download and install all of the IBM specific software and updates you need directly from IBM.

If you're not able to install what you need, smack your IT dept. up-side the head until they fix the problem.

Regards,

James

[PeterPumpkin]

Strange. The battery should charge regardless of whether the IBM software is on it or not. I could be wrong, but i seriously doubt this fault is software related. I had my R40 running for several months without the IBMs battery maximiser and it worked fine. Having said that you might wanna give the bios a flash (just in case).

By the way, you can download all of IBMs software from their web site. No need to waste the $$$ on a recovery disk.