Thinkpads Forum

Hey,

I know the 600's battery is notorious, but I've read about fully discharging the battery to be able to fully recharge. However, my luck in fully discharging it has been somewhat poor. I've ran it several times until the OS shutdown (going into hibernation). But this isn't a full discharge. I was running a small Linux Distro on battery power when the Thinkpad beeped and started flashing the 'low battery' lights. However the machine ran for another hour under these conditions... and would have ran longer, but I wanted to go to bed at the time.

Any thoughts on whats going on and how to fully discharge the batteries? I've also tried the piece of paper technique, where you put two tiny slips of paper over the 2 middle slots on the battery, but I'm still a bit skeptical...

Am I just crazy or is there a decent method?

Thanks.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 758#432758

Get PC Doctor for DOS, execute the Battery Rundown test.

Thats probably not good.

I'm running the Battery rundown. I normally get about 40 minutes of battery when running with my wireless card. But the first rundown had a time of 22 minutes. The second is now 18, this is probably not a good thing that its going down.

Any suggestions? I'm going to run it again as you suggested, but just wanted to check for updates.

The rundown times cannot (and should not) be equated to what your "normal" operational time for the battery is. The rundown utility executes a series of tests on the laptop for two reasons: 1) to force the system to drain the battery faster than simply letting it idle and 2) to be able to consistently repeat the rundown in a similar manner so each sequence can be reliably compared to each other. That your second rundown time was slightly worse than the first is not a good sign. If you allowed enough time for the battery to re-charge (steady green power light) then you either have a battery on its last legs or there's a problem with the charging circuitry in your system. If the battery is more than a couple of years old, I'd say it's your battery.

pikaia wrote:Thats probably not good.

I'm running the Battery rundown. I normally get about 40 minutes of battery when running with my wireless card. But the first rundown had a time of 22 minutes. The second is now 18, this is probably not a good thing that its going down.

I think, your battery is bad - may be one cell is dead.

Download PFControl http://fancontrol.de/view/index.php?q=node/135 or MobileMeter (in your language).

You'll see with both programs the designed capacity, lost capacity (wearlevel) and actually capacity. A new battery run continously down and shut down at ~9.0 volts.