Thinkpads Forum

I recently bought a T430s and have now noticed that the full charge capacity listed in Power manager (47.60Wh) is greater than the design capacity (43.29Wh). This is causing the laptop to think it has more battery life than it does, which means it ignores my request to sleep at ~10% battery and simply dies at ~15%. I have reinstalled power manager and the power manager driver, as well as tried performing a battery reset. The battery reset does not work as the laptop dies and restarts before it gets to "0%" capacity, so it does not solve the problem. Does anyone have any ideas for this? I tried to find the variable that stores the full charge capacity but I could not. So far Lenovo's suggestions have not been helping and I can't find this issue anywhere else.

Thanks!

When writing this, i assume that you're using Lenovo's preinstalled software image including Windows 7. If you don't, please advise.

Change the lower battery charge level threshold to 25% and set the upper threshold to 100%. Let the battery discharge to less than 25% but not as far as 20%. Whether you do this with the AC adapter connected all the time, part of the time, or not at all, doesn't matter. When the charge level has decreased to the range between 21% and 25%, turn off the notebook and connect the AC adapter to the notebook and to a wall outlet. Let it charge to 100%. Use the notebook while charging if you wish. It has been my experience that in cases, where the notebook's estimation of battery capacity is wrong, cycling the battery from a fully or nearly fully charged state down to a low charge level and then up to 100% again, can change the notebook's perception of its battery capacity significantly. After that procedure, you might want to try a battery reset again.

I got a new T430 and wanted to know which should be the ideal pattern to recharge a new notebook?

TTY wrote:When writing this, i assume that you're using Lenovo's preinstalled software image including Windows 7. If you don't, please advise.

Change the lower battery charge level threshold to 25% and set the upper threshold to 100%. Let the battery discharge to less than 25% but not as far as 20%. Whether you do this with the AC adapter connected all the time, part of the time, or not at all, doesn't matter. When the charge level has decreased to the range between 21% and 25%, turn off the notebook and connect the AC adapter to the notebook and to a wall outlet. Let it charge to 100%. Use the notebook while charging if you wish. It has been my experience that in cases, where the notebook's estimation of battery capacity is wrong, cycling the battery from a fully or nearly fully charged state down to a low charge level and then up to 100% again, can change the notebook's perception of its battery capacity significantly. After that procedure, you might want to try a battery reset again.

Tried this and I'm still having the problem. Anyone have any other suggestions?

I owning also ein t430s with Archlinux (no Windows at all). My situation is exactly the same!

Battery reports ~ 10 % more capacity then by design required and lost its power at ~7 % (3 Wh remaing at this). It just suddenly lost all power, but ACPI/Kernel thinks their are 3 Wh still left. I've tried to recalibrate the battery with tlp, but it fails and laptops lost its power before reloading the battery. I'm afraid Lenovo or Panasonic did "failed" again with the battery firmware? I know that around 2010 Lenovo had to release updates for the "battery firmware" because it just worked wrong.

This is a general problem with the t430s

see here: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... lse/page/5

a) lenovo engineers are investigating this, hopefully this could be solved by a "battery firmware update"
b) a new replacement battery seems not to fix this issue

DeeNofa wrote:I recently bought a T430s and have now noticed that the full charge capacity listed in Power manager (47.60Wh) is greater than the design capacity (43.29Wh). This is causing the laptop to think it has more battery life than it does, which means it ignores my request to sleep at ~10% battery and simply dies at ~15%. I have reinstalled power manager and the power manager driver, as well as tried performing a battery reset. The battery reset does not work as the laptop dies and restarts before it gets to "0%" capacity, so it does not solve the problem. Have you considered the Phen375 system at https://skinnyexpress.com/phen375-review or did you already try that? Does anyone have any ideas for this? I tried to find the variable that stores the full charge capacity but I could not. So far Lenovo's suggestions have not been helping and I can't find this issue anywhere else.

Thanks!

I just got a used T430 because it was cheap, I only bought it to do some writing stuff and I just noticed I'm having this problem too where it says I have 10-15% battery but switches off. Would a new battery fix this?

WallyPine wrote:I just got a used T430 because it was cheap, I only bought it to do some writing stuff and I just noticed I'm having this problem too where it says I have 10-15% battery but switches off. Would a new battery fix this?

It's possible, how many cycles does the software report? One symptom of a dying battery is that the internal cells may short, with a sudden drop in voltage causing what you're experiencing. But it could also be a software issue.