T23 Battery question - bad battery or charging circuitry?

[LymanSS]

Hi all,
I finished assembling my t20-t23 hybrid the other day and have been testing it for a couple of days to see if everything works. So farr all's well with one exception. The battery is hovering at 1 percent. The battery came with the T20 which I got (with a bad motherboard) from a friend. The battery maximiser indicates that it's at zero percent charge, and indicates no battery activity. No current no voltage no wattage.

The Battery Information secton shows that it was manufactured 9/18/2000 so it's rather old. The status detail section says it has 215 cycles on it, with a full charge capacity of 10.89 Wh.

The battery health indicator says that the battery is severly degraded and should be replaced.

So here's the question.... is this just a bad battery that won't charge? Or am I looking at a problem with the charging circuitry on the machine. I'm really hoping it's just a bad battery. But the fact that the machine makes no attempt to charge it implies that it might not be the battery.

Any advice would be very much appreciated. I'd like to know as soon as possible whether I've got a problem with this motherboard or some other major component. Any suggestions you can offer for determining this would be great.

Scott

[rkawakami]

Well, conventional wisdom says: "try another battery in the system" or "try another system with that battery". As it appears you can do neither at the moment (I've checked the other posts you've made and it looks like your other system is a 770), then maybe you can try these suggestions first:

1) Download MobileMeter from:

http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Oakland/8259/

and see if that reports the same battery charging status. It probably will since I'm betting that it hooks into the same sensors as the IBM MaxiMiser, but it's a free program and it's always good to have a second source to verify problems.

2) Measure the voltage at the battery terminals and see if it is around 12.6v. If it isn't at least 10v, then you probably have a battery that has "joined the choir invisible"; time to buy/beg/borrow another one. I'll stick my neck out here and predict that the battery voltage is going to be below 10v simply because of the age and the number of charge cycles.

From your post it's not clear to me if you've tried powering up the laptop with the battery only. If it is able to power the system and you have a way of creating a floppy disk or CD with PC Doctor installed on it, then boot the system with the PC Doctor disk(s) and perform the battery rundown. Before you do, remove the hard disk drive; there's no sense in exposing the drive to any more sudden power cycles than necessary. For info on how to get/use PC Doctor for the T2x series, check this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=27541

[Thinkpaddict]

Ray gave you some good advice there. I do have a T23 which has a nonfunctional charging circuitry. Unplug the AC from the power supply, then plug it in. Watch the status LEDs on the Thinkpad. What do they do? Ultimately, I'm afraid that the only way you can determine for sure is to do what Ray said (get a different battery which you are positive works on other system, or follow the opposite route and try your battery in a different Thinkpad).

[LymanSS]

Thanks for the responses. Very helpful information. I took the advice about trying the battery in another system. I remembered that a co-worker also has a T-23 so I brought my battery in to work and asked him to try charging it. He came back after a couple of hours and said that it just stayed at 1 percent the whole time and that the battery indicator kept blinking orange. He didn't say whether it was the rapid blink of "dead battery" or the slow blink of "charging." When it's in my system it blinks the orange light rapidly.

I haven't had a chance to check the voltage with my multimeter (which I'll do as soon as I get home tonight.)

So I'm hoping that this is a case of a bad battery, rather than a bad charging circuit (if that's the proper term). I'm going to start looking for a new one. Any other advice for confirming this diagnosis would be helpful. Again, thanks very much for the responses.

Scott

[mysbca]

Any other advice for confirming this diagnosis would be helpful.

Try his battery in your system to confirm your charging circuit is okay.