Wow! Buy a new battery

[JonathanGennick]

While playing around w/Linux the other week, I discovered that Thinkpad batteries keep track of their last full charge, so that you can compare it to their design capapacity. (You can get that info from Windows too, through the Thinkpad Configuration utility, but I never knew how until recently). Finally, I had objective proof of something I'd suspected for some time now, that my main battery was worn out. In fact, I was getting just a tad less than 20% of the design capacity.

So I bought a new battery.

What. A. Differerence! I was like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled. I sort of knew my batteries weren't lasting as long, but the degradation was so slow that I hadn't realized just how much I was missing.

That's the good news. Also while playing with Linux, I discovered that the X30 is not so smart about using dual batteries. When I run with the extendd life battery, rather than burn down the two batteries equally, the machine uses the main battery until it's completely dead, and only then switches to the second battery. That seems a very subobtimal approach for many reasons. For one, I don't think it's ideal to drain a lithium-ion battery completely when doing so can be avoided. And secondly, there's no real advantage then, over just carrying two, main batteries.

Back to buying that new battery. Best thing I've boughten in a long time.

[JHEM]

The battery use regimen is by design, e.g. the main battery is depleted first, then the unit switches to the secondary battery so that the main battery can be swapped for a charged one without having to shut the unit down, connect to AC or possibly lose your work.

The main battery isn't completely drained during this type of operation, so there's no real need to be concerned about possible damage.

Ahhh........ Munising! I spent a week there one day.

Got snow?

Regards,

James

[JonathanGennick]

Interesting about the battery regimen. But if I were just going to swap batteries, a simple hibernate+swap+unhibernate could accomplish that, and with minimal interruption of my work. On the other hand, no interruption is better than "minimal" interruption.

I thought lithium batteries benifited from shallow charge/discharge cycles. Thus, depleting both batteries evenly would seem to make sense. Perhaps my understanding is flawed here.

Whatever the case, I'm really, really glad that I finally choked up the cash and bought a new battery.

Lastly, yes, we do have snow in Munising. Plenty of it. I'm headed out skiing (cross-country) in a little bit. Most years I've been here, I've been able to ski well into April.