Battery Question

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raket · #1 Post by **raket** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 6:15 am

As moderators and admins know i once announced that i wanted a almost dead battery for free, i ended up with a X60 battery which was almost dead from a nice member for $15+$15 in western union charges. I almost got banned for not paying in time. i even wanted to pay more but the nice girl sending the battery did'nt want to have more money as i was late with payment. and she was strict that it was a donation and not a sell at all (the package was declared as a gift and condition declaration was something like "almost dead") so it did'nt go through customs.

This battery was in a recall battery program announced by IBM. in fact they sent me two brand new batteries because it was dangerous to use this battery.

What happened is that i got two brand new batteries. But now after about 1½ year, they wont hold more then 2-3 minutes each. I could not stand the 3minutes issue anymore and went through my stuff in the cellar and found this old "dangerous" battery.

For some reason, this "dangerous, free, holds-2-minutes"-battery now holds 26100mwh out of 37000mwh. and yesterday it lasted about 1hour and 20 minutes. Note that my machine does 17-18w because i use WLAN and my card can't use powersaving in linux anymore. and that my keyboard on my thinkpad x60 went broke yesterday so i can't adjust the brighthess on the monitor

(adding brightness=1 as an argument to modprobe thinkpad_acpi results in a kernel panic)

Is it normal that old battery come back to life after storing them in a cold cellar for more then a year?
The problem with this battery was not that it could not charge. the problem was that it dropped from about 30000mwh to 500mwh after 1-3 minutes of usage. but it was not like this yesterday.

hunterman223 · #2 Post by **hunterman223** » Mon Apr 25, 2011 5:22 pm

I don't know about that revitalising business, but if IBM says it's dangerous to use then it most likely is. You should NOT mess with laptop batteries, or any for that matter. They can be very spontaneous and temper-mental, but when they are you'll know about it. Search youtube. Here's what could happen:

A) Nothing.
B) Battery Stops Working.
C) Battery Leaks and Damages Laptop
D) Battery Bursts into flames and burns your house down.
E) Battery explodes and puts you in the hospital.

Just to put it simply...

raket · #3 Post by **raket** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 4:09 am

Whatever, i will give it a shot and gamble with my life.
This battery obviously reports wrong things to the computer.
it still holds 100%.

It was on 0.1% (90wh) for about 1 hour yesterday in critical mode.

Kinda lame error.

Is it possible to do a real hardware reset on the battery as it obvious reports bad values to the bios?

hunterman223 · #4 Post by **hunterman223** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 3:26 pm

It's reporting bad values because it is DEFECTIVE, but it's your choice.

#5 Post by **Harryc** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 3:30 pm

Look, I am tired of seeing members here that feel that they need to resort to capitalization to get a point across as if the other person can't read, or as if their opinion is so important it needs to be in large letters. It is totally unnecessary, and I am going to start issuing warnings for it. Cool it ...

hunterman223 · #6 Post by **hunterman223** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 3:51 pm

I guess some people read capitals differently, i was trying to draw attention to that word and would have bolded or used italics if I weren't using the iPhone app. I was not at all shouting or doing anything of that nature.

#7 Post by **Harryc** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 4:28 pm

Even bolded is a bit over the top...the OP can read, but thanks for the explanation.

hunterman223 · #8 Post by **hunterman223** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 5:13 pm

I suppose it may seem so to some, and not to others. I'll just avoid the whole works next time.

To OP, you could try calibrating the battery. No programs come to mind right away, but if you give google a try I think there is plenty of freeware to do it. Some manufacturers implement this functionality in the BIOS, but sadly lenovo is not one of them.

craigmontHunter · #9 Post by **craigmontHunter** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 7:54 pm

Batteries are fickle things. If you have a windows install, there is a program in powermanager that recalibrates the battery. Otherwise running it down all the way, charging it and repeating the cycle should calibrate the battery manually.

One thing I don't get is that if the battery is that dangerous, why did they not ask for it back? if something happened, that would look really bad on them, even if they had sent replacements and had given instructions to stop using the old battery.

ParatoOptimal · #10 Post by **ParatoOptimal** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 8:36 pm

Does Lenovo have a bad battery list somewhere?
Is it by serial number?
Thanks

raket · #11 Post by **raket** » Sat Apr 30, 2011 8:07 pm

There was some recall program some years ago.
I dont use the battery anymore.

Thanks for the advice