So I’ve been noticing that along with the previously mentioned problem of GNOME not knowing when my AC power is plugged in or not, my battery’s life seems to have been cut in almost a third. I used to get approximately 3 hours of runtime on battery, but lately I have been getting just about 1 hour. The time to charge the battery to full has also increased by a pretty significant amount of time than I remember.
GNOME’s battery applet and acpi -V show the battery doing fine up till about 65% charge and then it just plummets to 5% battery and low battery warnings appear. That’s quite a drastic drop.
For instance, here’s some of the graphs from GNOME today of my battery:
5 minutes later:
Looking at those graphs makes me believe that my battery may be standing on its last leg, but I’m not really that knowledgeable about laptop batteries.
Is it time for me to start looking for a replacement battery at this point? Or is there possibly some way to salvage this battery. It’s not really that old, about a year old if I remember correctly. Is it worth trying to recalibrate the battery or is it just shot? Any help is appreciated.
#1 by Merlin on October 8, 2009 - 2:28 pm
If it’s just one year old you definitely should try to recalibrate it (should be a setting in your bios though not all laptop vendors support that). The battery life span is also influenced by heat. If your laptop is docked in a docking station over a longer period of time without using the battery it can also shorten the life of the battery.
#2 by mijenix on October 9, 2009 - 7:07 am
Hi
Maybe Wikipedia is a good resource (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Guidelines_for_prolonging_lithium-ion_battery_life). My thinkpad battery failed after 3 years. But I heard that dell battery already failed after 1 year. I think it depends on battery treatment and quality.