OT: Weird Laptop Battery Problem

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Alejandro Imass <aimass-EzYyMjUkBrFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org>

| On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 11:11 PM, jim <cinetron-uEvt2TsIf2EsA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
| > Hi , wondering if anyone has any suggestions for me. My laptop battery
| > suddenly died. It wasn't slow and graceful. I'm wondering if there are
| > fuses in them typically.

LiOIN batteries are fairly high-tech.  Charging them isn't simple -- I
think it is under computer control, but I'm not sure where the
computer is.  It might be the BIOS of the laptop, it might be an
embedded processor in the laptop or battery.

If you do certain funny things to a LiON batter, it can burn or
explode.  Not something I'd play with.

| Apparently if you drain the newer Lithium-ion to zero they simply die
| and can't even be re-charged. This happened to me with a relatively
| new external (and quite expensive) APC battery. The guys at APC said
| it was because I left it uncharged for a few hours and it was exactly
| what happened! I drained it whilst working on a plane and forgot to
| charge it that night. Next day: dead.

That may be the case.  But it it isn't clearly laid out in the product
manual, it should be counted as a manufacturing defect.  There is no
way that the customer should be required to guess that there is this
kind of quirk
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists