[Novalug] Laptop Battery

Mark Smith mark@winksmith.com
Wed Nov 11 00:54:26 EST 2009


oddly enough, i ran into this last night on my battery.  this laptop
was a mac so it may or may not apply to you.  the issue was that this
laptop has some brains in the power unit.  every now and then i have
to re-initialize it otherwise it won't even try to charge the battery
(among other stupid things).

for me, the solution was to reset the power control unit with a
SHIFT-CTRL-APPLE-POWER key sequence.  after this, it started charging
the battery.  for me, i could see that it wasn't even trying to
charge the battery previously.  the battery just ran dead on it's
own and w/o any additional power going into it, it just stayed dead.

obviously, your mileage will vary.


On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:31:40PM -0500, Clif Flynt wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:19:43PM -0500, Dan Arico wrote:
> > Has anyone ever heard of a laptop battery going from operating perfectly to 
> > stone cold dead overnight?
> > ...
> > The repair shop tells me the battery is dead and will not take a charge. Does 
> > that sound right? Can a battery fail that abruptly?
> 
>   I Am Not An Expert. (on this topic)
> 
>   My understanding is that the batteries have smarts in them, and I
> suppose the 'smarts' could become fried.
> 
>   My local BatteriesPlus store has a tester that reprograms the smarts
> as part of testing a laptop battery.  This has sometimes fixed a battery
> that was refusing to accept a charge.  They charge 10 bucks to test the
> battery, but it's saved me $100 enough times that it's been worth it.
> 
>   I wouldn't expect big-box Nerd Herds or even a computer repair place
> to have a battery tester like this.  Might be worth a trip to one of
> the battery specialist stores.

-- 
Mark Smith
mark@winksmith.com
mark@tux.org



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