AA1 peppermint and a battery mystery

[brian grieves]

 Having consulted weather my battery was kaput due to undue loss of charge and having received desktop messages to that effect - I bought a new one.Its bigger and when charged indicated a life of 6hrs. After unplugging it caved in well under that.On restart it indicated 40% power left. So...can anyone advise?

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

I can't say I've had a problem with the battery or battery indicator.

That indicated 6 hours to discharge is just a guesstimate, so how far out was it .. and more importantly did it change as the battery discharged.

Battery discharge times will also be heavily dependant on what you were doing .. ie. play a flash video and watch your systems temperature rise which means it's using more power.

I'm wondering what is different between your AA1 and mine... is yours an AOA110L (aka ZG5) ? .. which BIOS version are you using ?

If you hit Alt+F2 then type gnome-power-statistics and hit enter .. then go to Laptop Battery>Details what are the :-

Energy
and
Energy when full
and
Energy (design)
and
Percentage
and
Capacity

ratings ?

you can also leave that running, and check "History" to watch the power drain .. I don't know how accurate tat is though.


If you install acpi:

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sudo apt-get install acpi

then run:

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acpi

does it agree with your battery indicator panel applet ?

[brian grieves]

its a ZG5 ok
I,m stumped about the BIOS though!

48.8
48.8
48.8
100%
100%

and acpi agrees - its full charged

I,m going to watch it discharge, last time it was not worked at all.

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

The BIOS version can be found by hitting F2 at bootup .. it will be listed in there somewhere

or an easier way is to open a terminal and run:

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dmesg | grep DMI

or

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dmesg | grep AOA119

You should see a line similar to:-

[    0.000000] DMI: Acer AOA110/        , BIOS v0.3301 05/09/2008

I've highlighted the bit you're after in red.


can you run:

Code: [Select]

acpi

a few times as the battery discharges, and see if it always agrees with the battery indicator panel applet.

[brian grieves]

will do - I need a while to read up though.

[brian grieves]

its
system version v0.3109
UGA         intel V1585

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

I'm wondering if it's BIOS version related, your BIOS is quite a few versions older than mine, and there appear to have been some fixes that were battery related, there have also been a TON of C4 state timing fixes.

C-states are CPU power saving modes .. for more info, see here:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-the-CPU-C-States-Power-Saving-Modes/611/1

BIOS fixes contained in different versions are listed here:
http://macles.blogspot.com/p/acer-aspire-one-bios.html

Now normally I don't like suggesting BIOS updates, because there is always a small risk of bricking the PC .. the general rule of thumb is DON'T update your BIOS unless there is a specific NEED.

Only you can answer if you consider this a NEED, and are willing to take the small but significant risk of ending up with a door-stop.

I must also add, that the AA1 mitigates the risk to a certain extent by having a built-in BIOS recovery routine that *should* recover a BIOS update that has gone wrong .. I have used this function, and it worked for me, but there are no absolute guarantees.

So, I've given you all the info, and I won't be held responsible if things go wrong.

Now with that in mind .. do you want to attempt a BIOS update ? .. your call.

[brian grieves]

Unplugged it last night and it had 70% in the tank this a.m.
I'm curious enough to read up on your advice but will decline grappling with a Bios for the moment. Its been saved from doorstop once (thanks to you) and I'm too fond of it to risk it.
cheers Brian