Laptops / Games / Fedora & battery life

[M.Hockings]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:

>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Joshua Levitsky [mailto:jlevitsk at joshie.com]
>>which would someone say was good for desktop use with Fedora 
>>Core 1? More
>>
>>ThinkPad T40
>>ThinkPad X31
>>Dell Latitude D400
>>Dell Latitude C600
>>    
>>
>
>I have a Dell D600.. It's Okay. No Problems with it. Everything works.
>The Centrino works(intel wifi) via ndiswrapper, SXGA+ is great. Hard drive 
>area is hot. (again, most laptops are like that)
>
>Weight is OK, comparable to IBM T40.
>
>The only grouse, & I've mentioned this here and elsewhere _a_lot_! is batt
>life.
>I get 2:30min on a standard 6 cell. after 3 months etc, the batt is going
>down, 
>now it's like 2 hours (or less!!)
>
>Get the IBM T40 if price is no issue. Great batt life from what I hear. 
>  
>

I think that most modern laptop batteries are "smart", that is they have 
a chip that tries to keep track of the battery's available power.  If 
you don't completely discharge the things once in a while they kinda 
forget about the rest of the battery.  Going from memory I think the way 
to recover some of the lost capacity is as follows.  Power off the 
machine, then power it back on to the power on password or hold it in 
the bios setup or whatever until the battery completely dies.  Then plug 
it in and let it completely charge.  That should help calibrate the 
chip.  I seem to recall reading in the specs for one laptop about how 
long the battery would last when new and how long when 1 year old.  It 
was diminished by a significant amount.

Mike