On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Alexander Stagun wrote:
> Michael Schmitz wrote:
> > Another battery level reading is available from the battery itself
> > at least on my Powerbook: if the row of LEDs on the battery is down
> > to one and flashing, power really is low. Otherwise, it's still
> > above 5%. Do the more flashy models still have these LEDS?
>
> The LEDs indicated the same sudden level decrease. Additionally, I
> could reproduce that behaviour under Mac OSX. So now I think, this
> rather is a hardware issue. I called Apple and they will send me a
> replacement battery. We will see then, if it was just a bad battery.
1.5 years ago, I wrote a script to monitor the battery state every minute, and
log it to /var/log. I still have all the data :-)
This is what happens (well, happened half a year ago) when I unpluged the power
(on-line -> off-line):
| mWh mV crit + - MHz ac |
| 20430 16712 no yes no 545.944 on-line
| 20430 16216 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 20430 15912 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 20430 15792 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 20430 15640 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 20140 14968 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 19980 15288 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 19650 15120 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 19470 15000 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 19320 14912 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 19100 14808 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 18850 14712 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 18600 14632 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 18420 14544 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 18110 14320 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 17840 14344 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 17620 14272 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 17210 14184 no no yes 545.944 off-line
| 0 14136 yes no yes 545.944 off-line
As soon as `crit' goes to `yes', I had a few more minutes to shutdown the
machine. However, these days the power state becomes critical after an uptime
of 4 minutes, and I don't have time for a clean shutdown anymore :-(
Note that this is not on a PowerBook, but on a Vaio, with LiIon battery. And
it's definitely the battery, since so far it doesn't happen with the (larger)
spare one.
Gr{oetje,eeting}s,
Geert
--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
-- Linus Torvalds
