thinkpad battery meter wrong

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sersoft2
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Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 4:47 am
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

yeah so I've exchanged my dell p2 266mhz to a guy who knows absolutely nothing about computers (he just wanted microsoft office in french) and got a "almost" new thinkpad A22m p3 1ghz 256ram, the only problem is the battery, after a full charge, it goes down to 0% in 15minutes! at first I thought that the battery was totally dead. but after disabling the auto-shutdown, i noticed it still runs fine at 0% for about 45minutes. I asked the guy and he told me that he never actually used the battery and it was always plugged into power supply. so dose that mean he killed the battery and screwed the meter or is there still something I can do while I wait for my new battery to arrive from ebay?
beatoem
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Joined: Sun Jan 16, 2005 11:38 am
Location: sydney,australia

looks like the battery suffered ibm software reccomendation trap :?
best disable all battery warning check boxes in windows xp
let the battery fully drain untill pc powers off recharge the battery,if you decide to use battery power let it drain completely before recharging again.after a few cycle times it should run well over an hour,maybe over 2(depending on the cells).i had a 600e battery run like that for 18 months
before i sold the laptop,it was still ok .that particular battery
gave me approx 30 minutes befor the yllow light started to flash+another 55 minutes by disabling all warning devices,running on 54g wifi.
d saint"
lamo
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it seems, that there is calibration error in the battery controller. check out if your battery was disassembled and the liion elements was replaced. if so, you should check out the controller logic, i mean the chips marks(you can see it on the controller's PCB), and post it here :)
or you can do that beatoem proposed, but this method not always will be helpful. There are some type of controllers(bq 2060ss for instance) that supports upper recalibration.
sersoft2
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Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 4:47 am
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

I've opened the battery and clearly was the first one to do it, the cells were intact, original with glue and everything. I've already disabled the Windows warnings and everything, but its life doesn't get any longer.

I've noticed that when you charge it to the maximum, and then turn off the LCD, the battery lasts about 3-4 hours with LCD turned off. running XP PRO SP2, downloading movies, and the meter acts normally, goes from 100 to 99 98 97 [......] 3 -2- 1 - 0 and shuts down but when the lcd is on it does exactly the same thing every time. (go from 100% to 40% in 15minutes and then instantly goes to 0% and run on 0 for an hour)

I was surprised when I charged it to the max, put the LCD brightness to high and as soon as I put a dvd in the drive it turned off due to low power.

conclusion: must be the battery can't deliver the required voltage anymore and needs to be replaced?
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