Battery discharged after removal

I have a Compaq Evo 600 I am selling this week.I took the mostly charged battery out briefly and put it back in after a few minutes.The next time I tried to boot up it was completely dead.
It seems to be charging fine it's at 40% now and going up.Is what happened normal?I wouldn't think so or you wouldn't be able to use spare batteries.

 

That's strange....batteries DO discharge, but not in a few minutes. The only thing that I can think of is that you might have shorted the battery and caused it to discharge in that fashion (which is not good), but if everything is working now (and this doesn't happen again), I would not be too worried. Are you sure that you put it in properly & that nothing was blocking the contacts?

 

I don't recall.I was in a hurry so anything is possible.I'll wait until it gets to 100% and see if it happens again.

 

It charged overnight so I popped the battery out for a minute ,popped it back in and it booted right up.I think I may have poked around with a voltmeter and shorted it.I think I started to try to take a measurement and decided it was a little risky.I guess I was right but don't remember actually touching the battery with the tip of the meter lead although it was close it was a tight fit when I backed off.
Thanks for responding Vespoli

 

It shouldn't be able to discharge the battery with a quick little short like that. To entirely discharge the battery in seconds would cause it to explode from the sudden heat and pressure. I suspect the problem is that the battery is on its way out, and falsely records as being fully charged when in fact it is able to hold little charge. Same thing used to happen to my old thinkpad.

 

It charged all night and showed 93% after I thought to look after I had already booted it 3 times.

 

Hmm.Is there a program that will monitor when your battery dies?Like maybe log it when it get's to 5%, then 4%,etc until it dies?
That way you could see how long your battery is good for without having to watch your laptop.

 

Screw it.I'm running Prime95.If I'm going to sell it I better make sure.I'd rather tell the guy he has to kick in another $70 for a new battery than give it to him and have it die in a month.

 

That's very nice of you, many people wouldn't bother to do that. I wish I could give you more advice but I don't have much more to add. There are programs that help detect battery life, but I think they have more to do with estimations based on hours of use and usage habits.

Good luck.

 

Some BIOSes include a battery calibration routine in which the computer fully charges the battery then measures how much power can be taken out before the minimum acceptable voltage is reached. The actual capacity of the battery is then updated and the difference is expressed as battery wear. Windows then has a better estimate of the 100% charged battery and can make a better estimate of the running time. without the calibration you can suddenly go from thinking there is 30% remaining (example) to a low battery alarm.

If you have MobileMeter then you can read the battery properties (right click on the MobileMeter and select options).

However, some battery calibration efforts by BIOSes can give the wrong answers (I recently had this problem) and the alternative method is to disable the low battery alarms and let the computer run until it is dead (then recharge and repeat the exercise).

John

 

That worked out well.I ran Prime95 for almost 2 hours from about 80%.I'm cool with that.Thanks for the help guys.