t61 battery sudden discharge

my 18month old t61 (xp sp2) has recently started doing one unexpected and annoying thing- while running on battery, even when the battery has 50-80% life left, it suddenly tells me the battery is critically low and goes into hibernation (the configured action for 10% life)....does not give the "low battery" alarm (programmed at 25% life)

has the battery run its useful life or there is a potential problem with the power management system....any way to test it?

thanks

 

The batteries useful life is probably at an end. You probably have one or more bad cells, and when the battery hits them it just drops down 40% instantly (I had this happen on one of my T40 batteries).

You can try disabling your critically low actions. On my T40 I was able to run 30 minutes+ with a 0% battery sometimes. If you run it down to the battery shutoff point (you will lose unsaved data, but it won't harm your computer), it may recalibrate that battery and fix it (probably not though).

I would recommend you just buy a new one. I bought my third T40 battery from Calcellular ( $73 for a T61 6 cell). The price was 1/2 of IBM/Lenovo's and the battery served me very well for over a year until I parted with the T40 and got an x200.

 

Before going out and purchasing a new battery, I'd recommend recalibrating your battery first in your battery manager.
You can then use BatteryMon (free for 30 days) to check/monitor your battery status.

 

jonlumpkin and david...thaknks for your suggestions...i'll try the re-cal as soon as i finish this response...if no luck, search for the new battery

 

so i tried i did a test last night, there is an issue with the power manager (in addition to reduced battery life with age)

i disabled the screen saver and all battery alarms/actions, started from 100% charge, results:
100 to 4% in 70 min (a t4% offered battery stretch which i declined)
4 to 1% 12 min
1 to 0% 5 min
and (surprisingly)it ran for another 30 min at "0%"

total time of is almost 2 hours which i can accept for now. hope this will do the re-cal, i will test alarms again

 

The behavior on that is very similar to my original battery on the T40. When I first got it, I could get the better part of 5 hours out of it before it got to 5%. However, after a few years it would drop to 5% in about 90 minutes, but would still run for about 30 minutes after hitting 0%. I never could recalibrate it, so I just used it as a secondary battery for non-critical work (e.g. watching movies on a plane), and would let it run till it died.

I highly recommend buying a second battery (you can get one for about $80 shipped from CalCellular) if you plan on keeping your T61 for any length of time (and why wouldn't you, it is a great laptop).

 

i am having the same result--- the re-cal has changed nothing; time to spring for a new battery

 

dr.gj,

I am having an identical problem on my 8 month old T61p. I just got the battery replaced under warranty, and it did the same thing on the first discharge. I didn't fully charge the new battery before using it. It came at about 40% charge. It discharged to 20%, then suddenly dropped to 5% and hibernated. I'm recharging it again to run another test. I'm wondering if it's a problem with power management. It's a brand new battery and shouldn't be having any issues.

 

Same problem here on the T61p, and it's about 7 months old now. The power manager shows around 43% battery health, and I just decided to have Lenovo replace it (under warranty).

One question for those of you that have used it: have you used RM CPU clock? I installed this a few days ago to get rid of the dreaded C2D buzz/screeching noise, and I never had a problem until this program was installed. If the problem is with the ThinkVantage Power Manager, is it possible to uninstall that to prevent this from happening again?

 

yes, i think you can uninstall the thinkadvantage (mine got wiped out as part of another glitch. but if you un-install it, many utilities won't work, including the blue thinkvantage button. btw, that's how noticed i had lost. i had to reinstall it to get back that functionality.

so look carefully at what you will lose before deciding to un-install

add: re battery, i triied all that was suggested in this thread + more, nothing worked so i bought a new battery on ebay...it works great

 

dr.gj, do you use the RM clock, or do you think the problem lies in the Power Manager?

 

i don't use the rm clock.

in my case, there was nothing wrong with the power-manager...the battery (over a year old) had started to fail. the Li-ion batteries do fail pre-maturely at times has happened to my cell battery too. every thing works fine with the replacement battery.

 

Interesting... I'm having the same exact problem, and I bought my T61p about 7-8 months ago too... Could it perhaps be a faulty series or something?

In power manager, even after the laptop has been on ac power for over a day, it said that battery is only 98% charged... Then I checked the battery with Everest, and it said that battery wear was only 5% which seemed pretty normal to me... I tried to do the recalibration, resulting in fixing the 98% bug, but still it would jump from about 70%-4% in a second...
Looks like it's time for a new battery...

 

Same exact problem here. I don't buy the explanation that the battery is going bad. I have had five thinkpads over the years and never had a battery do this. Also, I do not use this battery excessively as I do have a second battery. Something is not right with either the monitor, the charging circuit, or the battery itself (ie bad batch).

 

Weird, how old is your battery? If it's under warranty I am sure you can replace it..

 

hey bro i have had that problem in many of my thinkpad t60 and t61. i recommend that you just charge the battery to 100% and just reinstall the os and it works for me. i just reinstalled the os.

 

Hm, I have a similar problem with my T61p. But with mine I can use it for about an hour, the batter is about 50% and then suddenly it goes into hibernation.

Mine is just over 1 year old now.

 

I have the same problem with the battery in my T61p. Luckily it is still under warranty (expires this month). They sent me a new one. The old one was a Sony manufactured 02/2008, and the new one is a Sanyo manufactured 11/2008. Hopefully it was just a bad batch of batteries. I know Sony's were exploding about a year ago.