Battery isn't charging.

I'm having problems with my 12-cell battery. BatteryMon-application and Windows's own power meter show that it's always fully loaded but when I unplug the ac-cord windows goes instantly into stand-by mode. Also when I open the bios and let the battery to discharge (takes about 20-30min) and restart windows afterwards, power meter is again at 100%.

Normal 6-cell battery works fine.

Thanks!

 

If your 6-cell works fine, the 12-cell may just be worn out/defective. You might try finding out the wear level of the 12-cell with battery testing software.

If the battery is less than a year old there's a good chance a replacement would be covered by your warranty.

 

You can try a deep depletion by disabling Windows' critical battery action and just letting the computer run until the battery is genuinely empty.

My 6024W's battery is good for about 8 minutes of operation once it says zero (but I have failed to turn this into usable capacity in spite of several deep depletions).

If you have Vista then you need to use this command because a do nothing critical battery action is not available by default:

John

 

Well, the battery is brand new. About 1 month old. And it seems that my computer doesn't recognise that battery at all anymore...

Now we'll see how zepto's support works.

 

If it's brand new, then it may just be defective. I've seen batteries fail within hours of their first heavy use, so it's not unheard of. I'd say you're doing the right thing contacting your reseller for further support, but it can't hurt anything to try John Ratsey's deep cycle suggestion first.

 

Well I got a new battery from Zepto and it's working. So the problem was with the battery not my hardware/bios as zepto support first suspected.

Actually I got two brand new batteries. Zepto sent me one extra by accident and when I contacted them they said I could keep it because shipping it via UPS costs more than the battery itself.

One thing that bothers my is that I get only about 4 hours working time with 12 cell battery (just surfing/listening music). My cpu is C2D 2ghz/2gb ram/intel x3100. Normal?

 

no
should be around 5h for 6224 or 6324 so clearly more on 6024

btw: you got two 12 cell batterys?
interested in selling one? ;D

 

4 hours for 12 cell with X3100 graphics is too low. I could get 3 hours with the 6 cell if only it was full capacity. First thought: Are you running the latest BIOS. I recall that 6024W came with a BIOS which didn't let the CPU go into the low power sleep states. You can check this by running Perfmon, see here. here.

Otherwise we need to figure out where the power is going. I suggest you load RMClock and use the monitoring and battery info pages. What is the CPU speed / voltage under light load? With the display on minimum brightness you should get a power drain below 15W (15000mW), but you may need to turn off wireless and Bluetooth and have nothing excepted a mouse connected to USB. I have also found that Flash on web pages causes significant CPU utilisation. I use Firefox + Flashblock.

John

 

With min. brightness and wireless turned off, discharge rate jumped around 13W.
With wireless on and a bit brighter display it's around 15W. Life time around 6 hours.

I'm gonna test that Perfmon later.

Does the charge of a battery get better after a few recharges?

 

Yes, sometimes the batteries get better after a few charge / discharge cycles.

Have a look at the capacity numbers on RMClock's battery device page. Does the total designed capacity match the capacity givin on the battery's label (mWh = V x mAh)? I got two 6 cell batteries, both of which had less capacity when new than on the label. Does the fully charged capacity match the designed capacity?

John

 

Well not quite.. if I did the calculations right.

Battery says: 11.1V * 8.8AHr (= 8800mAh) = 97680mWh

RMclock's designated capacity = 93485mWh

 

Ah! So the batteries still don't give what the labels say! Yours is about 4% down which is about 15 minutes out of a possible 6 hours.

The label on the 6 cell says 10.8V, 4.8AHr = 51.84WHr. But on mine the actual capacities were 47.317mWh (9% down) and 49.194mWh (5% down) when new. I never managed to extract an explanation from Zepto.

There is something strange about the way the Zepto BIOS updates the battery info. On my Samsung X60 plus RMClock reports the designed capacity as 57720mWh (which matches the label's 11.1V, 5200mAh) but the fully charged capacity is 41070mWh. The difference is the "wear".

John

 

i experienced, that zepto doesn't show any "real "wearlevel at all bit seems to be defined as 100,2%^
very strange
for example:
my batterie had a "designed capacity" of ca 49000mWH when i bought it, wear level (reported by RMClock) was 100,2%
now its 44809 and a remaining capacity of 44907(wear level again 100,2%)
^^