Compal JHL90 battery issue

Hey guys,

I have a JHL90 and it has the 9-cell in it. The only problem I have had since I bought it is that Windows won't tell me the estimated time remaining of battery life. Is this a common problem? Is there an easy fix? I tried notebook hardware control and it gave me an estimate... and under linux I get a time estimate also.

Thanks guys!

 

yea, vista doesn't do that for me either.... idk

 

It's a feature of the battery, not Windows. The battery doesn't report life remaining.

 

but under ubuntu linux it gives me a reading... so are you sure its a battery thing and not a windows thing?

 

Wait... really? Perhaps Linux does its own sort of thing with calculating remaining time. My Compal never read its battery life remaining in Vista (32 or 64), nor XP. Maybe it was just my battery, too. Perhaps there's a 3rd party battery program somewhere that will be able to calculate it for you?
Usually this kind of thing is built into the battery-- it calculates power draw at the given moment and averages out the remaining capacity in mWh, in my experience anyway...

 

i use battery bar v3.1, it shows the time left, percent left, time to charge, all that good stuff and hardly uses any memory too.

 

I don't know about you, but the battery time reading I get under linux is way off mark. And when I looked in the ACPI info directories, I couldn't find anything pertaining to battery time, so it looks like it's just as dtd00d guessed and some linux app is using a messy software calculator. I don't get any readings at all under Windows either. I don't really care much for it, to be honest. I think you can get a better feel for it judging from the percentage remaining and tasks at hand. Time estimates tend to be very inaccurate anyway no matter the source since performance requirements can change unpredictably.

@seneortighto: Is battery bar giving reasonable times for you?

 

Everest can get you battery information and state, wear level and time left.

 

it isn't 100% spot on, but it is pretty close. like a good ballpark figure for how much time i have left, give or take about 20 mins. it does a calc based on current consumption of power so as you do more cpu intensive stuff it changes the remaining time to accommodate. plus it shows battery wear and how long until the battery is charged when on AC. it's a nice little program.