Toughbook battery drained on it's own?

Hi everyone!

Yesterday I tried to turn on my newly purchased Toughbook CF-30 but it didn't. It was working the last time I turned
it on may be a week or two before this. Since I still don't have an ac adapter I can't check to see if It works on that.
My best guess would be that the battery is somehow drained. Does this happen?

Thanks,

 

Yes, it happens. GPS is the main power draw, as far as I know. I take the battery out of my Toughbooks right after I shut them off.

 

Thanks mklym, I'm relieved a bit now. My unit has a built in GPS. I'm just curious, How come does it draw power while the unit is off.
It's a bit of a pain to take out the battery everytime you shut it off. Is there a way to prevent this unwanted power draw, say
by disabling the GPS in BIOS?

 

You can disable it in the BIOS and that should fix it. You really need to take the battery out when you are not going to use it for a while. It is good standard procedure to remove batteries from any electronics that are not going to be used in a while.

 

Thanks for good advice. I'll disable the GPS and make sure to remove the battery when I'm not going use it for a while.

 

If yours is an aftermarket GPS then possibly a small switch can be added to turn off the
power when not in use. I did this to may CF 29 and it saves the batteries from being drained
when not in use.





Bob

 

Thanks Bob, That looks cool. My Toughbook is a used CF-30FCS64AM, which comes with preinstalled GPS.
So I suppose it should be the OEM unless the previous owner has changed it.

 

How old is your battery? some times if you rarely full cycle the battery you never really get to know if the battery is weak. So now your only sign is it won't hold a charge and drops off to dead even if just low before when you turn it off.

 

So, I don't really know how old it is. It came with my machine which is a used one. Do you mean the batteries could loose calibration if not full cycled
for a while? That's true, I don't know when it has been calibrated last time.

 

Calibrations are easy... F9 at boot up... Do it tonight!

 

Thanks! Cool! That's good to know, I was going to drain the battery completely and then fully charge it to calibrate.
But I have to wait for my ac adapter to arrive, and then I'll definitely give it a go.

 

...and my guess you should have the charger by thursday :hi2:

 

Awesome! Thanks a lot man :thumbsup:

 

you can see how old the battery is, and how many full cycles it has, by using the Panasonic PC Information Viewer application; under 'Battery Status' check the Total Charge Index (cycles) and Battery ID, which show the production date code, the first 6 digits are YYMMDD.

 

Thank you Gear6! I'll do that before wiping out the Windows for good and installing Linux