AC power and built-in battery question

[Astronaut]

hello,

I have recently purchased a laptop with a built-in battery, thing is it's always plugged in, under windows, there is a way to only use AC power and not use the battery on firmware level, I wanted to know if the same could be achieved under gentoo?

Thanks a lot

[Roman_Gruber]

edit: May be done with ACPI quirks, but that'S not that well documented, and there are so many different hardware. May be achieveable

Usually all handled in hardware, software just reads out some read only registers

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Hi

I assume you want to preserve the battery and ask that question.

In my point of view: I have read somewhere a battery should usually last 500 charge / discharge cycles. What I also know after some years, the 100 % battery is just a joke, usually a decent battery has around 70-80 percent charge left after a while. Mine, ASUS g75VW, as of now reports around 64,67% which is also fine for the age. the 100 percent is just after a few cycles. For myself the real 100 % is around 80, or 70 percent of the designed 100% capacity.


Most battery packs have a build in controller. How the charging is done, especially the "keep alive charging", sometimes called refresh charging, or whatever named, depends on the charging circuit. I doubt you can influence that. I would also not suggest to unplug the battery because you are than in the state of no UPS for a power failure, and you have to pay attention to the "proper storage" of batteries than.

In my point of view the software just reads out some registers, but you can barely influence how the refresh charging, how the charging is handled, because it is done by a controller with a non upgradeable hardware / software. Most of the time some MAXIM chip or something similar is used.

When you care for your battery, you should enforce 3-5 full load / discharge cycles after a fresh purchase and pay attention to not overheat the device in question, so the chemistry is kinda "optimal".

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Usually you use the AC power adapter when the laptop is plugged in. You can not usually influence what the charging controller does when the ac adapter is plugged in. The battery is charged, than a refresh charging is applied.

Some cheap notebooks, e.g. MSI had several notebooks, which discharged the battery because the power brick delivered had too small Wattage delievered. E.g. Playing a game, which put pressure on the gpu and cpu which caused too much power consumed, the power adapter could not handle all and so the battery was drained. LAter these clock down because of that effect...

I would pay attention when gaming or using something else which caues heavy load, if the battery drains, if so I would return the hole product, because the power adapter is not well designed, which indicates a cheap product!

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I assume you ask, because you purchased a laptop with build in battery, and you were a person who usually removed the battery, to conserve it'S live right?

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off topic: In my use pattern, I only use notebooks for quite a while, I never had a dead battery for 17 years. Last dead battery was an ACER around year 2000, with pentium 3 inside + windows 2000.

the asus g70sg, nearly 7 years in use, 60-80 percent of battery indicator when fully charged
g75vw now, 64,67% => well that was a second hand purchase, and the previous owner ruined hte hardware a bit, I saw a lot of damages because he was unable to proper service the device and such. so this notebook was mishandled
asus k70, sold, ~4-5 years in use => also 60-80%
msi cr700 => still in use, several years old, same

I do use my batteries from time to time. I recommend to fully charge / discharge regularly once every one or two months.

[Ant P.]

Is it a Thinkpad? Those have Linux drivers for that.

[cwr]

I've had a battery controller chip fail on me, with the battery about a month out of warranty.
It looked as if the battery couldn't charge - anyway, I replaced it.

Will