According to acpi -V, my battery was down to 76% of it's design capacity last time it was fully charged, and the battery notification icon updated it's "time until empty" accordingly - according to it, my eee 901 now only lasts 4 hours on battery, power saver mode, screen brightness on minimum and no wifi. However, even when every indicator (acpi, /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state, the battery icon in the tray) points to the battery being empty, my eee lasted another hour before turning itself off, and I was running wifi and using some CPU heavy apps (audacity, mathematica). I've tried completely draining the battery and completely charging it to re-align it the sensors (as instructed on eeeuser.com), but the problem remains. While I don't mind the fact that my battery did, in fact, not lose a quarter of its capacity overnight, I do find the innacurate reporting a bit annoying, especially since I had to set the eee to no longer shut down when battery capacity is critical, seeing as how that effectively costs me of an extra hour of battery life.

Any ideas?

Anyone?

You can try doing the same thing, but running it down in bios instead of in eeebuntu. Other than that, short of knowing how to reprogram Li-ion battery chips, not much to do.

You can take a look at the stats eeebuntu gets for your battery. This is what I get:I guess just note the design capacity, and last full capacity, after discharge. I think those numbers are the ones reported by the chip in the battery, though, so if they're wrong, it's back to a bad chip.

Right, I'll give that a try today. How should I recharge it though, turned off, in bios, or in eeebuntu?




Which would be a great deal easier if hardware vendors released specs for their stuff as Free hardware, but that's another rant-worthy topic.



Thanks for the tip.

I'm not sure the recharge state would matter. The only reason to do it in the bios is then Eeebuntu never sees those numbers, so it should (maybe) reset them without power controls. On the other hand, I would've thought it would figure it out when it stayed on for an hour after it's own estimate...which is what points to the battery chip, as that's what reports remaining current/voltage.

I can't disagree with the open specs, but then, I also would never muck with a Li-ion, as that's likely to hurt.

If the battery is still under warranty, you can try to harass Asus for a new one.

Well, I did drain it in bios and recharge it...apparently, the battery is now at 83% of its design capacity (it was 76 before I did this). I'll give it another go tomorrow.

Weird. Maybe it'll all come back if you do this a couple times :-/

Not the optimal solution