[NTLUG:Discuss] Compaq Presario

[Daniel Hauck]

Dennis Kaptain wrote:
> I have a Compaq Presario 2103US laptop with a battery charging problem. This machine runs Fedora 8 Xfce desktop.
> 
> Correct behavior for this machine: while the battery is charging the LED is yellow. when the battery is fully charged the LED turns green. If no AC is attached the LED goes out
> 
> A few weeks ago it changed. The battery is charging and the LED is yellow. Every few minutes the LED turns off for a few seconds and then turns back on yellow. This never allows the battery to fully charge. 
> 
> What I tried:
> I verified that the power supply is in fact supplying 18.5 volts without interruption and bought a second power supply just to confirm there isn't a problem with the old power supply.
> 
> I removed and reinstalled the battery hoping to fix a bad connection.
> 
> 
> Has anyone ever seen behavior like this? Do you have any ideas how I can fix it?
> 
> Thanks
> Dennis Kaptain
> 

First I'd like to suggest booting into DOS and just run some sort of
meaningless but processor intensive task until the battery completely
drains.  Then let it charge again, but be in the BIOS setup.  (It should
give you some sort of graph or other indication of the battery state.
Most laptops do that.)  When it becomes fully charged, look to see if
the same behavior is exhibited as under Linux.  This should help to
isolate if this is a hardware or a software problem.

It's interesting that you are running Fedora 8.  I too am running Fedora
8 and I have encountered a very unusual behavior today.  The power icon
in the systray changed state saying that it could no longer read the
state of the battery.  It had never happened before or since.  I suspect
some recent update had slipped an inadvertent bug in or perhaps
something needed a restart and didn't ask for it.  In any case, the
first thing I would try to do is determine if it's hardware or software.