Get rid of your “battery may be broken” notification
November 21st, 2009 at 6:55pm |
Some HP Pavilion standard 6 cells batteries apparently use the same ID of 12 cells batteries. This would lead GNOME to display the following notification at every login:
Battery may be broken Your battery has a very low capacity 48% which means that it may be old or broken.
Of course M$ windows wouldn’t care a bit about your battery health status and thus not annoy you with any message.
Fortunately your battery is not broken but simply not carefully crafted. This is not a big deal though. You can get rid of the “battery may be broken” message by typing
ALT+F2
gconf-editor
navigate to
/apps/gnome-power-manager/notify/low_capacity
and untick the value.
At the following login you would see that message no more.
Related posts:
- Do not require the password for cpu frequency scaling in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10
- HP Pavilion and the broken nVidia chips affair
- Reclaim vertical space in Gnome!
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Posted in HP Pavilion
Brilliant
Thanks for post. That was starting to get annoying :-p
Great post – I’m using Lubuntu, but the same applies – just install gconf-editor with
sudo apt-get install gconf-editorthen run with
gconf-editorand navigate to the path given in the post above, unticking the option.
Thanks for the tip, that really helped. Keep up the good work.
Regards, Amol
Thanks for this. I’m using an Acer eeePC and was getting the same error with Debian Squeeze and Lubuntu 10.04 Beta.
Thank you, this was exactly what I was looking for! I was getting tired of seeing that error every time I logged in, now no more…
but my battery is really made broken by ubuntu9.10. my battery is just one years old , and before, i use windows, i can stand for 2-3 hours, now , just 40 – 50 minutes , that ‘s my battery information,
present: yes
design capacity: 56160 mWh
last full capacity: 15210 mWh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 10800 mV
design capacity warning: 760 mWh
design capacity low: 200 mWh
capacity granularity 1: 1 mWh
capacity granularity 2: 1 mWh
model number: 42T4536
serial number: 1662
battery type: LION
OEM info: SANYO
spacelee, as far as I know there is no way a piece of software (Ubuntu) can damage a battery. Given that basically is simply drained and recharged by the electronics controlled by the BIOS (not the Operative System!) and it cannot be overclocked in any way there are no chances that it’s Ubuntu Linux’s fault.
Poor quality batteries perform very well at the beginning, hence when you were using windows it was working great! However quality issues or frequent and intense charge/discharge cycles would let the battery have a very short life, regardless to the software that benefits from its power.
In other circumstances there could be the case a not tweaked program or operative system may drain more power from the battery, hence reducing its performance, however in your case the last full capacity: 15210 mWh is indeed 25% of the design capacity. This means that is the battery itself that is broken.
In my case, instead, the battery simply has a misconfigured identity chip, so that the design charge is the one of 12 cells version, whereas my device has 6 cells only. The last full capacity value, actually, reports 95% of the 6 cells battery design capacity even after 2 years (during which it has undergone very few discharge/recharge cycles though since I mostly use the laptop in AC mode).
I would add that – I don’t know with 10.04 but it was so with previous Ubuntus – Ubuntu is quite weak on the power management side, so maybe that’s part of the problem. Your battery is weakened indeed but nevertheless it managed to get you better performance under windows.
Well, my battery really *is* broken but I was getting sick of hearing about it anyway
Thanks for the tip.
Damn, I went and bought a new battery last week. Slams head.
Should’ve kept up to date with aldeby…
At least now I know to keep the old battery. I want to keep this HP Pavillion for as long as possible.