Is it possible that my HP Compaq Presario CQ71 doesn't charge battery properly under Plasma desktop??

I wouldn't be asking this and would assume battery is broken but it works fine under Ubuntu on the same computer.

Thanks.

I would highly doubt this, as no operating system to my knowledge has the capability to influence battery charging, as this is all regulated in hardware and it's associated firmware.

However, I have noticed on my system that when UPower gives out bad information (as it does from time to time) then the battery applet (as well as KDE Power Management) will declare the battery to be invalid or broken, and display no charging information and a red cross instead.

For me, this usually goes away if I kill and restart "upowerd".

On thinkpads there's a mechanism which allows to charge or not charge batteries. There's a hardware setting which only charges your battery up to a certain level, for example; I have it set to 85%, because it greatly increases Lithium-Ion battery's life time if you don't fully charge or discharge them (and especially don't "store" them fully charged). I have no idea whether powerdevil or whatever supports it though, I guess not.

Either way, the relevant files are /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh and /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh, you can try echo'ing some percentage (e.g. 82) in there as root and see if anything changes, in case those files exist and you have a thinkpad.

Cheers,
Sven

scummos wrote:Either way, the relevant files are /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh and /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh, you can try echo'ing some percentage (e.g. 82) in there as root and see if anything changes, in case those files exist and you have a thinkpad.

Cheers,
Sven

Nope..haven't found those..there are multiple POWER directories under /sys/devices/..I'm no expert but would love to preserve my battery so..any more useful tips?

Thanks,
Saso