Battery charge limiting

Kevin Oberman kob6558 at gmail.com
Wed Oct 19 06:13:32 UTC 2011


On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Dmitry Kolosov <onyx at z-up.ru> wrote:
>> I've never heard of such a theory as limiting charge to prolong battery
>> life, not with Lithium Ion batteries anyway; nor have I ever seen any
>> such as a BIOS option.  'Common' on which brand/s of notebooks?
>>
>> Can you provide any links to articles discussing this?
>
> http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-104440.html
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/34452/how-can-i-limit-charging-capacity-to-
> extend-a-batterys-lifespan
>
> Lenovo provides such programs with their new products. A program can hold a
> battery at 70-80%% while it not used.
>
>> I don't think control over a notebook's charging is possible in FreeBSD;
>> this is usually managed by an Embedded Controller and ACPI merely passes
>> on the the states reported by that and by the battery itself.
>
> May be modern EC provides some controlling methods or so?

Actually, my old IBM ThinkPad started providing this advice after I
updated the power
management. The issue is with batteries kept at 100% charge for long
periods fail
more quickly. The power management software stops the charging when it reaches
80% of capacity, if you choose to set it that way.

This is under the control of the power management software though I assume that
the EC had to have the capabilityto stop the charging.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com


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