Help with battery power

[sean8601]

Hey guys, I cant seem to fix this and everywhere i look on the net doesnt have the answer but a lot of the same problem. Im on a laptop and when I unplug the power it says Battery critically low, computer will suspend unless it is plugged in.... battery is full obviously and i dunno. im running ubuntu 11.10 32 bit ... thanks guys

[jayd512]

Ubuntu 11.10 has been getting quite a bit of flack for it's poor battery life.
See here for a little more on that. There's also a little info on what might help you get it fixed.

[sean8601]

Its really not a battery life problem cause the battery is full. the system just thinks that there is not a lot of battery life left... it foes from 6 min to 2 min in seconds. then power down.

[jayd512]

Gotcha.
I'm not familiar with the Unity layout. But there should be a Battery Indicator icon. If you click on it, you should be able to open your power statistics.
Take a look at it's capacity, energy when full... all that good stuff.

Once you do that, I only have 2 suggestions. Let your battery completely discharge. Then charge it. See if that allows Ubuntu's power manager to basically calibrate itself. If no change, run all updates and check for improvement.

If that doesn't help, I'd suggest filing a bug report.

[reginaldperrin]

It is unlike software to be wrong in this sort of case.
Seems very much likely that your battery is dead or dying.
Sadly, they don't last anywhere near as long as you would want them to, and they're damned expensive to replace to boot.

You probably don't have a spare battery to help diagnose, so I would take your laptop to a repair shop or similar (someplace which sells laptop batteries anyway), see if you can try out a replacement battery.

When unplugged with a new battery in it, the battery indicator should stay on nearly full-charge for much longer than mere minutes. This would indicate that your old battery has reached the end of it's life.
If the indicator still drops out in minutes as before, then this would point to something else than the battery, especially if the old battery is still fairly new.
It doesn't mean that Ubuntu is sucking the power out though, it would still seem to be more likely that a hardware fault would be doing that, rather than software. At the very least, this way you know whether or not you have to spend money on a new battery or not.

Hope this helps

[unlimitedscolobb]

I have recently installed Ubuntu Oneiric on a laptop and have run into a similar issue. I checked the battery level immediately after I got the message that the power level is critically low and it showed me that the battery was 85% charged. I haven't waited to see if the system would actually be shut down on me, though.

Could you please tell us how much percentage of battery power do you have when you get the alert message?

[hunter_thom]

I actually see something similar but I'm on a laptop w/ ArchLinux and e17. As soon as I unplug the power, I get a "Power critically low!" message, although its at 99% power. I used to have it configured differently though and it would report percentage instead, which was more accurate. Perhaps a configuration option within your battery settings but just a guess.

[Toadbrooks]

It is unlike software to be wrong in this sort of case.
Seems very much likely that your battery is dead or dying.

For what it's worth, I have the same problem. I'm running 10.04, the system says my battery is fully charged, but if I unplug, it shuts off almost immediately. I know it's battery failure. No one bothers to tell you that leaving a laptop plugged in and a battery in it is a bad idea.

[rokytnji]

This is a old IBM T23. I don;t Unity or Ubuntu on it. I run AntiX with Fluxbox with tint2 and a conky moniter for battery. I just unplugged the power cord and did a

$ acpi
Battery 0: Discharging, 99%, 02:36:35 remaining

and since I have typed this out I did again

biker:~$ acpi
Battery 0: Discharging, 97%, 02:37:11 remaining

I don't know if Ubuntu 11 with Unity crippled this or not. Just posting for info.

[Rubberman]

There have been kernel issues lately with power consumption regressions. If you look at the blogs (slashdot, ars technica, TheReg, LWN, et al) you would have seen the discussions. Hopefully this will be resolved soon as it is impacting a lot of people. FWIW, on my laptop, I usually run Ubuntu 9.04, which doesn't have this problem...