battery problems

[Corson]

a while ago i bought my current laptop from a friend for very cheap, with the understanding i would need to buy a new battery for it. i got a battery off of ebay, and it works fine, except- after about a half hour, the percentage life left jumps down to 7, and the warning beep goes off every few seconds, it stays at 7 for a while, then jumps down to 3. the battery still lasts for a total of about an hour and a half or more, its just a pain having to mute the sound after a half an hour...
i have run a battery optimizer program which came with the pc that helps the life a little, but it doesnt change the fact that the shown percentage jumps down so quickly. it wouldnt be much of a problem if i could turn the beep off but it appears to be controlled directly through the mobo.

another problem im having with this laptop is that the ac jack seems loose, and i have to jiggle the cord to get it to charge. im assuming it is loose inside, and i havnt been able to open the laptop up, i dont know much about laptops and this one is tricky. i think i may have to take my whole screen off to get to the ac port. i work at radio shack, and im wondering if i should just send it out to our repair center to have it fixed, it would probably cost me around 75-100 dollars.

i mainly want to fix these problems so i can sell this laptop for something a little speedier with much better battery life for college. still cant decide whether or not to leave my desktop at home and just get a nice laptop for school or get a low end lappy and keep my good desktop.



this is an HP pavilion zt1000

any suggestions?

 

[swatbat]

Well it is possibly that the charging circuit in the notebook is shot but the battery is prob messed up. As far as the ac jack goes if you can get it fixed for a 100 bucks send it off. That is a lot less then what most places would charge for labor and is not that bad of a price.

 

[inotocracy]

Well it is possibly that the charging circuit in the notebook is shot but the battery is prob messed up. As far as the ac jack goes if you can get it fixed for a 100 bucks send it off. That is a lot less then what most places would charge for labor and is not that bad of a price.

He said the battery runs for well over an hour and a half after the 5 minute remaining charge warning comes on, so its probably not the battery thats malfunctioning. The only way to really know for sure is to some how get ahold of another battery and test it out, if the same thing happens its the board on the laptop.

 

[Corson]

well damn yeah that makes sense, i think it sounds like the the battery is fine, but that is a larger pain in the ass than if the battery was just funky. maybe ill add that to the description of problems if i do send it to radio shack repairs. if you sign up for the credit card, you get free repair estimates, so i wont be losing much just by sending it to get a price for all or some of the problems with it.

thanks

 

[Darth Bagel]

I've heard that for some batteries the voltage curve (if you will, probably not the right term) changes with age and use such that the battery appears to drop to a very low level of remaining power after just a few minutes, but then the voltage steadies out and stays where it is for a long time.

 

[swatbat]

He said the battery runs for well over an hour and a half after the 5 minute remaining charge warning comes on, so its probably not the battery thats malfunctioning. The only way to really know for sure is to some how get ahold of another battery and test it out, if the same thing happens its the board on the laptop.

Yea a lot of batteries have internal circuits that can fuck up. The best thing to do would be to test it with a different battery though. Good example my ibook battery is fucked. The ibook thinks the battery gets like over 5 hours when it only gets about 3.5. It will say it has 2 hours left and just die. We have tried the battery in another notebook same problem. The battery is just trashed but I don't care as 3 hours is still pretty good.