I've been working on rebuilding a few CE 6 netbooks by combining working parts from several ones with issues that I've picked up over the past couple of years. During the process I've swapped around the battery packs from them, and quite honestly can no longer recall which one was from which unit. But something else interesting has developed out of this: the two netbooks I've successfully rebuilt thus far do not recognize the power levels left in any of the battery packs. Both read the power level at 0% even on a fully charged pack, and one of the two won't stay powered on for more than a minute because there's an automatic shutdown written into the ROM for when the power gets too low.
(That's the Sylvania ROM that does that.
) But since the other one doesn't shut down
(and doesn't even give the low battery warning
), I decided to see how long the packs would last before running down. So I disabled screen dimming and backlight-off functions and left the device powered on, with minimal if any use. Two of the packs each ran between 5 and 5 1/2 hours before the battery ran out and the device turned off. The entire time the battery meter in the system tray had one bar
(indicating low power level
).
Usually, an improperly calibrated battery pack will register some power level, even if a low one, doesn't it? Can the system recalibrate the battery level, or is this a hardware issue? Is there a way I can make these netbooks properly register the power level in these packs?
