Re: Re: uhoh, evil mojo ...

On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 02:49, Jean Delvare wrote:

> That's definitely weird. Mine discharges battery one from 100% to 10%,
> then battery two from 100% to 10%, and only then starts cycling
> regularly between both (never checked exactly how, but it does cycle).
> 
> It's different for charging, where I believe it cycles more. It may
> simply be in order to prevent the batteries from overheating (charging a
> battery generates much heat IIRC).
> 

Interesting.

> One thing I am thinking of. I think I remember laptops have an internal
> battery (or is it a simple capacitor) which they use to regulate the
> power level when switching from battery to AC or back. Maybe *this* is
> broken in your laptop and causes the trouble.
> 

Hmm, that could be more than possible.  That would explain a few other
oddities that happen once in a while -- like if a battery discharges all
the way, the system has a really hard time recognizing it in order to
recharge (then again, having accidently discharged all the way twice
now, may be the cause of this problem in the first place...)

> If this is the case, I would expect the problem to show under Windows as
> well - and I think I remember you told it wasn't the case?
> 

It's more I haven't experienced it under Windows.  I ran an extended
test on it trying to get the problem to be reproduced but it never did. 
That doesn't mean it doesn't happen there.

> If it happens only under Linux, it *may* be ACPI related. The ACPI
> support under linux is still being developped. So maybe you could try
> bleeding edge ACPI support and see what happens. However, I'd really
> expect the power-supply to be a hardware thing, so I'm not sure at which
> point the ACPI software layer could break things.
> 

Perhaps.

> I found one for my own laptop. Never used it, because it requires
> writing a floppy disk and booting on it, and I do *not* have one on my
> laptop (stupid Sony). I could burn a CD-R instead, but I don't feel like
> paying for a BIOS update since everything works OK (of course, Sony does
> *not* say what the BIOS is supposed to fix/improve).
> 
> Could find one for you there:
> http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/B2B/drivers/drivers.php?model=PCG-GRX600K
> 
> But it seems it is the same as the original one, so it wouldn't help.

Yup, that's exactly what I have now.   Time to call Sony again I guess.


> You could use dmidecode to get some information from your BIOS etc. I
> don't know how dynamic these values are, I would actually expect them
> not to change often, and not to change at all after boot time.

Thanks.  Yes  I tappears none of these values would be dynamic..  Too
bad, was thinking some things related to the batteries might be..   And
I know that Windows has a way of modifying BIOS settings with the Sony
"Setup" Utility.

Start of my dmidecode:

[root@localhost root]# dmidecode
RSD PTR found at 0xF7690
checksum failed.
OEM PTLTD 
SMBIOS 2.31 present.
DMI 0.0 present.

-- I found the checksum failed. to be kind of funny...


J/