My wife suspects the Li-ion battery in her Sony Vaio is bad and cannot hold a charge any more.

The battery model number is PCGA-BP71.

I know nothing about batteries. Is it possible, or likely, that we will need to buy a new one? They are over $150.00 if my quick Google is any indication.

Follow up question... Is it possible that simply running some kind of reconditioning software would extend the life of the battery?

As far as I know, once they're dead they're dead. Laptop batteriess are actually rated for a rediculously low amount of cycles. (we're talking a couple hundred cycles at most). The problem with sony laptops seem to be that you have to pay outrageous prices for sony branded accesories. A decent dell battery on ebay will cost you $50. A sony one will cost more than doubble that. There are cheaper ones than the BP71, but they don't last as long.

Good luck,
Matthew

Let me be more specific about what's happening...

Battery indicator applet on this laptop says that the battery is not worn-out, it's good. It has a wear-indicator-scale of 0-100% "good", and it shows 100% "good", with 58 charge cycles in the battery's lifetime.

Charge meter (not the same thing as the wear indicator above) seems to work fine. Shows full charge, can see it slowly decreasing as the battery gets used up.

However, battery gets used up a bit faster than expected. Looks from the speed of the decreasing of the charge meter that it would die in less than an hour instead of the 2+hours estimated.

But somewhere during the drain, say, around 88% charge... BAM the laptop shuts off completely. No warning.

Well, I don't know anything really about sony's laptop bateries, but I do have some experience with Apple's older batteries doing similar things. Basically they stopped charging, or acted like they charged but only held a few minutes of juice. This was a known issue on one of the older line of G3 laptops and IIRC there was a program to reset some sort of memory in the battery that would usually fix the problem. I wonder if Sony has something similar or if you could just deep cycle the battery (hook up a 12volt bulb or two to it overnight) to discharge it completely and see if it resets.

-Mike

Hmm sounds like that could be the case with this one. Anyone else?

Had the same problem with a IBM Thinkpad (600E) model.
Basically, wouldn't hold its charge, even though it was charged up every night and would go from near 100% full to 0% (shutdown/standby etc) within a few minutes once off the charger.

IBM replaced the batteries about 3 times under warranty.

Turns out that my Business Partner (whose laptop it was) was running down the battery each time he used it before recharging (which is what you used to have to do with NiCad batteries), but this is totally the wrong thing to do with your Li-ion batteries (which I told him many times BTW not to do this) - with Li-ion batteries you never run them down fully, and you charge them up fully at the first possible chance.

Doing that I've never had a battery go dead like that on me, but I suspect my current Thinkpad battery is starting this behaviour now after 1.5 years of use.
(goes from 100% on standby to a few % over a weekend on standby with no usage - sounds likle a dying battery to me).

with Li-ion batteries you never run them down fully, and you charge them up fully at the first possible chance.

This laptop generally stays plugged in most of the time, the battery stays pretty much topped off.

Yeah, thats what my laptop does all the time too mostly, and I'm now wondering if the unit overcharges this way, and that hastens the problem as well.

You mentioned the battery cycle count was 58 - that number normally starts at 1 the first time you install it in the laptop and power it up on AC and counts up for each charge "cycle" from then on, so your battery thinks it had 58 discharge and charge cycles.

Question is how much of a "discharge" is needed from 100% to make the battery think a cycle has occured? More than 10%?

That may be part of the problem - you have to run it down every now and then, but not too much - but I don't know what "not too much" is for a Li-Ion battery and IBM wasn't much help either!

Hmm... Well, i've got the exact battery in question in my laptop at the moment and I don't think you're ever going to get two hours out of it. Not being able to run it down to empty would seem to indicate something was wrong. Perhaps you could try booting it on a dos disk (or anything without APM) and see how long the battery lasts? That'd also give you the chance to compleetly cycle it, wich might be a good thing to do. You're sure someone hasn't changed the "shut off laptop when battery reaches x%" to something unreasonable?

Matthew

I'd do what matthew_k suggestes as thats something IBM suggested we try as well - boot it up on DOS, run the battery flat, then recharge and see how it holds up.
If that fails, you're up for a new battery I think.

Good idea, will check!

I think you're pretty much on the money here.

With most Compaq's, the charging circuit and the battery itself have embedded microcontrollers and sometimes you have to go through a process called 'characterisation' to get them both on the same page. This process involves a 24-hour charge followed by a full discharge with no power management enabled so that the machine dies (obviously best done in DOS).

It's worth checking for firmware updates from the mfr just in case they 'silently' update the microcontroller ROM too.

Not sure it's possible to do a rundown on this puppy, since it simply dies so quickly.

For instance, if I boot the machine with no AC power, it dies partway through the boot, before it even reaches any Windows code, it's still in the BIOS when it dies...

This is a bit of a no-brainer I admit.... Does it have BIOS level pwr management that needs disabling?

Checking now, and also updating the bios...

Punctured cell, it's dead. Bin it. If it's still under warranty, ask for a refund on the value of the battery, not for a new one. Sony don't actually tell you but you are supposed to extract the battery while you use the mains adaptor, otherwise the battery pack fries. They will argue the toss aggressively, and you will probably get no-where, so the best bet is the dealer you bought it from. It's a known problem on a couple of VAIOs although I no longer know which models.

Since i've got the same batteries, I've been checking this out a bit more. It seems you're not the only person who's had problems with the BP71. Google groups will show you more. However, with the internet being what it is, two people with bad batteries can make problems seem a lot worse...

According to this page, you have a couple options for replacing it:

In reply to:

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What other batteries are available?

There are 4 batteries that I know of for the FX210/FX215 laptops. Three of these are from Sony, the fourth battery is from APC. These batteries will also work with the FXA and European AMD based machines. I believe that they will also work with any FX series Sony Vaio.

PCGA-BP1N -- 1700mAh, Original battery, about 45 minutes of life without PowerNow! and original bios. 70-80 minutes with PowerNow! and updated bios.
PCGA-BP71 -- 2600mAh, Extra Battery, about 90 minutes of life without PowerNow! and original bios. 120-140 minutes with PowerNow! and updated bios.
PCGA-BP71A -- 3000mAh, Extra Battery, unknown haven't tested.

LBCSY1 -- 3200mAh (was listed as 5000mAh), Battery from APC.

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From a quick search, the APC one looks like a good dea, and would be a name brand one from people who've made their name making batteries. I got my BP71 used, and it's worked flawlessly for almost a year now. I leave it plugged in most of the time, probably running the batteries down once a week, and it does fine.

Matthew

Sony don't actually tell you but you are supposed to extract the battery while you use the mains adaptor, otherwise the battery pack fries.

You have got to be fucking kidding me.

There are times with this laptop... because of its inane power-switch system that's all software controlled... that there is NO WAY to reboot the unit without pulling the battery. Sometimes when Windows really screws up, everything is hosed and no amount of button pressing on this laptop will get it to shut down and restart. Only recourse is to pull battery and mains power and re-insert. Done it dozens of times, NEVER ONCE paying attention to the order of which items I'd pulled.

Tony, I think he meant leaving the battery in when using AC power for long periods would result in shortened battery life. I do not think it is related to the sequence of AC, battery in or out, or removing AC or battery while the computer is on.

I have experienced short battery life on Li-ion batteries in a Toshiba Libretto and a Dell Inspiron which are normally used on AC power. I now use them with the batteries slipped out while on AC. This has resulted in much increased battery life although I have gone thru several batteries on my way to acquiring wisdom! Good luck.

Michael

Tony, I think he meant leaving the battery in when using AC power for long periods would result in shortened battery life.

Ah, well, OK, I guess I misunderstood then. Still, that totally sucks how is one supposed to recharge the battery then?

Recharging is definitely a problem since a fully charged battery does lose some of its charge while not being used. A few days is not a problem but a few weeks will leave your battery weak at the knees if not recharged before use. If I know I am going to be using the notebook as a portable I slip the battery in the day before or even a couple of hours before leaving AC power behind.

Not a great solution but my notebook batteries last much, much longer now.

Michael

No, I think the $6,000,000,000 question is why is the rechagring circuit so poorly fsckin' designed that when you have the battery in, and the AC power attached it'll fry the battery after it gets to a full charge. How difficult would it be to design the charging system to stop putting power to the battery when the battery says it's full...Then not apply any power to it until it drops down to say 85%, or if the battery is pulled out, and put back in.

I'm not a battery expert but I think the way it works at the moment is that after fully charging a battery, the laptop will trickle charge the battery. This is so that it alway stays topped up to 100%. Problem is that if you leave the batteries in all the time and never actually use them, then it will gradually screw up your batteries.

Somebody told me to fully charge the battery and then take it out if you're not intending to use it. And every month or so run it down and recharge it.

I've got a couple Dell Li-Ion batteries which in theory should give me about 3 hours together but die after about 1.5 hours.

- Trevor

There is a Smart Battery specification which most laptop battery manufacturers follow. It's all hooked into the system management bus (A subset of I2C basically) and you should be able to access the battery via the ACPI interface that way.

Using a 12V light bulb overnight isn't a good idea with newer batteries with this amount of intelligence. If the microcontroller in the battery gets confused then it will lose it's calibration data. Some of it can be regenerated by the battery but some can only be calculated by the factory.

Deep cycling Li-Ion batteries will damage them. They won't be able to hold a charge. A prime example is the morons at Compaq that decided to make it possible to totally drain the batteries in iPaq's which in turn kills the PDA...

- Trevor

In reply to:

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No, I think the $6,000,000,000 question is why is the rechagring circuit so poorly fsckin' designed that when you have the battery in, and the AC power attached it'll fry the battery after it gets to a full charge. How difficult would it be to design the charging system to stop putting power to the battery when the battery says it's full.

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They wouldn't make any money off resale now would they?

I would definitely second this - APC batteries are low cost, good quality, and last a long time, plus I've had damn good service from APC on returns, etc.

I'm not a battery expert but I think the way it works at the moment is that after fully charging a battery, the laptop will trickle charge the battery. This is so that it alway stays topped up to 100%. Problem is that if you leave the batteries in all the time and never actually use them, then it will gradually screw up your batteries.

But from what I'm reading here, trickle charging an already full Li-Ion battery will kill it, so they should drop the charge to 0 instead of a trickle, not do something that'll fry the battery. It's not difficult for the charging system to query they type of battery in there, and if it's Li-Ion, don't trickle charge. And if you need a full change, either pop out the battery, and put it back in, or pull the AC out, and plug it back in to reset the charger to top off the battery.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I'm agreeing with you on this one
I guess it could be stopping the trickle charging once it's full and then turning it back on when the battery self discharges a little.

So it'd be doing a 100% -> 99% -> 100% -> 99% cycle. Anybody a battery technology expert?

- Trevor