I had been running Ubuntu Mate 18.04 on the laptop for a few years but decided to give LM a go, hence the re-install.
LM has been great however there seems to be an issue with how LM interacts with the battery.
The battery that was in the laptop had lost some capacity (I think it dropped to around 30%) but was good enough for now and worked fine with UM so I left it as is when I installed LM.
One day (after the new LM install), when running on battery, the laptop suddenly shut down. Normally I would get at least 60 min out of the battery (fully charged) but this time it was only about 20-30 minutes.
At first I thought it was the battery (thinking it had given up the ghost) so I bought a new one (not from Lenovo but from a reputable manufacturer) but the same thing happened i.e. only around 20-30 minutes from fully charged. When I turn the charger on and boot the laptop back up it shows it still has around 95% charge, so a bit perplexed why it would shut down.
I have LM 21.0, UM 18.04 and Xubuntu 18.04 on bootable USB sticks so I booted the same laptop off each of them and all 3 would spend several hours on battery, going from 100% to 20% (at which point I shut the laptop down).
This made me wonder if LM was “remembering” the capacity of the previous battery so I tried the following:
Charge battery to 100%
Make a backup of /var/lib/upower (sudo cp -ipr /var/lib/upower /var/lib/upower.0)
Clearing down /var/lib/upower (rm *)
Rebooting
Leaving the laptop on the login screen (because I noticed if I wasn’t logged on then it would let the battery run lower than mid-90s%) ‘till it reached 20%
I’ve also set the power settings to “do nothing” when the battery is critically low.
The first time I tried running on battery after doing the steps above I managed to get the battery down to c.75% before it shut down but the 2nd time (about a week later) it only got to mid 90s again.
The fact that booting off the USB and running different operating systems (in battery mode) works a treat makes me think the battery is fine, so it must be something to do with LM?
The first bit of my system info is as follows (happy to provide the full list but thought I’d reduce the clutter by only including the pertinent bits):
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System:
Kernel: 5.15.0-73-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.3.0 Desktop: Cinnamon 5.6.8
tk: GTK 3.24.33 wm: muffin dm: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 21.1 Vera base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: LENOVO product: 20ANCTO1WW v: ThinkPad T440p serial: <superuser required>
Chassis: type: 10 serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: LENOVO model: 20ANCTO1WW v: SDK0J40697 WIN serial: <superuser required> UEFI: LENOVO
v: GLET96WW (2.50 ) date: 06/20/2018
Battery:
ID-1: BAT0 charge: 93.6 Wh (96.9%) condition: 96.6/99.5 Wh (97.1%) volts: 12.4 min: 11.1
model: SMP 45N1149 serial: <filter> status: Not charging
CPU:
Info: quad core model: Intel Core i7-4910MQ bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Haswell rev: 3 cache:
L1: 256 KiB L2: 1024 KiB L3: 8 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 3758 high: 3884 min/max: 800/3900 cores: 1: 3692 2: 3698 3: 3774 4: 3766
5: 3859 6: 3884 7: 3699 8: 3695 bogomips: 46294
Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmxAny help in getting LM to utilise the full battery capacity would be greatly appreciated.
Many thanks