Arch Linux

HuFlungDu

Member

Registered: 2011-11-06

Posts: 15

"Battery critically low" When laptop unplugged

Title says it, occasionally when I unplug my my laptop, a message (Gnome 3 popup) shows up informing me that my battery level is critical and the computer will shut down if I don't plug it in. If I don't plug it in, it does actually shut down, however, the battery is not critically low. If I reboot my computer without plugging it in, it comes up like normal and I can run it for 3+ hours with no issue, so I'm assuming this has something to do with power management settings/software, but I have no idea where those are. Ideas?

Reki

Member

Registered: 2011-10-27

Posts: 59

Re: "Battery critically low" When laptop unplugged

As you've said, it's probably in the power management settings. I'm not sure with your case, since I don't use GNOME 3, however you could check the battery icon preferences and maybe the options indicate to notify and shut down reacts when it reaches a certain level. This happened in my friend's computer, where his computer notified him whenever his battery was still 90%, which automatically shut his laptop down. You could change it to something like 10% or 15%.

Last edited by Reki (2011-11-07 11:43:46)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: "Battery critically low" When laptop unplugged

Gnome's power manager seems to sometimes have a wrong idea of the battery level, or at least of the time till discharge. You can set what is deemed a critical level with dconf-editor.

HuFlungDu

Member

Registered: 2011-11-06

Posts: 15

Re: "Battery critically low" When laptop unplugged

Well, checking dconf-editor shows that it's set to 300 seconds for time critical and 3% for percent critical, so that's not the issue. It seems like it actually thinks my battery has that little power left, which I would normally think is indicative of a failing battery, but the fact that it's so intermittent and that my battery can still run it's normal time after a reboot seems to suggest a software problem.

eldragon

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2008-11-18

Posts: 1,029

Re: "Battery critically low" When laptop unplugged

i have the same problem, i can see through /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state what the ammount of power left on the device is.

there seems to be a problem with my battery reporting the wrong number, it jumps for a few seconds, then jumps back...this makes gnome-settings believe the battery is dying... i ended up killing the plugin in charge through dconf.

i wish there was a "do nothing" option ...but there isnt.

Last edited by eldragon (2011-11-07 22:32:04)

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: "Battery critically low" When laptop unplugged

What does the message say? I was getting something like "100% (2 minutes) left" on my netbook. Disabling "use-time-for-policy" made power manager ignore the erroneous time left reading.