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#1 2009-05-11 15:45:54

dberg918
Member
Registered: 2009-05-11
Posts: 19

Broken battery affects screen brightness control

This is more of a story than an issue looking for a solution, so I apologize if this is a little off-topic.  I just wanted to share this because it seems so outlandish to me!

This morning, I woke up to a thunderstorm moving into the area.  I unplugged my desktop computer in my bedroom and took my laptop out into the living room so I could look at the radar while I ate breakfast.  Unfortunately, the battery in my laptop is broken; my dad ordered it from some website about 5 months ago (batterysrus.com or something like that), and it was only $50, which should've been the first clue that it wouldn't perform well.  It worked great for about the first 6 or 7 charges/discharges, and then I started to notice that it would unexpectedly give out, as if the battery monitor wasn't reading it correctly.  It has now gotten to the point where it lasts about 15 minutes, which is about how long the old battery lasted after 5 years.

Anyway, I boot up the laptop this morning, and realize as soon as KDE is ready, the battery is about to go.  So, rather than plug in to an outlet, I go and grab the battery out of my dad's laptop (same specs as the battery in mine).  The first thing I noticed when it started booting was the screen looked a little dim.  This is because the screen was in fact dimmed compared to when my black-market battery was in use.  When KDE was ready, I checked the FN brightness controls, and they worked!  Something that never worked before!  I never would've thought that a broken battery would affect screen brightness controls, but I'm guessing that because PowerDevil wasn't able to read the battery properly, all of the power management tweaks simply do not function.  The screen is left at full brightness and it just hopes the computer gets plugged into an AC outlet before the battery dies.

Has anybody else seen this before?  I'm thinking there's bound to be a host of other things that don't work with a broken battery, maybe I should take a look around...

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