SL 410 battery stopped charging! :^(

[bobthib]

I have a 1 yr old SL 410 and it has been not a reliable as I would have liked.  My current problem is suddenly the battery has stopped charging.  The charger is good, and the Power Manager reports the battery condition as GOOD and 72% charge.  But the "Activity" is "No Activity" and it should say "Charging."  If I unplug the charger, the battery starts to drain, but if I plug it in, I got the little plug but no charging activity.  It's very frustrating.  I have a spare charger, and it does the same thing.  And everything was ok up till Friday.

I run the Lenovo diagnostics and everything passes.  

Does anyone have any idea what I can do?

[Maliha Community Moderator]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Check whether battery threshold is not enabled, to do so launch lenovo's Power Manager -> Switch from Basic to Advanced Mode -> Click Battery -> Battery Maintenance...

Keep us posted.

[ceomybiz]

I have the same problem as the original poster.  2nd Battery was working fine until a few days ago.

Battery.  "2-Second"

Charge thresholds (my settings):

• Optimize for battary lifespan (automatically change for me)
• Notify me when thresholds change (checked)

Battary Gauge reset:

• Notify me when reset is recommended (checked)
• Periodically show messages about battery charge capacity

[ceomybiz]

I called Support (I'm still under warranty) and they directed me to run the Thinkvantage update utility to update the Power Manager and BIOS.

Unfortunately, these updates did not solve the problem.

Fortunately, I did some messing around with the threshold settings based on a hunch.  The hunch came from the fact that my working Primary battery was still listing it's:

• status"Charging" 
• Remaining percentage: 99%

I decided that perhaps there wasn't any problem with the 2nd (Ultrabay) battery at all.  Perhaps the system believed that 99% just wasn't good enough for that primary battery, and that it was going to keep trying to charge it until it reached 100% (which it wasn't ever going to do).

So, I:

Opened Power Manager->Battery Tab->Battery Maintenance Button->(select) Battery:  1-Main

Then I chose:

Custom

Start charging when below 95%,

Stop charging at: 99%

I think that the stop charging at 99% instead of at 100% was the key, because it was never reaching 100%.

Interestingly, now that I've gone back in to re-examine the settings doing this write-up, the Battery Maintenance has switched itself back to 

Optimize for battery lifespan (automatically change for me)

Notify me when thresholds changed (checked)

And it's still charging the second battery.

Perhaps the updates worked, but the changes took some time to show up in the Battery maintenance screen, perhaps not.  

In any event, problem solved.

Best,

-Dan