T480 battery discharge problem: internal battery goes first at all times!

[souldier]

I sent a message to Lenovo Support on facebook and actually got a response from Mac. He said the T480 behaves this way by design, but he would forward my feedback to the appropriate team that may be able to consider our request and make a change in the future if approved. That's at least a step forward. Here's hoping we see an update in the near future!

[souldier]

Via the Lenovo vantage app a BIOS update for my T480 has just been released. In the release notes it says that this update will also allow for battery firmware to be updated via Windows Update.

I just did the BIOS update as well as the Windows Update. After doing this, it appears that the dicharging sequence MAY have been corrected because my T480 is now discharging the external battery even though it has a higher cycle count. Just minutes before doing the update, my system was discharging from the internal battery, but after rebooting my system, it is now consistently discharging from the external battery. I will continue to monitor this over the next few days to see if they have truly fixed this issue. If anyone else can do the same and report back, that would be great.

[souldier]

I withdraw my initial observation in the previous post... my T480 is still discharging the internal battery first. Don't know how much longer we'll have to wait until Lenovo listens to our request for this to be changed.

[GarethM]

So its finally happened. I bought the T480 over say the E480 specifically for the battery hot swap feature, as I commute for 5 hours each day for a new client, on trains which don't have powerpoints.

Finally the moment came where I hadn't been able to charge my laptop overnight and my battery was almost at zero. THIS IS THE MOMENT MY T480 WAS DESIGNED FOR.....I thought.

But of course my worst fears were realised. The internal battery had drained first, and was at 0%. Undeterred I gave Lenovo the benefit of the doubt......surely none of these clever designers has been so stupid to design a laptop with hot swappable battery where the internal battery drains to zero first?

I thought "even though it says that the internal battery is at zero, surely they've been clever enough to make it reserve just a tiny bit of power.........just enough for the 10 seconds required to hot swap my removable battery??????!!!!!!" SURELY?!?!?!?!

So i closed the lid, waited for standby, unplugged the external battery....... and of course, the whole thing just turned off and once I'd put the new battery in I had to to a fresh boot of windows with my work in progress all lost.......

DREADFUL, DREADFUL DESIGN FLAW.......

Also Lenovo is guilty of false advertising here because the hot swap feature simply doesnt work.

Please sort this asap or I will be asking for my money back......

I see that you have two options here Lenovo:

1) Make it so that external battery always discharges first OR give users the ability to specify that this happens.... (the preferred option)

2) (less preferred option) at least have it so the internal battery reserves just enough charge to allow a hot swap to take place before it switches to the removable battery....just 1 or 2% would be enough for crying out loud!!!

[Boris_dp]

You seem to have another issue here. Your battery should not drain below 5% before switching to the other battery. On my laptop I see that but it is a false reading and it later detects the actual charge. If I were you, I would return the laptop for repair. 5% of battery should be enough for hours of sleep.

[souldier]

I can also confirm that when my internal battery drains first, it literally drains to absolute 0%. I know this becasue I got an error message stating that the internal battery could not be detected! When I got home and plugged into power, it started charging from 0%, then to 1%, etc. If I were GarethM I wouldn't bother trying to send in the laptop for repair... I highly doubt there is really anything they could do and will just send the laptop back in the same condition that it came. This should easily be solved via a software update.

Either way, this would be a non-issue if the external battery drained first as the user would then have the control to swap out the external battery at any time or even remove the external battery to switch to the internal one as desired. But when the internal battery drains first, we are pretty much stuck until it drains completely or near empty.

[phi1anthropist]

The issue is still actual. Why thread is marked as Solved?

[phi1anthropist]

I duplicate the thread to make support react howsome 

original post: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T/T480-battery-discharge-problem-internal-...

[SashaO]

Perhaps some of Lenovo engineers could explain why the company has decided to force the internal battery to be discharged first? Perhaps the company wants the internal one to deteriorate faster so we pay them for the replacement?

[GarethM]

Hi all. Given the lack of action from Lenovo for this dreadfully designed power bridge nonsense I have stepped up the fight in other ways. The request came through from Reevoo for me to review the T480 product, so I panned it in the review and gave it one star overall.

I made clear in the description that a) the hotswap feature as designed, doesn't work properly and b) this has been a problem with the T series laptop since the T470 and possibly earlier models indicating that Lenovo don't care what their user base thinks and have been ignoring this problem for several years now.

I would encourage you to do the same with your product reviews via whatever channels you bought them from. Lenovo will definitely sit up and take notice once this starts to impact sales....

This would be SOOOOOooooo easy to fix Lenovo. What a shame you won't listen to your users....