Having consulted weather my battery was kaput due to undue loss of charge and having received desktop messages to that effect - I bought a new one.Its bigger and when charged indicated a life of 6hrs. After unplugging it caved in well under that.On restart it indicated 40% power left. So…can anyone advise?
I can’t say I’ve had a problem with the battery or battery indicator.
That indicated 6 hours to discharge is just a guesstimate, so how far out was it … and more importantly did it change as the battery discharged.
Battery discharge times will also be heavily dependant on what you were doing … ie. play a flash video and watch your systems temperature rise which means it’s using more power.
I’m wondering what is different between your AA1 and mine… is yours an AOA110L (aka ZG5) ? … which BIOS version are you using ?
If you hit Alt+F2 then type gnome-power-statistics and hit enter … then go to Laptop Battery>Details what are the :-
Energy
and
Energy when full
and
Energy (design)
and
Percentage
and
Capacity
ratings ?
you can also leave that running, and check “History” to watch the power drain … I don’t know how accurate tat is though.
If you install acpi:
sudo apt-get install acpi
then run:
acpi
does it agree with your battery indicator panel applet ?
its a ZG5 ok
I,m stumped about the BIOS though!
48.8
48.8
48.8
100%
100%
and acpi agrees - its full charged
I,m going to watch it discharge, last time it was not worked at all.
The BIOS version can be found by hitting F2 at bootup … it will be listed in there somewhere 
or an easier way is to open a terminal and run:
dmesg | grep DMI
or
dmesg | grep AOA119
You should see a line similar to:-
[ 0.000000] DMI: Acer AOA110/ , [b]BIOS v0.3301[/b] 05/09/2008
I’ve highlighted the bit you’re after in red.
can you run:
acpi
a few times as the battery discharges, and see if it always agrees with the battery indicator panel applet.
will do - I need a while to read up though.
its
system version v0.3109
UGA intel V1585
I’m wondering if it’s BIOS version related, your BIOS is quite a few versions older than mine, and there appear to have been some fixes that were battery related, there have also been a TON of C4 state timing fixes.
C-states are CPU power saving modes … for more info, see here:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-the-CPU-C-States-Power-Saving-Modes/611/1
BIOS fixes contained in different versions are listed here:
http://macles.blogspot.com/p/acer-aspire-one-bios.html
Now normally I don’t like suggesting BIOS updates, because there is always a small risk of bricking the PC … the general rule of thumb is DON’T update your BIOS unless there is a specific NEED.
Only you can answer if you consider this a NEED, and are willing to take the small but significant risk of ending up with a door-stop.
I must also add, that the AA1 mitigates the risk to a certain extent by having a built-in BIOS recovery routine that should recover a BIOS update that has gone wrong … I have used this function, and it worked for me, but there are no absolute guarantees.
So, I’ve given you all the info, and I won’t be held responsible if things go wrong.
Now with that in mind … do you want to attempt a BIOS update ? … your call.
Unplugged it last night and it had 70% in the tank this a.m.
I’m curious enough to read up on your advice but will decline grappling with a Bios for the moment. Its been saved from doorstop once (thanks to you) and I’m too fond of it to risk it.
cheers Brian