Battery Care Warnings

[Danny Kukawka]

On Montag, 25. Februar 2008, Martin Owens wrote:
> Since we have notifications for broken batteries, faulty and recalled
> batteries would it not be an idea to notify the user every so often
> that they should decharge their battery to keep it healthy? Hardly any
> none technical person I know realises they should do this and end up
> having to replace their battery because they've left the thing plugged
> in for months at a time without any decharging and recharging cycles.
>
> Hal might be a nice place to add the data for when the battery was
> last cycled down and able to provide a nice warning when it gets old
> enough.

IMO this all make no sense for several reasons:

1) HAL has no persistent store to save such information as the date of the 
last charging cycle.
2) LiIon batteries get worse if they are not in the machine, if they get older 
they get worser
3) IIRC: you should prevent deep discharging of LiIon batteries.
4) the machine BIOS and/or the battery charging module take care that the 
battery get not charged more often then needed (see e.g. machines which don't 
charge the battery depending on the situation or not over 90% remaining 
capacity), there is no need to monitor this extra.
5) you can't guess or monitor charging cycles if HAL is not running, which is 
e.g. the case if the machine if down, suspended or e.g. Windows or an other 
Linux instance is running. Same for multibattery machines (if you e.g. change 
them between machines).

IMO this isn't worth the work. If you want this you may can add it to e.g. 
g-p-m, but please not to HAL.

Btw. IIRC: There are no messages about faulty or broken batteries to the 
userspace and also the info about recalled batteries (which isn't shipped by 
all distros) is not a message, it's an info which the userspace/desktop has 
to interprete.

Danny