Batteries, in general

[Fzero]

Just reading Prom's comment in Pandora General Chat about the battery ... more specifically the dangers of inserting the battery while running off mains.


I wanted to ask something but didnt want to derail that thread.


I wasnt aware of this, is it 'very' dangerous? are we talking danger to the Pandora, the battery ... or the poor sod holding the battery at the time [ie: me!]?


Got another question related to batteries too, though not Pandora, this is regarding a laptop.


Got a sony laptop,


battery failed,


got a new 3rd party battery which is meant to work ok with the sony laptop model,


however its not simply a matter of connecting it,


this 3rd party one requires you run an exe to set the BIOS to accept the new battery,


instructions state that you should have your 'original sony battery' connected with at least 30% juice and then run exe before switching it,


if you no longer have the original sony battery, as i dont, it states you should run off mains to run the exe then insert the battery and continue,


Now i tried this, running off mains then inserting the battery ... while still running off mains.


the battery is detected by Windows but shows as '0% and not charging'


even leaving it for half hour it still shows the same, also the battery LED just blinks.


Is it likely that i ruined the battery by inserting it when connected to mains?


from the instruction thats what it was telling me to do, though it was in chinese/english so room for translation errors.

 

[SNESFAN]

doubt you killed the battery, the exe probally just patches the bios


EDIT: more likely the battery is a cheap Chinese piece of shit to begin with that won't hold a charge right off the assembly line.


had a similar issue/resolve with a acer one I got for my sister about 2 years ago, about a year ago she started complaining that the battery wouldn't change, then all of a sudden the battery just went out... couldn't charge and as soon as you unplugged the wall outlet instant death. She just dealt with it.


she upgraded last week and gave me the old laptop. It was having a lot of other issues (corrupted HDD partitions from all the black outs) so I decided to wipe the thing and upgrade to the latest firmware/bios and reinstall the OS. Low and behold after flashing the bios the computer wouldn't start up... pissed off I wanted to punch the POS laptop... but one thing I did notice before smiting it with "the hammer of thor" (nickname for my fist lol) I noticed was the battery charge light was flashing with the device off.... strange... never saw that before.


about 10-15 min of that I said what the hell and decided to try agian... low and behold it booted up... the bios apparently changed the power routing or something and the laptop will either only boot without the battery plugged in, or if the battery is connected and holding a charge.


so moral of the O/T story, sony is habitually making proprietary stuff and connectors, it wouldn't surprise me if you needed a special "firmware" on your battery, or patch bios so it can accept a 3rd party battery. If you think the process didn't work, run it agian. If you think it took, turn off the computer, reseat the battery plug in the power and see if the battery light flashes, leave it plugged in for a couple hours with the power off. Then see if it holds a charge.

 

[Fzero]

Cheers. The exe in question is indeed a BIOS patch for the battery to work, but I'm stuck in a loop where the exe won't run unless the battery is charged.. and the battery won't charge, which I suspected was not going to charge until I'd successfully run the exe. Catch 22.


I'll try leaving it on for couple hour though tonight and see if it eventually starts to charge up.


Else looks like the more expensive official Sony battery might be needed

 

[SNESFAN]

can you flash the bios without any battery plugged in?

 

[Fzero]

By flashing, you mean with the exe [supplied with the 3rd party batt] or with the 'reset defaults' option in BIOS settings?


I can do the reset defaults from within the BIOS screen, which i did do, as recommended in the readme included with the exe.


You cant however run the supplied exe without a battery docked.


If you try, it just gives an alert stating that no battery detected and only lets you then click the 'close' button.


If you put the new 3rd party battery in, then run the exe, it gives an alert stating that the battery is at 0% charge and must be fully charged to continue

 

[WizardStan]

Scour the net, there may be an updated version of the exe.


As for the Pandora, inserting the battery while it's still on mains will result in a voltage spike as it briefly pulls power from both sources at the same time. Just like any voltage spike, it can burn things out.

 

[urjaman]

For the pandora, it is more of a problem that the system would attempt to force the battery voltage to atleast 4.0V. It could exceed the battery current limits and harm the charging circuit if the battery was empty/low on charge. OTOH if your battery was full and its voltage is >=4.0V I think it would just transition to running off the battery until its voltage drops to 4.0V again. In short, in charger-only operation the system is not expecting a battery on the battery terminals, and it could hurt lots of things to insert one. I'd think that it propably wont do anything big enough to harm the user, but I dont want to give any sort of warranty on this