Ubuntu – Wrong battery state reading cause brutal shutdown

asusbatterylaptopultrabook

I have an Asus Zenbook UX31A, the Asus 13" unit from first generation ultrabooks. I run Ubuntu 12.10 up to date on it.

Before a week or two I used to enjoy more that 5 hours of battery life, especially when watching movies with VLC and hardware accelerated playback. I can't link my issue to some update I did but for several days now and after about 2 to 3 hours, my laptop shutdown abruptly without warning for critical nor low battery level.

I suspect this is battery related since the battery charge curve show that the battery charge plummets from 50-40% to 0% before the shutdowns. Upon reboot, I have to run a "killall Xorg" since the greeter won't load and drop me to something like a black console with lines about battery I can't remember on top of my head right now and an arrow cursor.

After a while, usually 1 to 3 minutes, the laptop shutdown again.

I can't pinpoint the component that cause this. I know it's a software problem since after such an event I can't run it for at least 1h30 in Windows without issues. I lost patience after that but it reported still 1h of autonomy when I powered it off.

Any hint on how to solve or at least identify the culprit ? Any log I can check maybe ?

Thanks.

Best Answer

It's probably a calibration problem. I used to face a somewhat similar problem on my laptop too. Back when I was using Windows 10, I used to enjoy about 4 to 5 hours of battery life and after switching to Ubuntu, my battery life came down to about 3 hours. I did some research online and found tons of advice, but none of them seemed to be as effective as recalibrating. Here's what you gotta do...

  • Charge your laptop to 100% and let it remain plugged in for about 30 to 40 minutes.
  • After that, unplug it and make sure to use your laptop until it shuts down
  • After this try switching it on, if it doesn't switch on, then well and good. However, if it does switch on, then that would mean that there is still some charge left in your battery.
  • Make sure that your battery is fully drained.
  • Wait for up to 2 to 3 hours and then plug it back in and let it charge all the way up to 100 percent.

After this you should be good. This is a manual recalibration. This will probably fix your inaccurate battery meter readings.

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