Tech and Tips

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According to this page, you should avoid charging your laptop if its battery is nearly full. Indeed, it destroys your battery capacity in the long run.

Running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad (mine is a T510), you can set up the thresholds for when to start and stop charging yourself.

Here is how:
# aptitude install tp-smapi-dkms
# modprobe tp_smapi
# echo 40 > /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh
# echo 70 > /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh
# cat /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/*_charge_thresh

Then to have the settings loaded at each startup:
# apt-get install sysfsutils
And add the following in /etc/sysfs.conf
# For a LiIon battery in a Thinkpad
devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/start_charge_thresh = 50
devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/stop_charge_thresh =85

All the info is here.

Once you are done are reboot the machine, you will need to run the "modprobe tp_smapi" command to be able to access /sys/devices/platform/smapi
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