[PLUG-TALK] Thinkpad battery recall/replacement (err ...)

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 07:29:22PM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> I do have a new device for communicating with other people in real
> time, although I don't know if Lenovo has any of them yet. It's called
> a "telephone."

Lenovo does have phone support.  I believe the call center is
located in some southern prison, and staffed by angry inmates
who have been serving life sentences begun before the advent
of personal computers.

> After some updates just now Fedora wanted to be rebooted, and while
> shut down I looked at the battery you lent me. In the lower right hand
> corner of the yellow label, near the battery icon, there is a C2, but
> no JS anywhere to be seen.

Worth exploring further!

> ...
> installed and ran fine, but it launched Internet Explorer which went to
> someplace on Lenovo.com, and promptly announced "The battery barcode
> format is not recognized."

The same response I got from virtual Win2K under VMWare.  The battery
probably talks to the BIOS and the rest of the computer via the I2C
bus, and that information is not available to the simulated BIOS the
virtualizer creates.

> I read the Linux Thinkpad e-list, and I think I will ask there how one
> might go about getting a battery replaced when you don't have the right
> Thinkpad or operating system.

You will find many disgruntled emails.  "All they support is Windows!
Those bastards!" and similar.   Hence, I had to pull a dusty XP drive
out of a drawer to run the test. 

Still, it is nice to be reminded why I use Linux - XP is awful and
non-intuitive and does flaky stuff.  Glitzy, like lipstick on a pig.
Linux does flaky stuff, too, but on the rare occasions it does, I
can grep the sources and figure out which binary threw the useless
error message.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs