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My laptop works perfectly when it's plugged in but when I am on battery, it will turn off randomly. Usually after 2 or 3 hours but not always. It will occasionally not turn off but freeze completely. In that case the screen has half of the pixel green or pink and there's a bit of flickering. When I turn the laptop on, it boots normally but it may turn off randomly again after a while.

I am wondering if disabling the power saving mode on some of the laptop components could help me figure out what's wrong.

Which component with a power saving mode should I try to disable?

  • XPS 13 Ivybridge 8Gb RAM, 256 SSD, Ubuntu 14.10
  • I got this laptop 1.5 years ago. The battery lasts around 5h.

Here's what I'm getting when I do upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0

  native-path:          BAT0
  vendor:               SIMPLO
  model:                Dell
  serial:               1885
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              Thu 27 Nov 2014 10:37:25 CET (20 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               charging
    energy:              29.4002 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         34.7578 Wh
    energy-full-design:  47.286 Wh
    energy-rate:         14.1192 W
    voltage:             8.2 V
    time to full:        22.8 minutes
    percentage:          84%
    capacity:            73.5055%
    technology:          lithium-ion
  History (charge):
    1417081015  84.000  charging
  History (rate):
    1417081045  14.119  charging
    1417080955  14.134  charging
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  • 1
    The battery might be at fault here. Sometimes batteries fail this way; instead of degrading slowly, they start acting up by losing power all of a sudden. How old is it?
    – To Do
    Nov 26, 2014 at 10:06
  • The laptop is 1.5 years old and has the original battery. I have not been using it on battery very heavily. But yes, I guess the battery could be faulty. How could I test that? Nov 26, 2014 at 11:32
  • 1
    Try acpi -ib or upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0
    – To Do
    Nov 26, 2014 at 18:05
  • I've updated my question with the output of upower. Do things look normal? Nov 27, 2014 at 9:43
  • 75% of original capacity after 1.5 years seems low to me but that depends on how you use it. It is recommend it to discharge it completely once a month.
    – To Do
    Nov 27, 2014 at 12:08

2 Answers 2

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Proabably it is your battery that is failing.

To check this run:

upower -e

Identify your battery and run:

upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0

Change the battery "path" accordingly.

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I have found a workaround to my issue. If I set the brightness to 50% or more, I am not experiencing any freezes. However, when the battery gets low, the screen brightness is not consistent. There are some occasional drops of the brightness level.

Changing the battery should fix my issue completely.

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