Hi Folks, Yesterday I observed something which surprised me (running Debian Etch in VirtualBox in Win XP on an Advent 8117 laptop). WHen I sat down at the desk, I noticed the battery-charging LED flashing. When I check the battery level monitor (in both Debian and XP) it was at 20% and charging. An hour later it was fully charged. I generally leave the laptop running continuously, days on end, and its power supply is permanently connected to the mains. It's possible that something disturbed to connection for a while (perhaps most likely where the mains cable connects to the PS brick), and that something later re-established it (I do tend to swim in a pile of clutter so stuff gets pushed around), but the event prompted me to wonder the following. Might it be that, if a laptop (at any rate for some models) is kept continuously connected to the mains for days on end, then for the sake of battery health a re-charge cycle is initiated, whereby the input from the mains-connected PS brick is internally disconnected for a while, until battery-level drops to a fairly low level, and is then re-connected? It is, of course, known that it's good for battery life to submit it to a discharge/recharge cycle every so often; but I've not heard of this being built-in to laptops' power monitoring. (But then there's a lot of stuff I haven't heard of). Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 22-Feb-09 Time: 09:44:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------