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Is there any utility available on Ubuntu to check whether laptop battery is in healthy condition or not?

Binarylife
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samarasa
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3 Answers3

9

You can try Battery Status 0.1

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It has some additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area. Battery Status doesn't rely on GNOME Power Manager directly, but counting on presence in system for some useful integration with it.

enter image description here Features:

Using the Battery Status applet, the user can access:

  • Battery Status dialog
  • Power Statistics (provided by GNOME Power Manager)
  • "Show" setting
  • CPU frequency scaling (provided by gnome-applets/cpufreq-applet)
  • Power Management preferences (provided by GNOME Power Manager)

Add the ppa ppa:iaz/battery-status to your software sources (here's how to do that) and install battery-status from the software center .

You can run it as an indicator using the following command:

/usr/lib/battery-status/battery-status --indicator

Community
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Binarylife
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    If, like me you tried to do this too early in the morning for my brain to work you may struggle to get it to actually start running. In a terminal run /usr/lib/battery-status/battery-status --indicator and it works . You can then put an insert into your main menu or start up with the above command to start it off – andybleaden Jun 15 '11 at 09:12
  • advice taken :) Has it disapeared? – andybleaden Jun 15 '11 at 09:30
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    nifty little programme..will use it myself now. been messing lots with powertop to increase my battery life which could be better – andybleaden Jun 15 '11 at 09:35
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Clicking on the battery icon on the panel and choose the battery option from the menu.

In the resulting window, highlight your battery on the left and make sure the Details tab is selected. The interesting details are the Energy when full and Energy (design) values.

If the battery is new, the two values should be almost identical. If the maximum charge is significantly less than the design charge, then it indicates that your battery is getting old.

James Henstridge
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  • oh wow or rather oh cripes.!!! My design was 52 but now energy when full is 46...mind you I have had this for a couple of years Still pretty good really – andybleaden Jun 15 '11 at 21:37
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It could be that your battery is bad, a good way to find out is to run the "Power Statistics" tool.

enter image description here

In this tool there is a Laptop Battery section. Check the "Energy (Design)" section. As you can see from mine my batter has lost a bit of capacity over time. This will let you determine if the battery is bad.

See also:

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Jorge Castro
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