[Tfug] Laptop battery charging time

[Claude Rubinson]

Okay, here's a bit of an odd one.  I switched out the batteries on my
Thinkpad T40 this morning. (I don't see why it would matter but I use
those large, long-life ones.  What is that?  9 or 12 cells?)

Anyway, I keep the acpi command constantly running under watch so that
I can observe expected charge time/remaining battery life/etc.  I
hadn't used the batter in a number of months and it was almost
completely dead when I put it in this morning.  It starts charging and
in an hour and a half or so (maybe more, maybe less, I wasn't really
paying attention), it gets to "99% charged" with less than 1 minute of
charging time remaining.  Except that it never hits 100%/fully
charged.  Instead, throughout the day, the minutes until charged
counter has slowly (very slowly) been INCREASING.  An hour or so after
it hit 99% charged, the timer had increased to just over 1 minute
until fully charged.  Now, many, many hours later, it reads 4:27
(minutes:seconds) until charged.

I've removed and reinserted the battery in case it was a bad
connection but to no avail.

Anybody got any idea what might be going on here?  Am I about to
overcharge my battery, make it explode, and burn my house down?  Or is
this something that I shouldn't worry about?

Thanks,

Claude