Effects of Poor/Dead Battery?

[jlq2]

Have a battery that appears to be dead and won't charge (power/charge light is blinking yellow). Will the battery condition affect the performance of the computer (Thinkpad 600X) when running on AC? It is running VERY slow and I wonder if that could be the cause.

 

[SNGX1275]

Shouldn't have anything to do with the computers performance when its on AC power.

 

[acidosmosis]

jlq2: running of AC basically bypasses the battery and it's not used. Like sngx said it shouldn't have any effect whatsoever other than the fact that when you unplug from the ac outlet your pc will probably turn off

 

[Goalie]

I don't believe it should affect the performance of your machine, but it is possible that if the battery is dying, it could be putting some surges into your machine, risking damage to the hardware. Most laptops have decent protection against this, but I'd recommend you pull the battery and run on AC.

The only way that I could see this affecting the performance of your machine is if you have software that monitors battery charging, and the battery is quickly charging/uncharging and the monitoring software is changing modes to keep up, eating all the CPU.

If anything, this also would let you know how the battery effects the performance of the machine. As SNGX1275 and I said, I don't think you'll see any performance issues directly caused by this, but it's not impossible.

 

[Rick]

Well, to answer you question, does run okay when you take the battery OUT? Then obviously your battery is causing problems.

Laptop batteries tend to go bad after awhile and can cause some odd problems. If it is just not holding a charge - That that is fine. But sometimes they really do go "bad" and may supplying intermittent voltage, causing your computer to switch between power modes abruptly (May account lock-ups and slowness) or other things such as reboot.

Take the battery out and see if the problem still exists.