Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 21:30:50 -0800 From: Ben Lovett <blovett@bsdguru.com> To: mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Possible problems with APM on a Dell i8k running BIOS rev A19 Message-ID: <20020305213050.A288@bsdguru.com>
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Hello, I recently upgrade my laptop's BIOS to revision A19 because I read that it fixed a major problem that could cause the batteries in the system to stop charging. Other issues that were fixed between revision A16 (what I was running before the upgrade) were to make ACPI work better under Win2k. Well, fast forward to last night. I was working on my system, and then when I was finished, suspended it, unplugged it, and put it away for a while so I could do school work at my desk. About 4 hours later, when I needed to use the system again, I plugged it back in, plugged the ethernet cable back in, and resumed. The first thing that I noticed was that my ethernet cards link light was not lit up. I figured it was a fluke, and tried to up/down the interface to bring it back online. Well, no such luck. I proceeded to get SCB and DMA timeouts on fxp0, so alas, I had to restart to resume my work. Now, today I decided to try upgrading to 4.5-STABLE while at work because I was running a relatively old copy of 4.4-STABLE from early December 2001. Everything seemed to go fine, apm still worked. I thought I was doing pretty good for the day. Now, the reason that I mentioned that apm worked was, I noticed that it still saw my dual batteries, and said that I had some ridiculous ammount of battery life left (~9:30). I come home and power up the system so I can work on a programming project for class, and everything still works fine. Only difference between home/work is that I had replaced my second battery with the floppy drive so I could copy some files from a disk. Now, I run gkrellm with the apm feature enabled, and I took a glance at it and it appeared that it said that i had 0 minutes left on my battery. I couldn't believe it, since I was plugged in. It should have been charged to the max. I take a look at the output of apm, and it tells me that I have no batteries installed in the system. I've not quite ruled out the BIOS upgrade as the culprit, but I'm basically sending this out to ask anyone else with this laptop if they have experienced these symptoms, and what, if anything they have done to fix it. I assume that this could possibly apply to other Dell Inspirons/Latitudes because a friend who has a Latitude was the one who told me about the new BIOS changes, and they were the exact same for the Inspiron. I've placed a dmesg from the system after being booted verbosely at http://www.tilderoot.com/~blovett/dmesg.batt Thanks... -ben To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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