8890 Battery will not charge

The Sager warranty should cover your battery up to 1 year.

The system is most likely charging the battery but the battery is not playing ball. Most likely you have a dead Li-ion cell inside the battery.

I think I may have the same problem as I was using the system on battery with the charge showing at 85% then all of a sudden it dropped to 7%. Not a good look.

Recharging now to see if it can hold the charge, otherwise it looks like sending the battery back for a replacement.

Had this exact same problem around the similar timeframe as you. Sent it to Sager and had a new battery within a week of me sending it away which very fast turnaround.

Same things happened here, drops to 7%

Lithium battery info

Sager did all they could in their battery charger design - it monitors the voltage for each cell to prevent this sort of thing - but still Li-Ion cells are far from perfect and will fail in this manner.

I did research into Li-Ion design - you can charge the cells anywhere from 3.6 to 4.1 volts safely (4.3 if you don't mind severely shortening their lifespan) - basically the higher the voltage you develop on the cell, the lower the lifespan.

Li-Ion also does reach a finite number of charge/discharge cycles quickly compared with NiCd or NiMH technologies, which seem to die more gently (but still die!) - in all my Li-Ion experience I've gotten far fewer charge/discharge cycles with the LiIon packs.

It's a premium you pay for the weight and power density.

(right now - using a sager 8790 with the 12 cell optional Li-Ion pack - combining lowering the light and dropping the CPU clock when I unplug, I'm pushing 2 hours on it, which isn't bad for a 3.2G prescott when I get back to my desk and a raid array of IBM 60G 7200 RPM disks that goes with me for .12 TB of storage in a laptop)

I'm planning to buy 2 more battery packs and rotate them
through the unit - from prior experience with an HP laptop I found this was the best way to treat the batteries - however I still had the dead cell problem on 2 out of 8 packs after 3 years of use.

If there is enough interest I may design an outboard charger for sager 8790 series batteries - they feature the slide in / drop in design with gold fingers that make contact. It's one accessory I really miss from my HP laptop because I usually had 2 hot batteries sitting in the charger on my desk that I could grab with the laptop for a full day's meetings. I need that feature with the sager as well - but they don't make an external charger, which would mean having to use the computer as a battery charger (about like my motorola 9505 iridium phone - the batteries have to be in the phone to charge them - no separate charger which is a pain when you have 4 batteries to go through and recharge)

Joe

I have the same problem.
Hello everybody, it makes a lot of time i read all yours posts ans now i write my first one.
Let me introduce myself quickly...
I'm a french customer who have a d800p aka 8890 last december.
For my config i will put it on my signature when i will have time ...
Only problem is that i bought it IN France by "french kenitec" way.
And my battery is warranty only for 6 months...

But i was asking something to myself.
My batteries (both are down) doesn't charge a percent ...
Is the problem doesn't come from my notebook too ?


SORRY FOR ENGLISH TRANSLATION ...