Battery warning

[bigfrank Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close bigfrank]

I just got back on line after my Lap top computer went into hibernating mode. My AC plug accidentally got unplug and without warning the computer hibernated after the battery went low. When I got restarted the computer went hay wire. I had more errors going on than my last finale exam.
I had to restart it twice and finally got back online now.

My question is there a way to set up an alert if the battery goes below 50% or can i get an alert if it goes into battery power?

[T. R. Oglodyte Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close T. R. Oglodyte]

Frank -

go to your Control Panel and select Power Options. From there you can set alerts and determine how and when the laptop powers down (hibernate or standby), including the power level when that happens.

I always hibernate and never standby. That's because the processor is still running in standby, and if you put the laptop in a computer case it will overheat.

There could be several causes for the problems you had on startup. One is that the computer overheated, as I described above. Or, there might not have been enough power remaining to complete the shutdown before the battery gave out. (You should be able to fix that by having the computer automatically hibernate at 5% battery life. If the battery is totally shot, though, even at 5% there may not be enough juice left to complete shutdown.)

It's possible that there was a system hang during shutdown that prevented it from shutting down or hibernating. For example, if I have a network file open in Excel, my laptop won't hibernate until I close the file.

Another possibility is that you didn't have enough disk space for the disk write operation associated with standby or hibernation.

Finally, I had a similar thing happen to me one time on an airplane when I closded the laptop just before the hibernation process was completed. Closing the cover put the computer into standby instead of hibernate, and when I powered back on it completely rebooted and was acting funny. I had to reboot a second time to get it to act normally, and everything I had open at the time I went into hibernation was gone.

When you powered back up, did the computer go through the full Windows boot routine, or did it return from standby or hiberation mode?

[bigfrank Administrator Find all posts View Profile Close bigfrank]

Frank -


When you powered back up, did the computer go through the full Windows boot routine, or did it return from standby or hiberation mode?

Thanks Steve, I never noticed that was there before in the control panel. When the computer Restarted I got a windows XP Pro Admin log in window. It asked me for my name and password. I could not get out of it , I tried every password I could think of and finally I hit enter without the password and it worked.
When it came on I had all my windows up that was there but nothing worked and I kept getting messages like do you want to compress your outlook express folder.
It showed me that I had a wireless connection but I was not connected. I tried doing the repair a few times for the wireless but it still showed a connection but it still did not work.
After the next restart everything was OK.