Draining a Laptop Battery

I have an Alienware Area51M that has developed a kind of backwards memory problem. For some reason, the computer thinks it is 100% charged and turns off the charging circut before it is fully charged. I will unplug the AC and watch the battery level drop to maybe 70% and the machine will die. No low battery alarm, no popup, no blinky lights, just dead. I want to completely drain the battery and let it charge it back up, but I can't do that in the laptop becuase it thinks it is fully charged when it is not. So, how can I drain it? I am thinking just find the common and hook each other pin up to it down the road with a small load, a lightbulb maybe, until it "She's not only really dead, she's really most sincerely dead."

Given the fact that it's Alienware ! do you have any control in the bios ?
And that idea of hooking it up to a small power source is a ggod idea.
Whats there W/S have on that ,and do they have there own Alien Forum.

I will recheck the bios and see what is there for power options. What do you mean by W/S? Alienware has a support area, but their answer is to send it back to them and they might get to it within a few months. Not going to do that.

Put the battery in the freezer for an hour or so -- no -- I'm not kidding. "ding dong the witch is dead"

//edit -- those were mostly nicads I used to do them with though.

Have you seen http://www.ozzu.com/hardware/laptop-won-run-battery-t32011.html ? I'm curious if your charging circuit is another victim of XPsp2.

SP2? Not likely. I don't believe in service packs.

ATNO/TW - I put my battery in the freezer at %100 percent charge, left it in there for a few hours, and put it back in the laptop. It now says 92% and charging. I will update you and see what happens with it once it is charged back up.

W/S ,WebSite ,i figured you figured that out anyway .lol
I forgot about the battery in the freezer trick ,use to do that
for all types of battery's (not recommend for car battery's .lol)

Blimey ive neva evan heard of that.... ill hafta try it sometime. Hands up if u hate SP 2 by the way....

So far I love SP2

re: the battery trick. I learned it when nicads were popular with camcorders specifically. They have a memory feature and sometimes that memory gets a little funky. As best as I can determine, it doesn't deplete the battery, but fixes the memory glitch. I never tried it with Lithium Ions, so I'm curious to see how this goes.

Well, after the freeze, I unplugged the AC and watched the battery charge spiral downward. It took 2 mins and 30 seconds to go from 100% to 4% when the low battery alarm went off and it put itself in hibernation.

I don't have an ammeter handy., but I REALLY don't think that I am pulling that much power.

Any more ideas?

Update - It seems to be recharging the battery now in a possably correct manner. It is at 9% now, and didn't skyrocket back to 100% like I assmumed it would. We'll find out.

wow man nice trick man

More spooky tales about my laptop battery:

I left it charging over night last night, and when I woke up, the battery said 54% and stopped charging. Simply splendid. So I unplugged the AC and let if run off the bettery to see where it was. It lasted all of.....33 seconds before dying. So I plug back in the AC, reboot and lo and behold - 100% and charging.

Any more advice would be greatly appreciated.

Buy a new battery

Looks that way. I am going to dry to drain it manually first. I might be able to get an UPS for cheaper, as that is the only reason I use the battery.