ACPI strangeness - battery jumping to low capacity and back

[Christian Iversen <chrivers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi $ALL

My notebook is behaving somewhat oddly. The KDE battery indicator 
usually shows the right amount of battery power left, although every now 
and then, it jumps to a value in the range 0-10%, and then jumps back. 
This is quite annoying, because it gives of all sorts of warnings about 
imminent power failure.

I'm running kubuntu 7.04 with 2.6.20-15-generic from standard packages, 
on a Zepto 4200 (rebranded Compal CL56)

It _seems_ -- I'm not quite sure about the causality of this -- that the 
following error messages turn up in dmesg when the jump happens:

...
[577843.068000] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed 
[\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.BAT1._BST] (Node df853608), AE_NOT_FOUND
[577843.068000] ACPI Exception (acpi_battery-0207): AE_NOT_FOUND, 
Evaluating _BST [20060707]
[577873.068000] ACPI Error (psargs-0355): [PBST] Namespace lookup 
failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[577873.068000] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed 
[\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.BAT1._BST] (Node df853608), AE_NOT_FOUND
[577873.068000] ACPI Exception (acpi_battery-0207): AE_NOT_FOUND, 
Evaluating _BST [20060707]
[577903.080000] ACPI Error (psargs-0355): [PBST] Namespace lookup 
failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[577903.080000] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed 
[\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.BAT1._BST] (Node df853608), AE_NOT_FOUND
[577903.080000] ACPI Exception (acpi_battery-0207): AE_NOT_FOUND, 
Evaluating _BST [20060707]
[577933.076000] ACPI Error (psargs-0355): [PBST] Namespace lookup 
failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[577933.076000] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed 
[\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.BAT1._BST] (Node df853608), AE_NOT_FOUND
[577933.076000] ACPI Exception (acpi_battery-0207): AE_NOT_FOUND, 
Evaluating _BST [20060707]
[577963.068000] ACPI Error (psargs-0355): [PBST] Namespace lookup 
failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
[577963.068000] ACPI Error (psparse-0537): Method parse/execution failed 
[\_SB_.PCI0.LPC0.BAT1._BST] (Node df853608), AE_NOT_FOUND
[577963.068000] ACPI Exception (acpi_battery-0207): AE_NOT_FOUND, 
Evaluating _BST [20060707]
...

Maybe it has nothing to do with it? It seems to be battery-related, at 
least.

Is there something else I can do to help debug the cause of these error 
messages and/or the battery problem?

I've attached the output of dmidecode and acpidump, in case it's useful.

--
Regards
Christian Iversen

Attachment: dmidecode.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

Attachment: acpidump.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data