FN+F2 Battery charging shortcut not work on m11x?

Hi,

It has been a hassle, but whenever I need to disable or enable battery charging on my m11x, I had to reboot the machine and do it inside the setup Bios screen by pressing F2 key during the initial boot up.

I have read that it might be possible to do this without rebooting by pressing the FN+F2 key combination, but that does not seem to work for me. All I get is just an OSD icon showing if my Battery charge is enabled or not. Repeatedly pressing the combination does not cycle through 'Charging Enabled' and 'Charging Disabled'.

I just want to confirm that it is not possible to do this with the m11x? The only way to enable/disable battery charging is to reboot the machine?

Thanks for any insight on this.

 

Yeah it doesn't work.

Other people have reported this in another thread and I believe the conclusion was that it is not a supported feature like some other Alienware laptops have.

 

Thanks Maxgeek for the amazingly quick reply. That's disappointing that it does not work. I wonder if it is possible to get this working in a Bios update. I should think that this would be essential for the m11x as the battery cannot be removed conveniently. To have to go through the reboot process just to enable/disable battery charging is really a waste of time.

 

Never even knew what this FN key did.

Why would you need to turn charging off? (Not being a pain, just curious!)

 

If you leave your m11x connected to the AC most of the time(for example as a desktop replacement), it is better to disable charging so that your battery is not in a constant state of charging even when it is at 100%. Having your battery at a constant state of charging will shorten the lifespan of your battery and also cause it's charging capacity to be degraded over time.

For most laptops, you can just easily pop out the battery, but in the case of the m11x, this is not a very convenient task.

 

MaxGeek is correct. Brian (AW Rep) posted some time back that this was a typo in the 11x manual. FN+F2 battery charging disable/enable is not implemented on the 11x. I believe he stated this was not supported by HW - not sure.

FWIW, i never remove the batts. I have yet to have a batt fail on me within the warranty period. Today's LI-ION notebook batts go into a trickle type charge mode @ near 100% if I recall correctly. Keep in mind, with today's batts, its a total drain cycle which kills it. As long as you try to stay away from draining the battery completely you should be fine. I have owned the 17xR1 now for over a year and no issues with battery time.

The whole 'should I remove my laptop battery or leave it in when on AC' will always produce mixed opinion. In the end, its a personal preference

 

I am STILL working on getting the manual updated - takes a long time. This was a typo.

The Fn-F2 feature does not toggle battery charging on the M11x - it only shows status. Note that you can toggle charging in the BIOS - make sure you have the latest version for your system as there was a bug on the early versions that caused this to turn off on its own.

 

Thanks for the confirmation erawneila.

Regarding the validity of the fact that leaving the batt on AC all the time will degrade the laptop battery is still debatable. But, to be on the safe side, on days that I intend for the m11x to be plugged in all the time, I normally disable charging.

 

Hmmm. The whole battery debate again...

From personal experience and from what my friends have told me about their laptops, no matter what you do your battery needs to be replaced after about 2 years. I had an old dell e1505, and I removed the battery when it was on AC for a long time. But after about 2 years the battery just died. It basically became a dedicated ups.

A friend of mine has a toshiba and left her battery in all the time. Her battery also just died recently. And it has also been approx 2 years.