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I need a way to kill my battery in my Ubuntu laptop. Is there any mind numbing tasks I can Ubuntu do that will eat up the battery? I have already shut off the power management options.

The battery is giving my issues and and someone said I should discharge it fully an recharge it from 0.

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As an aside, it is possible that this someone has no idea what they are talking about. You can't really "reboot" a battery, and while I'm no HW expert, discharging a battery to 0 sound kind of unhealthy for it, to be frank. – Williham Totland Jul 16 '11 at 20:54
@Williham is correct. Laptop batteries should never be brought below approximately 40% charge. It's very bad for them. Some people say you can have a complete discharge cycle every 100-300 charge cycles, though. – Reid Jul 16 '11 at 21:44
@Reid: Surely that's can, and not should? – Williham Totland Jul 16 '11 at 21:48
Well the battery is not working correctly to begin with, so fully discharging it and recharging it can't do anymore harm than has been done by the previous owner. – Solignis Jul 16 '11 at 22:15
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I've heard of this related to "recalibrating" the battery. E.g., tech-no-media.com/2009/07/how-to-extend-lithium-ion-laptop.html – ultrasawblade Jul 17 '11 at 3:09
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apt-get install stress - a utility specifically designed for testing CPU and other functions. You can use it to peg your CPU at 100% usage until the battery dies.

I'm not sure what options exist to peg GPU usage at 100%.

You should drop to runlevel 1 and dismount all volumes possible since your system will not shutdown smoothly.

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Another option would be to use a livecd such as stresslinux.org – Nifle Jul 16 '11 at 20:33
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i like the idea of a live cd because the machine will just stop and wont hurt the drives. – Solignis Jul 16 '11 at 21:40
I could not get the stresslinux to start on the laptop, so I just ran memtest 86+. That worked fine, I am interested in trying out that stress linux though. Thanks – Solignis Jul 18 '11 at 0:29
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up vote 3 down vote

Run lots of Virtual Machines

Do a full ls of the root (/)

Try to find a string of text within every file on the disk

Fun full screen games

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