Battery time remaining fluctuates wildly, despite charge declining predictably

[Greg A]

Please take a look at the attachment.

The percentage charge remaining on my battery appears to show my battery emptying fairly predictably (graph #1). However, the very important Time to Empty statistic fluctuates quite a lot (graph #2). Certainly more than the charge remaining graph suggests it should. I believe this is because of the rate of power consumption (graph #3).

I believe that the Time to Empty statistic should be refined to take into account a longer period of time previously. Clearly the statistic needs to change if more power demanding activities are being carried out. However, it shouldn't change so rapidly - brief fluctuates should effectively be ignored.

The Time to Empty number is incredibly important to users' use of portable devices.

Note: this may be something that needs addressing in one of gnome-power-manager's dependencies, I don't know the stack well enough. So please reassign if necessary.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: gnome-power-manager 3.4.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-27.43-generic 3.2.21
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-27-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu11
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 346c69198d9a34d2dea85736f0dd6571
CheckboxSystem: b633b4f40868d491c2ae5b50030ce6f3
Date: Thu Jul 26 10:24:45 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-power-manager
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Greg A (etulfetulf)]

See Bug #811777 for an indication of why this is important.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.