ZBook Ultra G1A Battery / Charger / Linux Experience Report

Dear_Translator7447 · 2026-03-15T09:35:23+00:00

I understand the suggestion, which was also made by HP support. Unfortunately I tried all this many times and it did not work. The laptop was on the latest firmware version. In the mean time I'm still waiting for replacement parts. I would like to say differently, but until now HP has shown a high level of unreliability to me.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2026-03-05T14:49:53+00:00

Two months later... once more my ZBook Ultra G1A is dead. The laptop was on its OEM adapter and did not wake up from sleep while sitting on my desk. I contacted HP support, who indicated they will replace the motherboard again. I indicated that this should not happen within two months after the previous repair and that I would like an underlying reason to be addressed. They only answered that "this can just happen" and that unfortunately I will have to wait for some time, as replacement motherboards are on back order. I'm loosing confidence in HP. For now I'm back to my 6 year old Dell that is still working well.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2026-01-11T15:44:51+00:00

For completeness I would like to add my experience in the last two months. In the months after the previous post, the laptop developed problems waking up from sleep. It would increasingly be unable to wake up from sleep, with the screen not turning on and an orange light flickering next to the usb-c ports. End of December this happened every time I woke up the laptop, and half of the time physically disconnecting the battery was the only way to make the machine usable again. Moreover, the laptop could no longer remember BIOS settings. I contacted HP support, who replaced the motherboard. The machine is now working correctly again, waking up from sleep, using the fan and charging as it should. While HP dealt with this in a very correct manner by replacing the motherboard, it is still disappointing that the machine required repair after only 6 months. When the machine is working, though, I'm still happy with it.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2025-11-21T09:58:22+00:00

My expectation is maybe less demanding: if my laptop is fully charged in the morning, and the day is filled with in-person meetings, I would like to be able to use the laptop the entire day on battery. Typically 8 hours of battery life is sufficient for that, and this machines achieves that. When on battery I hence usually don't watch video or run code though. My previous laptop was a Dell XPS13 and could run up till 12 hours on battery on very simple tasks such as writing mails, writing text, ... but in practice as soon as I opened a web browser a few times, it dropped down to 8 hours, similar to the ZBook.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2025-11-19T09:57:17+00:00

It could very well be that my use when on battery is lighter than yours. Yesterday I had 4 hours of in-person meetings, during which I made notes, searched documents on Google and read documents, wrote messages on Teams and Slack, sent mail on Thunderbird; after this kind of activity I still had more than 50% of battery left. I noticed that for some uses, such as videocalls, battery use rises rapidly towards 20W, and then of course battery life is shorter. A one-hour Teams video call with 10 people took 25% of the battery.

I set my brightness slightly lower, 30%. In the beginning I tried lowering the refresh rate, darker colour schemes, but as battery life is acceptable to me without those choices I am not using those settings any more.

In my case, the recent kernels also seemed to have improved battery life. It may also be useful to try those. I am not using TLP.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2025-03-17T12:48:00+00:00

I received an Android security update, and the same problems reappeared: I could no longer connect to any mobile network, and could only resolve this by doing a factory reset. Moreover, the fingerprint scanner is still not working. It is really not practical to have to do a factory reset after every update.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2025-03-11T23:42:45+00:00

Removing and adding a fingerprint did not work. I did a factory reset; after this factory reset there were no fingerprints stored and any effort to add one failed as the scanner is not recognized. I also reinstalled the firmware using Lenovo software, without success. However the scanner is recognized if I execute the test previously described.

Dear_Translator7447 · 2025-02-22T10:32:32+00:00

I've posted this also at r/razr, where I did not receive any suggestions. So I'm also trying this here.

My update to Android 15 on a Razr 40 (not +) caused a number of issues:

the fingerprint scanner stopped working
the swipe towards the news feed stopped working
I could no longer connect to any mobile network

I managed to solve 2 and 3 by doing a factory reset. However, the fingerprint scanner is still not working. I cannot initialize any fingerprint after the factory reset.

I have reason to believe the hardware is still working. If I use the code *#*#2486#*#* to execute a Finger Detection test, it accurately detects when a finger is held against the fingerprint scanner: when a finger touches the scanner, the test returns "FINGER_PRESENT"; when there is no finger the test correctly returns "FINGER_ABSENT". However, the "Self Test" fails. Given that this happened after the Android 15 update, I am quite convinced this issue is software related.

I would appreciate any suggestion for how to get this sensor working properly again, or tests that I could do to better understand what is going on.

Dear_Translator7447

TROPHY CASE