Microsoft Looking Into Windows 7 Battery Failures

Jared writes "Microsoft says it is investigating reports of notebooks with poor battery life with Windows 7, as first reported by users on Microsoft TechNet. These users claim their batteries were working just fine under Windows XP and/or Windows Vista, and others are saying that battery problems occur on their new Windows 7 PCs. Under Win7, certain machines spit out the following warning message: 'Consider replacing your battery. There is a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly.' The warning is normally issued after using the computer's BIOS to determine whether a battery needs replacement, but in this case it appears the operating system and not the battery is the problem. These customers say their PC's battery life is noticeably lower, with some going as far as to say that it has become completely unusable after a few weeks. To make matters worse, others are reporting that downgrading to an earlier version of Windows doesn't fix the problem."

Comments

My battery died

[VanHalensing]

This article is exactly what happened to me. Battery life started fine. A week later, that message. Within a month the battery went from 90% to 3% and did an emergency hibernate. Moving back to XP didn't fix it either, it burned out that battery. I've since gone back to XP (thankfully I had a spare battery, they don't make my model anymore). I hope they fix this before I buy my next computer.

Re:My battery died

[PawNtheSandman]

That was my idea.

Re:My battery died

[VanHalensing]

I should also comment that the battery was about 2 years old and had been working fine previously. Also, this happened to another person I know (except faster) in a computer roughly a year old.

Re:My battery died

[jittles]

Within a month the battery went from 90% to 3% and did an emergency hibernate.

Wow! That's quite the battery capacity you have there...

In all seriousness though, I've been using Win 7 since the week of release. My laptop battery is approximately a year old. I've had no problems with it whatsoever.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Your two year-old laptop battery dies, and the first place you go is to blame the operating system? And the fact that it no longer works in any OS doesn't give you any hints, either? Come on, this isn't the toughest mystery you'll face this week.

Re:My battery died

[balbord]

Same thing here on my Asus A6Va. The battery now holds ~37%.

Re:My battery died

[melikamp]

I've seen batteries decline, though, exactly in this way, sometimes within a year or so of purchase. If you had to wait for a month, I wonder if it is just a coincidence. Notice that others in TFS did not buy a new laptop with W7, but upgraded, so they must have had their laptops for several months. And it totally explains why it does not get fixed when they go back to the previous system.

May be we should just stick with the simplest explanation until more data is available. But then, I don't use Microsoft's software at all, so I am more inclined to just sit on the sidelines at watch it burn, demolition derby style.

Re:My battery died

[dorre]

I'm totally agreeing.
The first things comes to mind: That's the normal description on how a battery dies.

When like 50 million laptops start using Win7 at the same time, there's a lot of them that had a battery failure waiting. While it may seem strange as a personal experience, it's certainly not from statistical viewpoint.
Not without more data.

Re:My battery died

[Lord Byron II]

A Li-ion battery should get somewhere between 300-500 charge-discharge cycles (http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm) and unless you use your laptop daily, you should still have a decent battery after two years.

As someone who has used a laptop 2-3 times a week regularly since 1996, I can say it usually takes about 2 years for a Li-ion battery to get to the point where it is only half-as-good as it was originally and generally I can get another year of it before I replace it.

Only once have I ever had a battery that fell from near 100% charge levels to near 0% charge levels that wasn't fixed by re-conditioning the battery (as the original poster described) and that battery tech was NiMH.

Considering the somewhat sophisticated chips in a modern Li-ion battery, I would say it's not unreasonable that Win7 is somehow tricking/confusing the battery into thinking that it's cells are prematurely dead and shutting them off.

Re:My battery died

[Reece400]

Yup, My 1 1/4 yr old Dell battery died over a period of a week. I had acceptable life and by the end of the week it was completely shot. No OS upgrade involved...

Re:My battery died

[thijsh]

I sense a disturbance in the force, as if millions of batteries cried out 'Windows 7 be damned' and bricked themselves.

From statistical viewpoint you have a valid argument, but remember: it's all just "Lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Or a more Homer-esque quote: "People can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.". :)

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the old marketing one-two team play.

VanHalensing sets up the strawman, you knock it down.

Classic stuff from the Win 7 team, as usual. You guys are consummate professionals.

Re:My battery died

[dangitman]

Your two year-old laptop battery dies, and the first place you go is to blame the operating system?

You say that like a two-year-old battery is some kind of relic. I've never had a laptop battery become unusable in less than three years.

Re:My battery died

[Stregano]

Well I have a 5 year old laptop that had a perfectly good battery, and then I put Mandrake 10 on it.

The battery did the same thing they are describing here for Windows 7.

Where is my ars article about Mandrake 10 killing laptop batteries of 5 year old computers?

Re:My battery died

[HikingStick]

My guess is that the new OS's power utilization habits are markedly different from XP, and that the battery had become conditioned to the old usage patterns. While the battery still likely would have shown decline and failure under your old OS, it might have come on more gradually. Switching to the new OS could be akin to replacing an alternator or other mechanical component in an older car--the changes that occur from the installation of the new part put additional strain on some of the other components, so they end up failing shortly thereafter.

That's why I always like to find out what repairs have been done before I buy a used car. If someone replaced the alternator, but nothing else, I figure that I'll be replacing the water pump and a few other items over the next few month if I buy the car. The real bargains are when you find out they've replaced most of the front-end components, and are then dumping the car because they see it as a money pit. If they've taken care of most of the potential problems, I've just found a vehicle that should run for at least 50k miles and should be able to get it at a bargain price. My little Mercury Tracer was like that. I picked it up at about $90k miles because the previous owner got tired of being nickled-and-dimed by regular repairs. I've now owned it for the past six ore more years, and have only had a few hundred dollars of repairs. I've put over 110k miles on the vehicle (yes, a '90s model Mercury Tracer that's still on the road with over 201k miles!).

It is just so easy to let an analogy become another rabbit trail...

Re:My battery died

[A beautiful mind]

Good for you. It is slightly annoying to read these kinds of statements though. The problem obviously doesn't affect 100% of the users, or even 50%, 20% or 10%. If it would, it would have been detected somewhere back in alpha stages.

It is absolutely silly to reply to a problem the user has with "but it works for me!". Most bugs are bugs because they do not affect all users! They occur rarely enough so that it wasn't caught before, but often enough to be a real pain in the ass. It is unhelpful to state that it works for you unless you know this to be a user created problem and can point out what the user could have done wrong.

Re:My battery died

[VanHalensing]

I'm not saying that this happens to all laptops, I know other people who it works just fine for. All I'm saying is that this is not an entirely isolated incedent and needs to be looked into, because it is occuring in multiple models. Interesting though that laptops of the same model are not experiencing the same problem. I'm wondering if the different companies that manufacture the batteries for the laptops (my laptop is a Dell, and it is an official Dell battery, but the manufacturer of the laptop battery is Sanyo). Also, I charge the laptop about every 2 days. So... over two years roughly 365 charges. That should be perfectly acceptable a lithium ion battery. I also try and keep the laptop on tables and such so it doesnt get too hot and get heat damage. And yes, I used the balanced option and the power saver option. There are programs you can download to analyze the working portions in the battery, and compare them to the designed specs. The program I used showed that it did make significant jumps down in working portions of the battery, not gradual decline like batteries normally make.

Re:My battery died

[fredrik70]

Within a month the battery went from 90% to 3% and did an emergency hibernate.

1 month??? I want your battery...

Re:My battery died

[Kleen13]

OS bugs aside, It all depends on usage, heat, storage, charge cycles, and cell quality... That's why they'll only offer you a 1 year warranty on a battery.

Re:My battery died

[shawb]

This could be an example of The law of very large numbers. Basically, this states that people have very little intuitive grasp of statistics and so believe that many unrelated things are indeed connected. Also related to the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It would be possible for a statisticion to determine whether the rate of battery failure after installing Windows 7 was expected, but that wouldn't convince anyone whose actually knows someone whose battery failed shortly after the installation. Or even not so shortly after.

Of course, it is possible that there is some bad code somewhere in Windows 7's power management that allows batteries to drain and then recharge continuously wearing them out, and a proper statistical analysis would reveal this as well.

Re:My battery died

[QBasicer]

You can't statistically analyze the whole problem until you know the numbers of those affected and those not. It's like review sites, seldom do people write reviews if the product works as expected, but more likely to when the product does NOT work. What's more slightly annoying is the people bitching at the people who report no problems.

Re:My battery died

[Linker3000]

This is another instance of where moving to Linux should be tried. I am running Fedora 12 on my Acer laptop and the battery life indicator regularly shows that I have 500+ hours of battery life remaining!

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using win 7 for about 4 months and i have no problems with my battery. you must be making this shit up

Re:My battery died

[flappinbooger]

In my experience, when the typical user says "I didn't do anything, it just happened" that means that they did something, twice, and they aren't telling you.

When they say it was a "brand new battery that was working fine and it just died" it's really an old battery, they never really used the laptop unplugged before, and they're using the lappy unplugged much more now since win7 is so kewl, so they just noticed it's toast. (just a guess)

Also, if this was a winXP laptop, it's ENTIRELY possible that the hardware is, oh, maybe, WORKING HARDER now that they just threw on Win7??!?? Sure, win7 is "way faster" than vista, but it certainly is a different animal than xp and could certainly be taxing a laptops HD and video and ram more than a typical XP installation on the same hardware. If it's got 1GB of ram maybe it hardly ever swapped before, and now it's swapping occasionally, drawing way more watts on average - especially if the HD isn't able to spin down.

I threw win7 onto a XP netbook with 1GB ram and I haven't noticed any battery life changes yet - but I'm not using it any differently either. I will keep an eye on it tho.

However, since installing win7, my netbook fell out of my car once and dinged up the corner. I think Microsoft should investigate that too.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Prolly shouldnt have bought a shitty gook laptop. ASUS sucks

Re:My battery died

[oldosadmin]

To be fair to GP, I bought a new battery (old computer) and had the same thing happen within weeks on my Windows 7 tablet.

Re:My battery died

[Ihmhi]

I'm rarely one to shill a store or product, but I've used Batteries Plus stores for customers who are in the same exact situation you are in. I believe they are owned by Rayovac.

Typically their generic laptop/cell phone batteries end up being cheaper than the name brand units (although this isn't always the case). For people in your case, though, this is really the only option for a fresh battery for an older laptop, cell phone, etc.

They're a franchise much like Radio Shack so you should be able to find one somewhere near you.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

After my battery died, I plugged it into the wall and got this message "Consider replacing your power generator. There is a problem with your power generator, so your computer might shut down suddenly." right before the city blacked ou...[HIBERNATE ACTIVATED]

Re:My battery died

[oboylet]

Your two year-old laptop battery dies, and the first place you go is to blame the operating system? And the fact that it no longer works in any OS doesn't give you any hints, either? Come on, this isn't the toughest mystery you'll face this week.

I don't know about GP, but the laptop I bought for going back to grad school came preloaded with Vista and included a Win7 upgrade coupon. When the disc arrived and I installed it, the machine wasn't more than 4 months old. I had the exact same experience and the battery went from functional to a brick in about two weeks after win7 hit the hardware. Fortunately for me, HP shipped me a replacement battery. It's an anecdote; not data, but it might be part of a larger trend.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL your just a retard

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome anecdote. Thanks!

Re:My battery died

[BlackSnake112]

Off topic but...

Other then they may share a belt (maybe not if really old) the alternator and the water pump have nothing to do with each other. They are two totally different part of the engine. The water pump is part of the cooling system while the alternator is part of the electrical (the battery charging) system. Water pumps are mechanical. I have not seen an electrical one yet. If you had said they replaced alternator and maybe the battery might go soon that would make a bit more sense.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been wondering what Dell did with their batteries 7 years ago as the three batteries for my Inspiron 600m still have 2 hours of usable battery life. I haven't done anything particular, one of the batteries saw almost no use in 6 of those years, one got used about half the time and the other one was always sitting in the latop, and yet they all have the same life left. I'm still not sure why but I'm not going to complain.

Re:My battery died

[biryokumaru]

Pshaw, I've been using Windows 7 for 4 years and my maximum battery capacity actually went up, from 90% to 110%!

Re:My battery died

[TheThiefMaster]

Could it be due to low power draw, caused by Windows 7 being better at sleeping the cpu?

If there's an imbalance between the cells then one could end up supplying the majority of the (low) current, and the other(s) could get marked as "dead", even though under higher current draw they'd still pull their weight.

Random thoughts, not necessarily real or even possible.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern batteries die after a few years whether they are being used or not. If your new battery has been sitting in a stock room since your old computer was current it will also be shagged.

It can be very hard to find new (i.e. recently manufactured) batteries for old laptops.

Re:My battery died

[HouseOfMisterE]

I agree. Dell must have used magic to make their old batteries or something. I own an old Latitude C600 with Intel P3-1GHz CPU, and have two batteries for this laptop. The batteries are 7+ years old, but each is still capable of powering this laptop for 2-3 hours with average use. As far at battery life is concerned, it's pretty amazing.

Re:My battery died

[ais523]

Part of the issue with Li-ion batteries is that in order to avoid losing maximum capacity, they're best stored at 40% charge and in a refrigerator. This is not a typical storage condition for a laptop battery. (It wouldn't at all surprise me if it was the storage condition that the manufacturers announced their life based on, though.)

Re:My battery died

[BitZtream]

Its entirely possible that your battery failed, they do that sometimes, and a lot of times act just like you're describing ...

Re:My battery died

[RichM]

They were crying out for Ubuntu 9.10.

Re:My battery died

[Mr. DOS]

As someone who has used a laptop 2-3 times a week regularly since 1996, I can say it usually takes about 2 years for a Li-ion battery to get to the point where it is only half-as-good as it was originally and generally I can get another year of it before I replace it.

Looks like someone's never experienced the bundles of joy that are consumer-grade Dell batteries.

      --- Mr. DOS

Re:My battery died

[cbytes]

This article is exactly what happened to me. Battery life started fine. A week later, that message. Within a month the battery went from 90% to 3% and did an emergency hibernate. Moving back to XP didn't fix it either, it burned out that battery. I've since gone back to XP (thankfully I had a spare battery, they don't make my model anymore). I hope they fix this before I buy my next computer.

Same thing happened to me. I have a 4 month old Alienware computer and after it suddenly shut off (not the low power auto-hibernate, but more like a sudden loss of power hard shut down) I tried rebooting and am having huge issues. The OS will boot but during startup I am prompted to run checkdisk. If I don't skip the test, my computer locks up when the counter reaches 1. Of course I also get the error about replacing my battery once in the OS, along with erratic program behavior most likely because of some disk error. I would suggest that anyone running a laptop without a hardware warranty should consider going back to XP before they lose their battery or worse.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Your battery, I see

Re:My battery died

[Hijacked Public]

lappy

This one word invalidates not only your entire post, but all of your other posts as well. Here at Slashdot and elsewhere.

Also, if your children have any posts those are invalidated as well.

Re:My battery died

[flappinbooger]

lappy

This one word invalidates not only your entire post, but all of your other posts as well. Here at Slashdot and elsewhere.

Also, if your children have any posts those are invalidated as well.

awwwwwwww.... come on....

Re:My battery died

[jtownatpunk.net]

Reminds me of when my old ibook decided its battery was dead. Nevermind the fact that I still got nearly 4 hours of use from a charge. The PMU refused to charge the battery and that was that. And it happened the day before I left on a two week vacation. Since the laptop was 4 years old, no brick-n-mortar stores had batteries in stock.

Re:My battery died

[izomiac]

Lithium ion batteries lose capacity for several reasons. First is the age from manufacture. In this case, a two-year old laptop might've gotten a battery that had been sitting in a warehouse for a few years. Second is the temperature. A battery in a desktop replacement laptop that's never below 60 degrees Celsius will degrade at an astounding rate, whereas a battery sitting in a plastic bag in the refrigerator will hardly degrade at all. Third is the number of charge cycles (rather straight forward). Fourth is how long the battery spent completely discharged. Modern batteries will shut down before before being completely depleted, but if this fails or if you don't immediately recharge them then some cells might die. Fifth is how long a battery was kept at high charge levels. A battery kept at 100% charge won't last nearly as long as one kept at 80%, 60% or 40%.

So, the best situation for a lithium battery is sitting in a plastic bag in a refrigerator at 40% charge, where it'll lose ~2% capacity per year. The worst case is being kept at 0% charge in hot temperatures which can make it useless in no time, and the next worse is 100% at hot temperatures (e.g. a laptop on a desk), which can lose a staggering 87% of its capacity in a year. (Yes, that's three hours down to twenty minutes.)

I expect this issue to turn out being that installing Windows 7 reset the manufacturer selected power scheme and probably disabled any charging control software. My own laptop had the "critical" battery level decreased, and the "only charge to 80%" software needed an update from the manufacturer (though in my case it still kinda worked, it just would nag with "Only use Sony batteries" and try to hibernate).

Most of this is from memory, but here's the source for the rest of it.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea this happened to me once, and what I did was plug it in to AC power and the issue went away after about an hour.

Re:My battery died

[Totenglocke]

Agreed. I've been using Win 7 on my laptop since the beta came out - the battery was already going bad (POS HP batteries) before I installed Win 7 and I got the replace battery message last night - but I knew before I installed Win 7 that my battery was down to only about 40% of it's original capacity.

Re:My battery died

[Unequivocal]

Linux is perfect. You just don't know how to configure it.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody seems to have mentioned that laptop batteries are more than just batteries. They are batteries + electronics that can be programmed to stop recharging. Mysteriously both of my laptop batteries (purchased at the same time, but one used a lot more than the other) "died" the same week. Win7 is somehow triggering the batteries' kill switch.

Re:My battery died

[brkello]

All anecdotal. I got a laptop, Li-ion battery died within 3 months. How many people upgraded to 7 and then had this issue? A few hundred. Probably actually is a bad battery. Nothing to see here unless there are more statistics.

Re:My battery died

[SlashDev]

Li-ion batteries since 1996? Hmmm...

Re:My battery died

[brkello]

Or it isn't a bug and people have the coincidence of having a bad battery around the time they upgraded to 7. But they are too technically inept to understand that even when they switch to a different OS and they have the same problem, then it probably really is the battery.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

i think that most of the reason why jittles posted was because of vanhelsing talking about him running out of battery power in a month.

but since we're on your track, lemme say this. people who talk like you just did in your post are fucking morons. why? because you're complaining about the obvious, by complaining about the obvious. I smack my friends in the face for doing that.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

This one word invalidates not only your entire post, but all of your other posts as well. Here at Slashdot and elsewhere.

Also, if your children have any posts those are invalidated as well.

So, barring that, you'd take posts from someone whose user name is "flappinbooger" seriously?

Re:My battery died

[Chuk]

We went from the RC to actual Windows 7 a week or so ago and the same thing happened. The laptop is also overheating a lot more than it had been. I think MS owes me a new laptop. Maybe two. It is about a year and a half old but it's had about the same battery life, maybe a slight decrease but nothing like the huge drop after we "upgraded" -- we usually have it plugged in though.

Re:My battery died

[Chees0rz]

lappy

This one word invalidates not only your entire post, but all of your other posts as well. Here at Slashdot and elsewhere.

Also, if your children have any posts those are invalidated as well.

Whenever I see "lappy" I start singing "heeeyy my lappy toppy, whooaa my lappy toppy"

(laffy taffy)

Re:My battery died

[DJ Nathan V]

What hardware? I've got a *5* year old Dell running Win7 RC and the battery perf has been on par if not slightly better than it was under XP. Granted, it's an ancient battery so the perf is quite low but it hasn't committed suicide on me either.

Re:My battery died

[AK Marc]

Could it be due to low power draw, caused by Windows 7 being better at sleeping the cpu?

Yes and no. Think of it this way, the power draw was consistent before. The battery essentially became conditioned to that. Then Windows 7 comes along. And at the peak, uses about the same as before. Then, the draw drops. Then increases. Then drops. It isn't the lower power draw itself. It's that the battery is conditioned to handle a single drain of a specific level through years of use. Then the drain mechanism changes. And that kills a borderline old battery.

Re:My battery died

[Meski]

Like the wave of car batteries that die on the first really frosty day of winter. Consider Windows 7 to be a frosty day that makes a borderline battery die.

Re:My battery died

[bemymonkey]

"I sense a disturbance in the force, as if millions of batteries cried out 'Windows 7 be damned' and bricked themselves."

Awesome. :D

Re:My battery died

[GameboyRMH]

I agree. I have a kill-a-watt hooked up to my Win7 gaming desktop and it's very light on power - it uses less than under Ubuntu 9 actually (although I think this has to do with the video card power saving feature enabled by the video drivers...this PC has two potentially power guzzling video cards in it).

I'm betting this is just a coincidence. This is how batteries often go - battery life starts to slowly decline, not too much, but then when the battery's had it, life starts dropping from 90% to 3% in a second and the laptop cuts out. I deal with a lot of dead laptop batteries at the office and there have never been any real warning signs that a battery is about to eat dirt.

Actually if I expect any OS to eat more batteries, it would be the various Linux distros that don't do true video off, like the 'buntus - it just turns the screen black and maybe dims it...but I have a number of Ubuntu laptops and the battery life isn't noticeably affected.

Re:My battery died

[GameboyRMH]

Another good point. 7 is lighter than Vista but still far more resource-intensive than XP. The extra heat generated by the laptop under increased load will also accelerate battery death - a PC repair tech once told me that heat is the #1 killer of laptop batteries, and recommended removing the battery from a laptop if it's going to be on AC power for extended periods.

Re:My battery died

[Unequivocal]

How is my post getting rated informative? Slashdot, wtf? It was a joke and at worse trolling. I'm never going to figure this place out.

Re:My battery died

[timepilot]

Sometimes even moderators can be funny.

Re:My battery died

[Anonymous Coward]

My Dell XPS 1530 on a University Dell service contract, had the battery stop charging entirely. They replaced the mobo, the video card, power supply, etc... but not the battery because it always charged fine on other 1530s. Turns out, the BIOS was at fault. Replace A12 with A09, and everything has been great since.

Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

MS is finally giving in: now all their users will have a taste of linux !

Too much Windows open

[myrrdyn]

Too much Windows open, too much currents = low battery :-P

Re:Too much Windows open

[colonelquesadilla]

Clearly the power is leaking out all the windows, they should use quality double paned glass, to help mitigate the problem.

Re:Too much Windows open

[Pharmboy]

Too much Windows open, too much currents = low battery :-P

Welcome to America. I'm pretty sure that what drains a battery is less related to the number of windows than it is related to what the windows are doing. One game will drain a battery faster than 10 internet browser tabs on static sites.

Re:Too much Windows open

[PawNtheSandman]

Turn off wireless card = improved battery life

Re:Too much Windows open

[Anonymous Coward]

one game of minesweeper versus 10 internet browser tabs loading gigapixel images?

Re:Too much Windows open

[laejoh]

Hey, life without walls...

Re:Too much Windows open

[capnkr]

The original marketing slogan "Windows - Life without walls (but definitely with wall adapters) ." was determined unwieldy, and had to be shortened somewhat...

Re:Too much Windows open

[fbjon]

Wall adapters - When you old walls don't fit your new Windows.

Re:Too much Windows open

[RobertLTux]

nice choosing the battle ground there

of course its more likely that the game is WOW and the ten tabs are different quest guides and such

Re:Too much Windows open

[orgelspieler]

You would think that life without walls would mean life without windows, too.

Come on Slashdot...

[datapharmer]

If you are going to post sensationalist stories at least give them better headlines. How about "Microsoft charged with assault on battery"... or some such. Seriously though, this could be bad if the users don't turn out to be crazies that don't want to admit their batteries just went bad.

Re:Come on Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

We just don't get a charge out of that anymore.

Slashdot's changing.

I think the rabid MS haters are growing old, have gotten married, gotten a life, and discovered that there are quite a few real endangerments to society other than some software company that's rapidly losing its monopoly power as firms like Apple and Google, as well as, FOSS take big bites out of its old slow hide.

Re:Come on Slashdot...

[Darth Sdlavrot]

Better headlines? What do you think this is, The Register?

Although I did think that the headline "Microsoft is looking into windows...." was not bad for /.

Re:Come on Slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

They were just scared off by all those crazy Apple wankers.

explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[alen]

Put Windows 7 on there to give to my inlaws and i thought it was a coincidence that the battery died. still works when plugged in, but battery life is like 10 minutes.

formattted it and put Vista on it because the graphics were glitchy with windows 7 and the problem is still there

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was just me but I could swear that my laptop, a HP ProBook 4515s, could do 3-4 hours before (bought it in October) and now I get 2 hours if even that.

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[alen]

flash is also a big culprit. i've noticed that surfing facebook i get barely 90 minutes of battery life when i should have 3 hours. tried it by surfing non-flash sites and my battery life improved

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[Xest]

I'm not sure that's Windows 7 in that particular case as I had the same problem with my old Inspiron 6000 and the battery was useless after less than a year. I only ever ran Windows XP on it, I think it's simply that Dell sold a load of shit batteries.

I used to do IT support in schools some years back too, we supported 147 schools and they all ordered a bunch of Dell D500s and D505s so had to support over a thousand of the things in total, the battery life on these wasn't exactly spectacular either, again, with many being largely useless on battery after only a year or so.

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[plague3106]

Sounds like an old battery. My laptop is a few months old, started with Vista, then upgraded to 7.

I get about four hours on a 16.5" full HD screen, high performance graphics, 7200 rpm drive, doing development work on VS 2008. I also have the high capacity battery as well, and I was suprised to actually get the performance they quoted (which was 4-5 hours of life between recharges).

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at your cpu usage while surfing flash sites. I've seen some flash pages peg my cpu to 100%

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[BitZtream]

The battery in your old laptop isn't working well anymore? NO FREAKING WAY?!

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[ais523]

Agreed, same thing happened to me with an Inspiron 6400 running Linux (specifically Ubuntu). I'm pretty sure it's a hardware problem in that case, not a software problem.

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[Theoboley]

I Bought my 6000 five years back, Running XP, and I have the same battery life now as i did back then. Original Battery in it, still running strong.

Re:explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000

[Anonymous Coward]

So... why isn't it a coincidence?

My example: Dad bought a new W7 machine just as the "black screen of death" issue hit the fan. Happened every boot for at least 30 minutes. Dad is old and lacks interest exploring new things and dealing with telephone service hell, so his solution was to leave it on, 24/7. Last month I suggested he try shutting down, just in case MS finally patched the issue. Next day I got an email - the machine never came back on. He took the works in to the store, and actually got an real tech this time who listened and then tested everything. Trouble was his old monitor had finally failed - it just coincidentally did it the day he got a new box, and the day the "black screen of death" issue hit the headlines.

There is some kind of battery black magic

[aussersterne]

in the world, and it's been there since before Windows 7.

I don't think I've ever had a friend, significant other, or family member that actually had a working battery in their laptop after the first 5-6 months or so, leaving them all permanently tethered until their next PC (which would end up that way again after the first 5-6 months).

Meanwhile, my batteries have always lasted the life of the unit with more or less full capacity.

I've long assumed it had something to do with usage patterns and charging habits, but I've not really looked into it more than that. One variable was that they were all using Windows (in some incarnation) and I rarely boot into Windows at all.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[melikamp]

Yeah, totally. I am using Windows 7 on a laptop to write this message, and my battery is as healthy as

<NO CARRIER>

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[stars_are_number_1]

The action that kills laptop batteries quicker than anything is using the computer, plugged into the wall AND the battery inserted into the machine. FWIU, if the battery is in the machine, you should be using only battery power, unless it's charging.

Once the battery is full, either unplug the computer from the wall and use only the battery, or take the battery out and use only the AC power.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[poetmatt]

what you're saying has minimal significance on new laptops. Most new ones are a-okay with having the battery in and plugged in. They don't just blow an extra recharge cycle when it's plugged unless the battery is below the automated (or user set) threshold to recharge the battery. Example: Thinkpads do that. I've had mine cycle maybe 15 times over the course of a year, since it's plugged in most of the time anyway.

Batteries do discharge over time, so if you always keep it out when plugged in and forget, it's equally likely you won't remember to charge it for when it's needed.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[stars_are_number_1]

To make sure I understand correctly, you're saying that newer laptops should recognize that the battery is charged and then stop charging?

That would make sense, considering my laptop is about 4 years old.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[HikingStick]

When supporting laptop users in a large office, we often saw the following pattern: those who typically used their batteries regularly (draining them most, if not all of the way), tended to need replacement batteries less often than those (mostly managers/officers) who typically left their machines plugged in/docked almost all of the time. Some of those users would only use their laptops on battery power a few times a year. They were the ones who reported battery problems (e.g., battery life less than an hour, battery would not charge) most often.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[Anonymous Coward]

My brother, who only runs Linux, and always runs his laptops plugged in is always killing his batteries very quickly. I run only Windows, and am very careful to not always run my laptops plugged in, and got 5+ years out of my previous laptop's battery! My new Think-pad T400 that came with Windows 7 is now about 2.5 months old and is still at 100% battery life...

I firmly believe its all about how you treat the battery, not what OS you run!

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[rickb928]

My 7 year old Acer 1894 P4 laptop (Same as Dell Smarttep 250N) had the original battery in it for 4 years with good life. It went from 80% capacity to 3% capacity in about a month. The second battery lasted 2 years. Both were used almost exclusively plugged in, battery charged, Windows XP of some flavor.

Of course after 7 years, the DC jack has been soldered in repeatedly, smoked, and cooked well done. Replacements have to be pressed in and bumpered.

Before that, I had a Mitac 6020N, and the battery in that was typical but lived for 4 years on a desktop.

I just got a Thinkpad X41 Tablet with two batteries. The standard 4-cell battery has about 25% of capacity left, too bad. The T-cell battery has about 75% capacity, and it lasts >4 hours. I might get a new 4-cell battery, or rebuild the old one, it's a nice shape.

Newer batteries, to me, seem to tolerate constant charging. My work machine is an X61S, and after a year of 8-hour use and rare discharges it still has all the life I expect out of the 8-cell battery.

I suspect one difference between premium notebooks and low-end might be the power management and charging. A sub-$400 notebook might not do as well, and the cells might not be so excellent either. You sometimes do get what you pay for.

And I suspect leaving your notebook on 24x7 isn't good for it either. The Acer is a hot beast with a P4 2.8 in it. the Thinkpad at home rarely spins the fan so you can hear it. When the Acer dies, my wife gets a used Thinkpad. She can try and burn that up playing Bejewelled.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[Anonymous Coward]

My old laptop, a Toshiba, had its Li-ion battery working 7 years after i bought it. I don't think I had good charging habits (I never removed the battery, though I usually had it attached to the power chord at home or at the university) and i used linux.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[dangitman]

huh... he had enough warning to spend the time writing out no carrier, and wait for the preview and submit...

That's because Windows 7 has this great feature, where it completes slashdot posts for you. It also automatically browses porn for you, so you don't have to.

Windows 7 - RIDE THE WALRUS!!!

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[multipartmixed]

Your observation is consistent with a patch I read once for the Sun T3+ storage array.

These have redundant internal battery banks (and power supplies), to allow safe shutdown of the RAID in the event of a power failure.

IIRC, the patch significantly increased battery life by instructing the RAID enclosure to drain each battery completely once a week.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[poetmatt]

well when I say newer, I don't remember when that became a guarantee that most laptops do that, but I imagine it was quite a while ago.

Also batteries and laptops both have their own protection against overcharging, and that stuff has been around for longer than your laptop.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company that sells laptop batteries and this is exactly what happens. All Li-ion batteries degrade from the moment that they are made, however the process is greatly accelerated by Heat & Charge Level. Using a laptop as a desktop computer keeps the battery at 100% charge and cooks it all day long. This stress can kill batteries in under a year.

The chips in the batteries store information on each charge/discharge cycle. As a battery wears the maximum capacity will decrease. If the battery is cycled on a regular basis, the chip will collect current data and re-calculate the percentages. If a battery is not cycled, the battery will assume that the maximum capacity based upon the last data that was collected. This will give a false percentage reading and will make the charge level drop out quickly.

Users incorrectly believe that by keeping the battery fully charged and never using it will preserve the battery. When they finally go on a trip 9 months later and try to use the battery it will fail on them and they do not know why. The #1 thing out of every customer's mouth is "but I never used the battery".

My take on the MS issue is that it is a combination of a few models with buggy ACPI data and also some just bad batteries. ACPI should report the battery's design capacity as well as the current capacity level. The ratio of the current capacity to the design capacity is called the State Of Health (SOH) and it represents the amount of wear on the battery. For example if your 6600mAh battery only charges to 3300mAh then your battery is 50% worn out.

In most OSs they only care about the relative state of charge (RSOC) to show you the charge percent. In some new OS (I am assuming W7), the OS tries to compute the SOH to let you know if your battery is bad. The problem is that many laptops do not correctly report the ACPI battery data. If the OS or the BIOS mis-report or mis-interpret the ACPI data then this feature can incorrectly report that your battery is bad. If you run Linux you can see this data in /proc/ACPI/BAT0/info. Most laptops that I have checked will mis-report some of this information.

Some of the reports are likely due to these false positives. These should be fixed by a tweak to the BIOS to allow W7 to properly interpret the ACPI data. The rest are most likely just bad batteries.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[oh-dark-thirty]

Lithium batteries that are kept at a full-charge voltage (4.2 volts/cell) will degrade faster than those that are either cycled regularly or stored at approx. 3.8 v/cell.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[Anonymous Coward]

To make sure I understand correctly, you're saying that newer laptops should recognize that the battery is charged and then stop charging?

Unless your are using NiCd batteries they charger is smart enough to stop charging, because all later technologies can fail pretty dramatically if overcharged.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Li-Ion batteries decay faster at 100% SOC, and faster at higher temperatures. Both of these are likely conditions for a laptop that's plugged in all the time.

Re:There is some kind of battery black magic

[poetmatt]

Again, only if the laptop is set to recharge to 100% every time you hit 90% battery or something. Oherwise, most laptops in the last 10+ years usually recharge to full from an increasingly lower charge amount. It's built into both windows and linux (I have no idea if Mac does). Plus you can change that setting yourself too. I have my laptop down to 65% (checked, yaeh)? It's plugged in 100% of the time and does not spend the time at 100%.

Abridged version: even plugged in laptops will not stay at 100% battery under any circumstance, even will continually plugged in.

Not experience this

[Xest]

I've not experienced this on my ASUS Eee PC 1008, whilst I've never had the advertised 10.5hrs battery life out of it, because I've never used it only in the lower power modes, I've always been able to get at least 8hrs out of it between recharges. I've been running Windows 7 Ultimate on it since it was released to MSDN subscribers (i.e. prior to consumer release).

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but clearly it doesn't effect every laptop and must occur under a specific set of circumstances or against a certain set of hardware.

Out of interest though, does anyone know enough about modern batteries to be able to tell why a piece of software should be able to cause permanent damage to a battery in the first place?

Re:Not experience this

[Anonymous Coward]

"Out of interest though, does anyone know enough about modern batteries to be able to tell why a piece of software should be able to cause permanent damage to a battery in the first place?"

Just guessing here, but hard drives store some operational parameters (e.g. SMART) like usage, faulty sectors, etc. and OSs can access these.

It's reasonable to assume that modern batteries have some sort of logic that can influence their behaviour. Maybe Win 7 screwed with some values that cause the battery to operate under bad conditions. Like flagging some cells as faulty or something like that.

Re:Not experience this

[dreamchaser]

Software controls how batteries are used/discharged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Configuration_and_Power_Interface

Re:Not experience this

[Wingsy]

If software has anything to do with battery charging it can kill a battery in short order simply by overcharging. If you charge a Li-Poly battery above 4.2 volts for any length of time, it's about the same as driving a screwdriver through the battery pack.

Re:Not experience this

[Anonymous Coward]

These batteries contain some complex chargers with a chip that probably remembers the exact use. I suspect that the battery remembers when it's worn out and refuses to reload any further than the predicted limit (to prevent all those nasty Li-Ion overheating problems), in this way it's kind of like those HP cartridges that still report as 'empty' when you refill them and won't work.
Recently I installed a program that allows me to check my laptops battery, it currently reports I have 3069 mWh left of the rated 5200 mWh and it won't charge past this threshold (it only steadily becomes less). A constant and stable decrease like this can only be reported when it's calculated by the internal logic inside the battery (any measured value would fluctuate since the voltage will also fluctuate based on load and charge).

So to answer your question: the battery probably remembers like HP ink... :-)

Re:Not experience this

[Cyner]

Yes, but even with ACPI there is no "kill battery" function. The worst an OS can do is set the computer to maximum power consumption. If the battery can't handle maximum power consumption without damage then it's defective by design curtesy the laptop manufacturer.

Re:Not experience this

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummmmm...NO. Ever heard of overcharge protection circuits? Yes you are correct, the laptop vendor would NEVER leave it up to WINDOWS OR ANY OS to decide what voltage to apply. What an absolutely assinine comment..

Re:Not experience this

[Nerdfest]

I'm under the impression that repeatedly charging/discharging the last couple of percent of a litium battery can very much reduce its life. I seem to remember someone from the OLPC project saying they extended battery life by avoiding charging the battery to full charge. As an anecdote, I have a laptop that I leave plugged in at almost all times. When I do run it on batteries, the battery last about the same amount of time as when I bought it. On the machines that I carry around, use and chjarge regularly, The battery life is significantly reduced after 6 months of use. If I were to hazard a guess, I would think that the OS is constantly charging and discharging teh top couple of percent of abttery capacity. O f course, I'm neither and electrical, or chemical engineer.

Re:Not experience this

[Xest]

I understand that, but what specifically about it allows for permanent battery damage? Can commands to discharge and so forth really be issued to the battery in a manner so as to permanently damage and decrease the life of it in a short space of time? Is there no protection at hardware level against it also for example?

If there is no hardware protection then does that not also leave the door open for intentionally malicious software such as viruses and trojans to kill batteries?

I guess my question would've been better phrased as "if it is possible, then why is it possible for software to kill a battery?".

Re:Not experience this

[ettlz]

ACPI does not normally (and from what I've seen, never) export any controls over battery charging, or even allow the user to choose power supply. The job of handling power is usually done by the embedded controller and its firmware, which also handles any charging (along with circuitry designed specifically for the job). This is designed for optimal performance of the system in mind and usually works very well. The operating system just monitors the state of the power supply and can make demand-related decisions (CPU power-state, screen brightness, sleep/shutdown) based upon a chosen policy. If batteries really are packing up early in the manner suggested, this is more likely down to a hardware/firmware/miscellaneous-ACPI-EC-horkage defect in the notebook itself, not the operating system.

Re:Not experience this

[Anonymous Coward]

ORLY? Wireless device makers don't open source their firmware because the output power is completely software controlled. You could fry your nuts with a buggy firmware and your laptop on your lap. I wouldn't be surprised if battery hardware was designed the same way (not saying it is, just wouldn't be surprised.)

Re:Not experience this

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenovo notebooks allow you to set the water mark it will allow the battery percentage to dip before it will begin to top up the battery precisely to preserve the systems battery life.

I vividly remember a few non-IBM notebooks we've used over the years had brain dead charging circuts that would start charging every time they were plugged in and the result was totally useless batteries on at least a dozen similiar notebooks after less than a year of purchase.

I always hibernate before I unplug power and always plugin before turning on the notebook unless I'm actually going to be using it somewhere on battery.

I keep my backup batteries charged at 50% and in the fridge until they are used.

There is also some confusion on the "memory effect" of LiON batteries. It is true the batteries themselves don't suffer from the effect however the internal gas gauge can easily lead to effectivly the same behavior. Deepcycling notebook batteries once in a while can still help to recover seemingly lost capacity.

Re:Not experience this

[citizenr]

Yes, but even with ACPI there is no "kill battery" function

Actually there is. Chip in the Battery counts charge/discharge cycles. All it takes it to tell that chip you charge/discharge battery 50 times a day and it will consider battery dead after a week just like Printers do with ink cartridges.

Re:Not experience this

[Cyner]

Yeah, you really don't know what you're talking about at all. Batteries don't assertain life status by cycles like miles on a car. They take the actual Amp-Hour status of the batter and compare that to what the battery should perform at. There are a couple variances on how life status is measured, but they all boil down to a measure of how much charge it will hold. It has nothing to do with cycles (other than actually cycling the batter will slowly decrease it's ability to hold a charge).

FWIW, no problems here...

[spywhere]

I put a clean install of Windows 7 on a new HDD in my HP dv7t, which came with Vista. The battery has been fine. I have also deployed several new Win7 laptops, and installed Win7 on two or three other laptops, with no issues.

Re:FWIW, no problems here...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not too surprising that some work and some do not.

The world of the OEM laptop is a maze of crappy drivers that sorta work and sorta dont. You get a new laptop and it might actually just be a 3 year old refresh design with the same drivers from 5 years ago.

Get a more state of the art neato one and you are more likely to get newer drivers that have the kinks worked out.

Then to put an extra bit of gravy on it you can sometimes dl drivers from the OEM's OEM sometimes not. Then sometimes you can install it other times it freaks out and tells you to contact HP/Dell/whoever...

That some laptops are freaking out with the power and windows 7 is not surprising. May work just fine in xp and vista. Then 7 changed something subtle and that crap driver written 8 years ago suddenly doesnt work properly anymore.

MS actually has a whole group of people whose job it is to fix this sort of mess. As it looks bad on them. When the real fault is the OEM itself and the way they manage driver updates and parts.

Re:FWIW, no problems here...

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop is 6 months new. After installing Windows 7 a month and a half ago, the battery today is giving me "consider replacing your battery message." It's my understanding that the charging is controlled by the OS. Reading all the posts that have come up from people with new/semi-new laptops it seems pretty obvious that Microsoft is on the hook for this one.

Bullshit

[dreamchaser]

One of my laptops is a 4 year old Gateway and it's battery still lasts close to 2 hours. The whole 'batteries always wear out fast' meme is based completely on ignorance.

Re:Bullshit

[AC-x]

Lithium Ion batteries do lose their maximum charge over time, that's a fact of physics. How much charge they lose depends on temperature and how much they're charged up.

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

Re:Bullshit

[Somebody Is Using My]

Thanks for the interesting link. I was particularly intrigued by the chart indicating how much temperature has an effect on charge level. I'd wager that this is a major cause of a lot of these reported Windows 7 battery problems.

After all, Windows 7 is more resource intensive than XP, especially if you are using Aero Glass. Not only does that mean that CPU usage may be up, but also that the platform it is running on will be using more powerful CPUs. Both of these things result in more waste heat which can leak into the battery. XP, on the other hand, won't be heavily taxing the CPU/GPU under "ordinary use" (e.g., non-game) circumstances, and can run on less-powerful (and thus cooler-running) processors.

Linux does it too...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same problem with Fedora on my acer laptop. Vista is quite happy and battery life works fine. But on Fedora it runs along dropping slowly until about 85% when it suddenly drops to 0% panics and suspends.

I have this problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

on a HP Pavilion dv9685eo, found that thread 6 months ago and hoped for the best. Down to 15 mins of battery life. Reinstalls, battery drains, etc, nothing works.

Re:I have this problem...

[Kozz]

on a HP Pavilion...

Well, HERE'S yer problem...

Happens in other OSes, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reminded of a driver bug in one Linux distro release that utterly trashed laptop hard drives by...hell, I don't remember, maybe parking and unparking the heads way too often (do they even still do that anymore?). Extremely unfortunate bug, but I wanted to jump in before the fanboys.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[MrCrassic]

Yes, the heads on mechanical hard drives still park and unpark on power on.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it was actually Mandrake (before it became Mandriva), and it bricked LG optical drives, not (thankfully) hard drives.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[Knuckles]

I'm reminded of a driver bug in one Linux distro release that utterly trashed laptop hard drives by...hell, I don't remember, maybe parking and unparking the heads way too often (do they even still do that anymore?).

It was Ubuntu, and it was not so simple to blame them as you remember it to be. Effectively they just did not overrule the drives' own settings for the parking frequency. Turns out that there are buggy drives that get it wrong.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

nope.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

There was also a virus back in the DOS days that did the same thing, back then though parking the heads on an MFM drive was a user initiated task.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[ettlz]

That and certain drives also have a mind of their own and ignore any hdparm APM setting after a short while in favour of their own, absurdly aggressive setting. One I have (by default) unloads after 8 seconds of inactivity and the only way to change it is by some obscure DOS utility that I can't get to work. 8 seconds is crazy-low, and because the typical interval for disc activity on a Linux system under enthusiastic use is typically 10-15 seconds (or even when a bit idle, as lots of other things touch the filesystem in the backgrounds), the heads spend a lot of time loading and unloading. It's possible to tune the Linux VM subsystem to ouch the disc less often, but in practise doesn't make much of a difference. Windows XP does exactly the same. The disc manufacturer says Linux should not wake up the disc so frequently, but I don't see how that squares with the way a modern, multitasking operating system works; things touch the filesystem, and this must be synced in good time (I don't want 30 seconds' worth of dirty data just sitting in RAM). And besides, disc manufacturers should just make discs and leave VM policy to kernel designers.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[petermgreen]

I believe it was actually Mandrake (before it became Mandriva), and it bricked LG optical drives
That was a different (earlier) issue.

Re:Happens in other OSes, too.

[petermgreen]

MY understanding is it wasn't a driver bug per-se but an interaction of a short spindown timeout with a slightly longer regular disk access (not sure what the source of that access was) and it hit a lot of linux configurations.

Utterly trashed is probabblly a slight exaggeration, it certainly made a lot of drives report excessive load cycle counts but I doubt there is any good data on how many actual failures it caused.

Interesting.

[aussersterne]

See my post above for an anecdote with opposite parameters. But it definitely seems as though batteries remain something of an "unsolved problem" for computing, as compared to mobile phones, where things hum along rather nicely. Higher current drain? Bigger hardware diversity married to a software ecosystem? Uneven usage meaning uneven current drain over time?

I don't understand anything about battery chemistry or the finer points of PC power management, but it does seem to be one of the sketchier areas of current PC hardware.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got these problems with a HP DV-9890-ED, but haven't experienced the degradation of the battery. Also, the error notification is only visible when I insert the power supply. When operating on battery only, the battery indicator is fine.

The battery-error exists for quite a while now, actually. I've got this problem since two months, and searches on the internet revealed that it excisted for over a half year..

Or maybe..

[consonant]

.. the notebook that ran Windows XP just fine is so old that the battery life is shot anyway? Which might explain why the battery life didn't magically increase when they downgraded to XP/Vista.

Hard to pin this down.

[CFD339]

This is one of those things that's really hard to pin down.

LiON batteries -- what's used in most laptops and netbooks now -- have different kind of failures and limits from the older NiCD and so on. Aside from the catastrophic failures that made the news, what happens with LiON is that there are a limited number of charge cycles per cell no matter what you do. The cells generally go around 300 charge cycles before their capacity drops to about half. The controller in the batteries (which prevents them from just bursting in flames all the time) senses this and reports it back to the os.

The result is that when you upgrade the machine, you've already had it a long while and you're not far from that day when suddenly you notice your capacity has dropped to about half and you'd better replace the battery. Your cruising along at 60% then a minute later you're getting the warning that you're out of battery -- one or more cells is no good anymore.

To test this, you'd have to buy a new battery first and then compare life cycles.

btw: Lots of theories about how to make them last longer -- most of the actual experts say to try to keep it at around 40% if you're going to store it and not use it, otherwise just use the machine. The controller won't allow it to overcharge an they have no "memory" per se.

Re:Hard to pin this down.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you charge it 300 times and the capacity is at 50%. Then you charge another 300 times, now the capacity is 25%. Another 300 charges, 12.5%. And so on. This does not explain how batteries go from 2 hour capacity to 2 minute capacity in the space of one month.

Re:Hard to pin this down.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny, if it was caused by linux or some other OS immediately everyone would attack the OS and not the hardware. Microsoft is ... well, Microsoft, they'll blame the manufacturer for not respecting some standards that should have never existed in the first place.

Re:Hard to pin this down.

[tlhIngan]

LiON batteries -- what's used in most laptops and netbooks now -- have different kind of failures and limits from the older NiCD and so on. Aside from the catastrophic failures that made the news, what happens with LiON is that there are a limited number of charge cycles per cell no matter what you do. The cells generally go around 300 charge cycles before their capacity drops to about half. The controller in the batteries (which prevents them from just bursting in flames all the time) senses this and reports it back to the os.

True, but few people run their batteries to depletion and then charge it up - the 300-odd cycle rating is for full charge/discharge cycles. Li-Ions last longer if you take a more partial charge-discharge cycle.

However, what Lithium secondary batteries suffer from is aging. They grow old - once they are manufactured, the clock starts ticking. Over time, they will die. Which is why you never buy spare batteries until you need them - a battery kept in ideal conditions, but unused will age the same rate as one in constant use. That three year old spare battery you kept in tip-top storage conditions won't have significantly more capacity than your now dead three year old battery (it may last half an hour, where your battery lasts 5 minutes, but you ain't getting back the old 5 hour life when it was new without buying a fresh new battery).

Literally, freshness counts. And a good chunk of life of batteries may be spent prior to the device being actually sold and in the consumer's hands - think of the cell being manufactured, then sitting on the shelf for a few weeks until someone buys it and manufactures their battery pack, which sits on the shelf a few more weeks until it's paired with a device. Then a few more weeks pass when the device is shipped to a retailer, where it can sit more weeks or months until someone actually buys it. The device may have been made easily 6 months prior, and the parts a month or two before that. If it's a product on the shelf a little while, the date could easily be a year the battery has been sitting idle from when it was manufactured.

For fast-moving products like iPods, this is very unlikely (unless it's a really unpopular model), but for other products (e.g., other media players) it can sit on the shelf for a long time.

Hmm...

[Pojut]

...anyone with knowledge of how an OS interacts with a laptop battery have an idea on what may be causing this?

On my end, I had Windows 7 running on my little Dell Mini 9 (upgraded to 2 gigs of ram, 16 gig SSD) as an experiment, and I got the same four hour battery life I get when ubuntu 9.10 is on there. Laptop is a bit over a year old.

New Dell E1555

[p51d007]

Got a new Dell E1555 to replace my aging E1505, blew out the HD, installed 7 fresh. 8-9 hour battery life (extended battery), no issues. Must be a really specific glitch.

Question for you

[markhb]

My son got a new Dell laptop over the summer. For various reasons he rarely takes it anywhere, so it's pretty much been parked on his desk attached to the charger full-time. Is that going to kill his battery life? Should he unhook the power cord just for the sake of running it on battery power?

Re:Question for you

[bobstay]

I'd suggest just taking the battery out and running it on AC if he hardly ever moves it from his desk.

Heat is one of the main things that kills lithium-ion batteries in laptops.

Re:Question for you

[CFD339]

Agreed -- heat kills batteries, hard drives, and capacitors in computer equipment. He should elevate the machine or use a laptop cooling pad of some kind for sure. Blowing out the dust with some canned air (carefully) every once in a while helps too -- or if your geek cred is high enough, strip the machine down and clean it out from the inside. The dust that coats heat sinks is a killer.

Re:Question for you

[daffmeister]

Don't laptops use the battery as a power filter for the mains also? Or has that gone by the wayside?

Re:Question for you

[bkaul01]

Don't laptops use the battery as a power filter for the mains also? Or has that gone by the wayside?

Laptops use an external DC power supply. The raw AC "mains" power never gets to the laptop itself ...

Strange

[Murdoch5]

I actually get semi decent battery life in 7 and less in Linux. However that's why they made the adapter.

THAT's interesting, as someone who has seen

[aussersterne]

a lot of family and friends with dead Li-Ion batteries, yet rarely experiences these myself.

One major difference in usage patterns is that I ALWAYS run on a smooth, flat surface (desk, table) and often try to elevate the rear of the machine to keep airspace underneath (i.e. with a docking station or similar).

The family and friends I know with laptops almost always use them... on their laps. Or on a bed or a couch or similar.

Heat concerns about the hard drive, graphics, processor, and general stability (bitflips in memory and so on) were always my motive, but I wonder if this is the reason I seem to have great batteries that last me years and years with full capacity, while they seem to end up with 2 minute charge bricks after just a few months.

Win7 asks you to kill your battery

[EmagGeek]

I'll bet it has something to do with people selecting the High Performance power profile without knowing the full consequences of it.

User Error...

I'm a PC,

[Anonymous Coward]

and Windows 7's battery draining prowess was my idea.

Downgrading?

[e2d2]

To make matters worse, others are reporting that downgrading to an earlier version of Windows doesn't fix the problem."

How is this even possible?

Re:Downgrading?

[XMode]

Don't know if serious.. But im assuming its because Win7 code has already screwed the battery up..

Re:Downgrading?

[Anonymous Coward]

just throwing this out there with no proof:
win7 rootkit?

depends..

[CFD339]

If you wanted to play the odds on best possible result -- he should use it tll it hits about 45% and then plug the laptop in and remove the battery, putting it on the shelf until he needs it.

The problems with that are

1. There's no battery in the machine, and it's really easy to pull the cord out the back of a laptop -- and its not really much of a laptop without a battery, is it?

2. The battery won't store charge indefinitely, so he's got to plug it in once in a while and make sure to keep that charge up around 40-50%

3. When he does need the battery, it hasn't got much charge in it so he's got to plan an hour or two ahead of time.

To me, I'd go with the "just use the damn thing" approach, and after a year or two just buy another hundred dollar battery.

For what it's worth, these guys were extremely helpful to me when I looked into this stuff and I've found them good to deal with (http://www.atbatt.com/). They also donate large numbers of 9v batteries to fire departments to give to people with smoke detectors, so I consider that worth some karma points.

OSX Snow Leopard upgrade may cause battery failure

[biggknifeparty]

I've heard reports on the Apple community forum that those who upgraded to Snow Leopard had battery failure. However, it could very well be that the newer versions, 10.6 and also Windows 7, are just better at displaying battery failure status than the earlier versions.

Vostro battery murdered by 7

[clysher]

Just chiming in to say that this issue is definitely real. My Dell Vostro battery was about a year and a half old when I installed Windows 7 the first time. When I finally decided to switch fully to 7 it only took about two weeks before I unplugged my computer and got a message that my battery needed to be replaced. The battery until then had about an hour and a half of time on it running the 'balanced' power setting. I noticed the message maybe two to three minutes after unplugging. I was planning to buy a new battery, but if this is real then I hope a class action is in the works because I need a new battery, and this is obviously the reason I need one. Also, since installing 7 I should point out that my battery now only has a seven minute life off ac power, even under Ubuntu 9.10, 8.04, and Windows XP. In response to someone mentioning 'high performance' being the likely culprit, I only ran high performance power management while on ac power.

Re:Vostro battery murdered by 7

[plague3106]

Your battery is just old. Replace it.

Re:Vostro battery murdered by 7

[Plekto]

I had problems with this a few years ago with a Powerbook.

The issue is that the new Li-Ion batteries have a chip inside them that monitors charge cycles and when it gets to a certain limit/number of cycles, disables the battery to keep it from possibly shorting out and catching fire. Of course, this circuit is often twice as conservative as it needs to be thanks to worries about legal actions and so on. The only option is to find a program that will refresh the chip's internal counter. For a lot of machines, though, this does not exist. The battery is perfectly fine, but since the chip says "no good" the battery bricks itself.

What was happening was that my Powerbook was doing exactly the same thing as is being described here. It was chewing through a "cycle" or two every day despite the thing actually not being unplugged or used heavily. Every day, it ate another cycle until the chip in the battery's counter decided it was "dead".

The real solution here is to get a NiMH battery replacement if you can.

I bought a computer with WIN7 RC...

[cvtan]

and sure enough 6 months later the 5-year-old battery in my MINI Cooper needed to be replaced.

Re:I bought a computer with WIN7 RC...

[shutdown -p now]

Who sold you a computer with Windows 7 release candidate, and why did you buy it?

Any change in O/S could do this to a battery

[Anonymous Coward]

LiON batteries become more effcient as they get used to a power profile (ie. usage pattern). So after conditioning a battery for 2 years with one such usage pattern (or using one O/S over time), then changing that all of a sudden by installing a different OS that uses the battery differently *could* shock the cells into premature collapse.

Re:My battery died...went NEAR Windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop went NEAR a Windows7 box, and immediately died! I like Windows 7, but it must have terrible power stuff there must be in it!!!

VMware

[Kitkoan]

I wonder does this problem also crop up when using a VM session over time, or must Win7 be the top loaded OS?

software effecting battery

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of remarks about the OS not able to effect battery life. I felt the same way (someone already linked a wikipedia article to it I see) until I ran into this issue. I had a user with a Dell Latitude 820 using Vista that wanted to upgrade to 7. As soon as he did the battery would not longer charge while the computer was powered on. He never got the message described in the article. Shut down his laptop, and the battery started to charge again. It really baffled me at first, but it opened my eyes up to the fact that software, particularly the OS and drivers, can have a profound effect on the battery. All this time I thought battery usage was completely dependent on hardware.

BTW, the user went back to Vista and everything works fine again.

Re:Dell Vostro no Win7 battery problems, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the family

I did that 2 years ago when vista.... (do I need to say more?)

p.s. Windows 7 on Parallels seems to works just fine here on OS X.... no battery issues, except some CPU going to 100% sometimes due to windows software.

This happened to me when OS X was new

[Megane]

When OS X 10.0 beta first came out, it was so much nicer to use than 9 (just being able to wake from sleep in less than 10 seconds was enough alone) that I permanently switched over to it on my G3 Powerbook (Pismo model). However, that being the "previous" model at the time (I bought one of the last ones), they didn't have the power management working right, and it used up the battery noticeably more when in sleep. But that wasn't the big problem.

In the last month before the initial one-year warranty was expiring, I was running it off of battery. When the battery got down to 75%, it suddenly went to 1%. I thought it was a glitch or something. After that, the battery only started crashing sooner. At that time, due to the model being out of sale for a year, Apple (apparently) stopping production of replacement batteries (a really stupid idea right there), and (presumably) other people having their batteries die at the same time, getting a new battery was like pulling teeth... from an elephant.

This illustrates one of the failure modes with LiIon batteries. When they wear out, they will charge to 100%, but crash during the discharge cycle. Part of the problem was that Apple had their laptops topping off the batteries whenever not at 100% (later on, Apple made a change so as not to top it off when already at 95% of better), and part of the problem was that the incomplete power-down during sleep caused the battery to go through cycles faster.

Also, LiIon batteries have a shelf life of a couple of years even if not used. It's possible that some of these people might have had an older laptop, but the summary specifically mentions new W7 laptops, and Windows computers are usually traded up more often than Macs. But I'm sort of surprised that the BIOS wouldn't be handling the power management exactly the same whether XP or 7 was used.

If you think this is a problem now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait until we have lithium ion powered cars all over the place.

Much ado about nothing...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using Windows 7 and my battery works perfectl

counter point

[AxemRed]

My brother has an Asus laptop... I'm not sure the model. It's a couple of years old. It came with Vista.

When Windows 7 because available at his university, he installed it on his laptop. He noticed that the battery life noticeably improved.

Gotta love the "Department" names...

[Two99Point80]

...the "2001" reference was spot on. Who thinks those things up? For me it's the coolest part of /.

So true

[Anonymous Coward]

The story is true, I just "upgraded" from Vista to Win7 my Lenovo W500 and was really puzzled why a battery that used to last for 4.5 hours now it gives me only 2:15 at 100% charge. And yes, I am using the latest ATI drivers with switchable graphics set to "Energy Saving". If I change it to "High Performance", battery life goes down to 1:35!

What is going on? Do we need now to buy special batteries for Windows 7?

And in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Batteries die over time.

more at 11

Re:Battery

[spartacus_prime]

Battery ain't found in ME

Well, that would explain a lot.

Win 7 and batteries

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I har: "I want a new laptop" This sunds like hogwash. Maybe there is a problem with Win 7, but I doubt it. I have used the preview, Beta and RC on my laptop HP DV200series ad on my son and son-in-law's without issue The newst of them is my HP at 4 years and we have no issues. Now, I may just be fortunate, but I doubt it. I think te life was up those batteries and Win 7 install was just the nail-in-the-coffin

It's Not Because of Windows 7

[hduff]

Windows 7 does not suck batteries. These are not the droids you seek.

Re:It's Not Because of Windows 7

[BronsCon]

I read the first 5 words of your post and was about to mod you troll. Then I finished the sentence.

Ok, now that I've made my funny, allow me to chime in with something useful.

My fiancee and I bought two identical laptops. I used mine in various rooms, at home and at work, on the road, at coffee shops... pretty much everywhere. She used hers in the bedroom.

Mine was frequently on an elevated surface, with proper ventilation, and was frequently running on battery power.

Hers sat on the bed or floor most of the time and was always on AC.

When we moved to a new apartment 2 years later, her usage pattern changed and she noted that her battery would last JUST long enough to move to another room and plug back in.

My laptop still lasted over 2hr on battery when I sold it shortly after. I offered to give her the good battery and sell it with her bad one, but she said she'd just ruin that one too (she's probably right) so she's still got a battery that lasts JUST long enough to move to another room.

I know it's only anecdotal, but we're talking identical hardware with the same OS and different usage patterns. That's gotta have more weight than "my laptop battery is fine".

What amazed me, though, is that she admits the issue was her fault.

Also..... I'm running Win7 and my battery is fine. Had to say it.

Same Here

[linumax]

I had to buy a new battery after upgrading to Snow Leopard as it told me that the battery needs to be serviced. It could have been a mere coincidence since the battery was more than a year old and functioned at about 60% capacity before the upgrade.

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Metallica, you Beyonce-loving, Mac-using, latte-sipping faggots.

Opposite experience

[h_thrilz]

My HP 2510p went from an absolute maximum of 4 hours life to nearly 7 hours when I installed Win7. I never let it go below 20% or charge above 80% if I can help it and if I'm working plugged in I've taken to removing the battery altogether so that the heat the system generates won't contribute to shortening battery life. I certainly wouldn't ever go back to Vista or XP for the sake of a battery. Win7's power management is vastly superior. (I wonder if people having problems upgraded to Win7 vs. performed a fresh install?)

Here is the Official Patch!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a patch that will fix this problem.

http://fedora-live-usb-creator.en.malavida.com/d5419-free-download-windows

Process of elimination

[Arctech]

"To make matters worse, others are reporting that downgrading to an earlier version of Windows doesn't fix the problem."

Hey, guess what. If the problem persists in another operating system, the original operating system wasn't at fault. The only possible way Win7 could be the problem here is if it managed to physically damage the battery, which is just shy of being completely impossible.

Interesting Timing

[nmos]

My laptop battery/charging system just started flaking out. Basically, the battery meter always shows the state of charge as it was when I first booted the machine up. It will operate on battery just fine but I have no way of knowing how much charge I have left. After some experimenting it's also clear that it's not charging when it's turned on but does charge when off. This is on an old Thinkpad that is probably 8+ years old so it's not surprising that something has died.

((Possibly allows) != (Probably causes))

[Zero__Kelvin]

You probably should have said:

Of course, it is probable that there is some bad code somewhere in Windows 7's power management that causes batteries to drain and then recharge continuously wearing them out, and a proper statistical analysis would reveal this as well.

Hint: There was never such a rash of complaints about poor battery life caused by Vista, XP, W98, W95, or even Windows "me", even though battery quality has improved drastically over the last 15 years. You don't have to be a statistical genius to figure out what is probably going on here. (and yes, I know "Windows me" didn't precede W95. I put it last since it is generally accepted to be the worst of the bunch)

Re:((Possibly allows) != (Probably causes))

[shawb]

No, you don't have to be a statistical genius. Tell me, how many batteries died a short period after Windows 7 was installed, and what is the expected failure rate? If you don't have those two pieces of information you are simply spreading FUD.

Re:((Possibly allows) != (Probably causes))

[Zero__Kelvin]

Either that or I read the article.

Not the only Windows 7 Issue!

[canajin56]

My Laptop came with Vista, and I upgraded to Windows 7 when I could. A few weeks later the numlock light burnt out. I have tried rolling back to Vista, and even XP, and the issue remains!

but but but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Windows 7 was "The best version of Windows EVAR!!11oneone"

You mean to tell me that a new operating system won't boost my battery life twice over and at the same time, double overall system performance?

Re:OSX Snow Leopard upgrade may cause battery fail

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a LONG thread (70 pages at last look) on that over at
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2139186&start=0&tstart=0

Essentially, the Snow Leopard upgrade did something to reduce battery life (on MacBook and MacBookPro lines). In my case, the MacBook battery is showing "service battery" (this was almost immediately after upgrade to SL, after 2+ years of no issues. I did try to go back to Leopard and (in my case), the situation stayed the same, so I suspect Apple wrote something into the battery during the upgrade that causes this problem (at least in some older versions of batteries). Some users have reported getting a new battery doesn't fix the problem. So far there isn't a solution.

Re: Microsoft Looking Into Windows 7 Battery Failu

[MSFT_AlexT]

We are investigating this issue in conjunction with our hardware partners, which appears to be related to system firmware. We are working with our partners to determine the root cause and will update the Windows TechNet forum with information and guidance as it becomes available. Best regards, Alex Microsoft Windows Client Team

Did you?

[jlintern]

"Microsoft has sold more than 60 million copies of Windows 7, and it's not clear what fraction of those owners are having problems with battery life."