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

[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.

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: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.