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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."
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.
Too much Windows open, too much currents = low battery :-P
Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
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.
Get a web developer
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
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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?
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.
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'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.
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
.. 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.
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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.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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
...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.
Living With a Nerd
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.
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?
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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...
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.
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?
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.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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.
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.
and sure enough 6 months later the 5-year-old battery in my MINI Cooper needed to be replaced.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
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!!!
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
on a HP Pavilion...
Well, HERE'S yer problem...
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
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.
Battery ain't found in ME
Well, that would explain a lot.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Windows 7 does not suck batteries. These are not the droids you seek.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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
"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."