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Microsoft Looking Into Windows 7 Battery Failures

Posted by kdawson on from the daisy-dais-y dept.

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."

17 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. My battery died by VanHalensing · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:My battery died by PawNtheSandman · · Score: 5, Funny

      That was my idea.

    2. Re:My battery died by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:My battery died by dorre · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:My battery died by Lord+Byron+II · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:My battery died by thijsh · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.". :)

    6. Re:My battery died by Stregano · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

      --
      The world is how you make it
    7. Re:My battery died by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
      Be yourself no matter what they say
    8. Re:My battery died by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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]

    9. Re:My battery died by Hijacked+Public · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      "Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
  2. Come on Slashdot... by datapharmer · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  3. explains my old Dell Inspiron 6000 by alen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  4. Re:There is some kind of battery black magic by melikamp · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    <NO CARRIER>

  5. Re:Too much Windows open by colonelquesadilla · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    It's either false dichotomies, or the terrorists win, you decide.
  6. Hard to pin this down. by CFD339 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  7. Re:Bullshit by AC-x · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  8. Re:Not experience this by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.