Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries

VindictivePantz sends word that the Windows 7 team has posted a new blog entry discussing their conclusions about the reported Windows 7 battery failures. "To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state. In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement. ...every single indication we have regarding the reports we've seen are simply Windows 7 reporting the state of the battery using this new feature and we're simply seeing batteries that are not performing above the designated threshold. ... We are as certain as we can be that we have addressed the root cause and concerns of this report, but we will continue to monitor the situation."

Comments

Sheesh.

[Esther Schindler]

FYI, If you know that your battery has plenty of juice left, there's a fix available. Sort of. The #5 item in Fixing Five Common Windows 7 Annoyances is "the undead battery." One way to know if it's necessary:

To see if your battery problems are likely to come from this conflict between Windows 7 and your hardware run the powercfg -energy command from a command prompt. If the result is that Windows was unable to determine the battery’s capacity, sooner or later you will see the misleading error messages or have the laptop shutdown prematurely.

Re:It would have been a story if...

[Ethanol-fueled]

FYI: My Ubuntu install on a Dell laptop throws the same warning ("Warning, maximum battery charge is 44% battery may be old or defective yadda yadda") I never saw on XP, though I doubt that XP had that kind of warning system in place. My battery is an official Dell part, but to be fair, it is an old battery.

The warning systems are glitchy, or that manufacturers have been shipping substandard batteries and/or power subsystems. Either would come as no surprise.

We need more honestly dumb software.

[argent]

Windows Seven's problem is not that it's doing the wrong thing, it's because it's trying to be too smart about it. It's not smart. It's stupid. A laptop computer (running ANY OS) isn't as smart as a lizard.

But its user's smart. If your software is stupid (and all software is stupid), and the user is smart (and all users are smarter than their computer, even when they're stupid) then you're better off admitting it than trying to fake it.

Instead of popping up a "your battery might be about to fail", give us a gas gauge. "Your battery has only [====> 40% ---] of original capacity". Show that for *all* batteries. Let people pop that up even if there's no problem. Let people be smart about it. Or even... let people be dumb about it.

You might find that people are more willing to replace batteries when they get down to 20%. You might think that's stupid. And it may be stupid. But it's still smarter than stupid software trying to be smart.

Re:Surprise

[gd2shoe]

I think Brian is trying to say that he designed the system and is a bit upset that we're bagging it out without asking him for an explanation first.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/bngordon

Brian Gordon
Group Manager at Microsoft
Greater Seattle Area

Ah. I see now. No offense intended. I didn't know that it was personal.

I will certainly give your team (or peers, whatever) the benefit of the doubt on this, but I don't buy for a second that they're the only ones who can know what their talking about. They may be the only ones who do know what they're talking about, though. (important difference)