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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."
This isn't MS covering something up, there was never anything to cover up here.
Bingo. If there's any story here, it's that Microsoft's reputation is so bad that people won't believe them even when they're right. That and that people aren't very technically minded. I once told my father to us a piece of software to monitor the SMART status on his HDD since it was "making a lot of noise". He just told me that he'd been doing it. About a year later he said that his laptop would barely run so I visited and noticed that the SMART was telling him that the HDD had irrecoverable errors and should be backed up and replaced immediately. When I asked how long it had been saying that, he replied that it had always said that (or something like it) since he first checked (at my encouragement). He just didn't think that it could be a real problem since the computer still ran at that time. Let's face it here, if a person is running Windows, they aren't going to believe that there's a problem until they can't work 'cause Windows gives alert after alert after alert and how can you know which ones to believe unless you're a "techie"? Sure if, you're reading here, you'll know, but 98% of people just don't.
I can't tell if you are joking or not. I mean if a hard drive sector gets corrupt where a set of critical files are and on boot it can't recover them or load them from cache because that is corrupt as well, is that Microsoft's fault if the OS starts crashing? If memory is failing causing a BSOD is that Microsoft's fault? If the video card's VRAM is faulty and is causing the system to crash is that MS's fault?
The laptop flies off the top of someone's car roof after they left it there before driving off....yep Its MS's fault once again.
Seriously. There is a crap load MS can be blamed for over the years. But hardware? cut them a bit of slack on a few things.
Windows is not at fault. Hardware or 3rd party software always is
I have a lot of sympathy for the Windows team on this one - I don't think they're blame-shifting here.
It's been my experience that the software that reports a problem will get blamed for causing the problem. Maybe "shoot the messenger" is just human nature, but I've often been amazed at how users will blame software that repors a hardware problem that the software couldn't not possibly have caused. "Disk I/O error detected" results in calls of "why are you causing my disks to fail" - after all it must be you, since the other software isn't complaining (failing, mind you, but not complaining).
And now apparantly "battery failure detected" results in calls of "why are you causing my battery to fail" - after all it must be you, since the prvious version didn't complain.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think that is what Microsoft is implying, without directly pointing a finger and risking a potential law suit.
Chances are that a lot of cells that are only now ending up in laptop batteries have spent quite some time sat on a warehouse shelf somewhere waiting out the financial downturn. Now that there are signs of recovery and people are buying laptops again, the production chain is starting up and those cells are finally going into laptop batteries. However, since the battery as a whole was only assembled last week, say, despite the fact that the component cells were manufactured last year, care to guess which date gets to go on the "Date of manufacture" sticker?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Yes, most of them probably just didn't notice the reduced battery life until this warning brought it to their attention. When I upgraded my notebook's Windows partition to Windows 7 I started getting this message, but I started seeing the warning over a year before, whenever I booted Ubuntu.
That reminds me. Does Windows 7 finally report on hard drive SMART status? Glaring missing feature from XP.
More likely is that batteries are having their very limited lifetimes exposed to the user via the OS. Most people think a laptop battery is supposed to last indefinitely and charge the same every single time. The reality is you'll probably be replacing the battery before you replace the laptop.
And of course nobody will pay attention to the only source that can possibly know what they're talking about: the engineers that designed the system..
That was sarcasm, no?
(Nothing about this particular problem, but we've seen denials before...)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Let's just say that I don't think the end of the tale has been reached yet.
Microsoft would prolly claims that Windows 7 isn't killing kittens or puppies either, but we know the truth!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Strange that. I just have hardware issues, then. Because if on my Compaq C731TU running Windows 7, I get SQUAT for battery life, however, when I swap out the HD for my Fedora drive (oh yeah, exact same drive, too) and work with that, I have this amazingly long battery life (nearly three hours). So something MUST be wrong with my hardware. Possibly if I read all the tripe that Microsoft will publish on this particular issue, I'll be able to convince myself that they're right, and reality is wrong. OH wait, they do that anyway! Far out. Glad to know I'm wrong, my hardware is wrong, my OS is wrong, and well, Microsoft is right. Gee, thanks Steve Ballmer! You've shown me the light, yet again!
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
You upgraded a pair of netbooks and a 4 year old laptop to Windows 7 and you're shocked it doesn't work well (or at all)?
The software isn't trying to be smart. It's telling you exactly what your manufacturer did.
Is it? The manufacturer only provides one bit of information?
You don't wait until your tires are at 2psi to fix them, you fix them THEN.
When I stick a tire gauge in my tire, it doesn't say "bad" (without telling me whether "bad" means "2PSI" or "20PSI"), it tells me "2PSI" or "20PSI" or "30PSI" or "32PSI" or "35PSI".
I also have a cap on my tire that goes red when it goes below 30PSI. When I see that, I pump them up. When I check and it says "32PSI" I pump them up. If I'm having to pump them up a couple of times a week, I go down to Sears.
I don't have to depend on an idiot light that came on at 20PSI (which is definitely low enough to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT), with no indication whether it was 20PSI or 2PSI. Because I *also* have a gauge.
I'm not asking Microsoft to get rid if the warning, I'm asking them to let me know what my tire pressure is.
It doesn't *matter* if it's not linear. My gas tank isn't linear. So long as I *know* it's not linear I can deal with it.
I wouldn't let Microsoft off the hook just yet. Lithium ion batteries need to be slow charged the last 10-15% of their charge cycle or they will be damaged. There are already known unfixed issues with the Vista/7 battery controller, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear some lithium ion batteries are failing through mismanaged charge cycles.
If the operating system (or any software) were in charge of regulating the battery charge cycle, how would the battery charge safely while the system was powered off? There should be hardware in the charge circuit to prevent this kind of damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_controller
If a graphic card can be fried with simple directx calls, they are certainly not well built and as such we can't be blaming microsoft.
XP was painful with 512MB. You're not going to convince me that 7 runs well with that amount of memory, not ever.
Keep in mind that I really like 7 (though I didn't hate Vista either... I always ran it on high-spec machines).
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