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

Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is not at fault. Hardware or 3rd party software always is

Re:Surprise

[socceroos]

...news at 11.

Re:Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Surprise

[lgw]

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.
 

Re:Surprise

[mdm-adph]

Ah, I hate sticking up for MS, but it's true. Ubuntu 9.04 introduced this feature, too, I think -- I remember seeing a box pop up for it after installing on my 7-year-old laptop and going "wait a sec..." ...and then realizing that, as far as the software was concerned, my 7-year-old battery with its 5-min lifespan probably has "failed" as a battery. :P

Re:Surprise

[Brian Gordon]

...which will source the frenzied blogosphere shrieking conspiracy and propagating each others' blind speculation. 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..

Re:Surprise

[Kadaki]

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.

Re:Surprise

[Chris_Mir]

Pretty similar to multi-tier software development, where business logic is developed separately from the user interface. I'm doing the latter and guess who gets all the bug reports?

Re:Surprise

[omnichad]

That reminds me. Does Windows 7 finally report on hard drive SMART status? Glaring missing feature from XP.

Re:Surprise

[westlake]

Windows is not at fault. Hardware or 3rd party software always is

That's generally a fair assumption with any OS.

Win 7 has about eight to ten percent of the global market. OS Platform Statistics

That translates into a hell of a lot of laptops and a good many batteries that were well past there past their prime before Win 7 was installed. But there have been only a few hundred complaints.

Re:Surprise

[gd2shoe]

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...)

Re:Surprise

[Blakey Rat]

XP reported SMART status. It was in the Disk Management administrative tool. (Same place it is in Vista and Windows 7, actually.) Pretty sure Windows 2000 had it also.

To answer your question: Yes, Windows 7 reports SMART status.

Re:Surprise

[omnichad]

No, not in a tool. I mean - pop-up warning "Hey, your hard drive is failing" without your intervention. Like the battery warning.

Re:Surprise

[socceroos]

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.

Re:Surprise

[Idbar]

Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries
My guess is that batteries are killing themselves as soon as they know they are powering a Windows machine. They have become quite intelligent now.

Kidding, kidding!

Re:Surprise

[Conchobair]

I have to agree after 3 years working ISP tech support and hearing numerous customers blaming the ISP for giving them viruses.

Re:Surprise

[ozmanjusri]

the engineers that designed the system. Are they the same engineers that designed Vista?

That's the OS which shipped with the "Microsoft ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery" device that frequently refused to charge batteries even when plugged in, in case you're wondering.

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.

Re:Surprise

[jlintern]

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

Re:Surprise

[ozmanjusri]

how would the battery charge safely while the system was powered off?

Look for yourself;

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa939594(WinEmbedded.5).aspx

Both are used. I suspect the Microsoft controller is managing both battery charge and drain from the computer being in use.

Re:Surprise

[AK Marc]

Does Windows 7 finally report on hard drive SMART status?

No, it doesn't report SMART status messages to the user, but it does keep logs that may be manually looked up.

See how easy that was?

I apologize that you didn't say what you fucking mean,

He said what he meant. What he meant what he said. And when he corrected you that your interpretation of his statement, which wasn't unambiguous, so misunderstanding wasn't difficult, you turned into an ass. What are you doing now, arguing that he doesn't know what he meant? Or are you arguing that a log file that has to be manually opened is "reporting on" a status? For Windows, reporting on something means 4,000 popups with "click ok to continue" on them. It's understandable that there are misunderstandings, with no inflection, regional word choice, the large number of people who don't speak English as their first language, but to be an as about it when someone corrects you doesn't mean you are right and he is wrong or whatever you are arguing about. After his clarification, it is obvious what he was asking, and that your answer is the opposite of the correct answer to the question he was asking.

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)

Re:Surprise

[PIBM]

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.

Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries?

[maxwell demon]

So what does it tell them? "Hey, you seem to be failing. Do you need me to help you?"

Re:Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries?

[noidentity]

I think it's warning the batteries that they will be warned, kind of like recently with Windows 7 RC. Trust me, you don't want to startle a Li-ion battery.

Re:Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries?

[lgw]

There are a countable infinity of integers. There are an uncountable infinity of reals. It's a math joke.

almost fooled me...

[Cornwallis]

I got excited for a minute because I thought the header read "Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Babies".

That would have been interesting.

Re:almost fooled me...

[ajrs]

I got excited for a minute because I thought the header read "Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Babies".

That would have been interesting.

So, Windows 7 is still killing babies?

Re:almost fooled me...

[Teese]

I got excited for a minute because I thought the header read "Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Babies".

That would have been interesting.

So, Windows 7 is still killing babies?

They haven't denied it yet.

Re:almost fooled me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, Mr. Beck.

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

[Dr Caleb]

Just to play devil's advocate; are we sure it's not the battery or laptop manufacturers that are not admitting their mistake?

Not news - just like last time

[vcgodinich]

What's news here? Microsoft gets vague claims than win7 is killing batteries, with no hard data, no common variable, not even vaguely reproducable.

This isn't MS covering something up, there was never anything to cover up here.

Re:Not news - just like last time

[mcgrew]

* waves hand *

similar story with Fedora and hard drives

[FranTaylor]

Fedora recently added a feature named palimpsest that checks your hard drive. I did an upgrade and all of a sudden I am getting complaints about my hard drive being close to failure. I think "no way, this is a pretty new drive". But I dig deeper and sure enough the drive really is bad.

Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives

[Naturalis Philosopho]

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.

Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives

[SilverEyes]

Mod points are so fleeting..

Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives

[Xest]

"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."

Or just that FOSS trolls like to make a non-story into a big story, because to the trolls of the community, pratting around with shit like that is apparently more important than actually providing better software, like, you know, versions of Open Office that are actually better than MS Office, versions of Eclipse that are actually better than Visual Studio and so on.

Really, if you think people would react any differently to the same errors popping up on Linux, or Mac OSX then you're delusional. People don't care until it finally stops working and really does actually effect them. I used to work in IT support some years back for schools, and we'd always tell teachers to keep a backup of any work they do on their laptop and none of them listened, but they all came crying when their laptop failed, was run over by a car, was dropped by a kid and so forth.

Windows really doesn't give alert after alert unless there's actually something wrong. If it's chucking up an error, then there is an error, it's really not hard to read the popup and see if it's an error you care about - sure you may choose to ignore "This computer has no anti-virus software installed on it, click here for help installing some" but then don't cry when you get a virus. Similarly, if it comes up and says "Windows delayed write failed" then yeah it's not easy for the average Joe to understand, but it's still good reason for them to figure that something isn't right, whether it's that they pulled out a USB pen drive in the middle of writing to it, or whether their hard drive is outright failing, the fact is, something went wrong, ignore it and accept the consequences. I've certainly never seen a popup in the tray that I "don't believe", because they've always alerted me to the facts, I'm not aware of any circumstances where Windows makes up errors for the sake of it.

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:Sheesh.

[Qzukk]

Like a zombie battery?

Yes. When it starts getting low, it moans MAAAAIIINNNNSSSS

Re:Sheesh.

[Esther Schindler]

Let's just say that I don't think the end of the tale has been reached yet.

Must be the newest OS fad

[Kitkoan]

First Apple had laptop battery issues with OS 10.6 (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2139186&tstart=0) and now it's Microsoft with Windows 7. Two completely different OS's both suffering from the same style of issue in their newest product. Are they both using a shared driver code in their newest OS that is causing this? Did they only implemented in these changes in these new OS's or did they get patched in their older OS's too?

Re:Must be the newest OS fad

[e2d2]

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.

Re:Must be the newest OS fad

[Tak_1]

Sure you can, its held in with one plug and a couple of y head screws and it just lifts out. They finally made it all easy to replace. And everyone sells aftermarket batteries. Usually better than stock. But I always let Apple replace the first one free. Why not? I paid for it.

In related news

[SnarfQuest]

Umbrella Corp says that its virus is not causing people to turn into zombies. However, we were unable to get more information from their spokesman, as he was killed by zombie dogs.

Wha??

[Itninja]

"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."

Can a brother get some restrictive clauses and pronouns up in here?

Not dead

[Lost Penguin]

Microsoft: Oh yes, the, uh, the Battery...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
          Laptop owner: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
          Microsoft: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
          Laptop owner: Look, matey, I know a dead battery when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
          Microsoft: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkably charged, the Battery, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
          Laptop owner: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
          Microsoft: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!

Re:Not dead

[maxwell demon]

"tfosorciM" and "renwo potpal"? :-)

Re:Not dead

[MBCook]

Microsoft: Bring out your dead batteries.
Microsoft: Here's one.
Customer: It's not dead.
Microsoft: Yes it is.
Customer: But it still holds a little charge.
Microsoft: Not really. It's as good as dead.
Customer: Look! It plays YouTube for over 2 minutes.
Microsoft: It's dead. Do we need to come back later?
Customer: But it's still good. It's happy!
Microsoft: *THWACK*
Microsoft: There. Now it's dead.
Customer: You killed my battery!
Microsoft: No we didn't. It was already dead.

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.

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

[Zocalo]

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?

And what if Windows 7 is the cause?

[Fri13]

Okay, I saw this in the news when it came. I thought "Okay, some laptops seems to have problems." But I do not think so anymore. Why?

a) I have three laptops.
1. 4 years old (2006), Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1645 (windows 7, Linux 2.6.31)
2. 1.5 years old (2008) Acer Aspire 1520 (Windows 7, Linux 2.6.31)
3. 3 months old (2009) Asus EeePC 1008HA (Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux 2.6.31, latest stable FreeBSD)
(Okay, they are not all mine, only the newest)

b) I now run dual- or quadboot on every one of them with Windows 7, Windows XP, + Linux 2.6.33 (Distro = Mandriva 2010.0) (+FreeBSD = latest FreeBSD stable)

c) I needed to install Windows 7 just on last sunday (family pack)

Here is estimation of battery state in hourhs when WWW surfing, coding and compiling stuff (usually the 2. and 3.)

1. 1h 15min.
2. 1h
3. 5-6 hours

These are on FreeBSD and Linux and Windows XP.

Windows 7 gives these.

1. about 30-35 minutes.
2. None..... NONE!
3. 1.5-2 hours!!!

Okay.... is Microsoft now really saying that my 3 MONTHS OLD BATTERY (6-cells) is DYING? And that 1h battery what has worked fine with Linux OS from last 2.6.28-2.6.31 releases is ALREADY DEAD?

Why does Windows 7 eat the battery but when I boot to other software system I get just normal times?????

I have only one thing to say. Sorry about bad language (and typos!): Microsoft, GO TO YOURSELF!!! And I cant not even RETURN THE "#!"#! Family Pack!

Re:And what if Windows 7 is the cause?

[KarmaMB84]

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)?

Re:And what if Windows 7 is the cause?

[godefroi]

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).

Remember Kids...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7 doesn't kill batteries, people kill batteries.

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:We need more honestly dumb software.

[argent]

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.

Re:We need more honestly dumb software.

[argent]

Honestly dumb software would have solved that too.

When people bought new batteries and popped them in and they showed "this battery has [====65%=>----] of original capacity".

Seems sensible

[arikol]

The new OS has features which the old one didn't and now does more to inform the user about the computers state in an understandable manner.

Apple did something similar (I think it was with OS X Leopard) where suddenly lots of people got a "this battery needs servicing" type message. This was only due to Apple realizing the need for this feature to give real recommendations. Who knows at what health percentage a battery should be replaced?

Sounds like the windows team realized the same thing and decided to support the user in his decision making. That's great. No conspiracy needed.

Batteries and their lifespan

[yoshi_mon]

Over the years as my number of rechargeable battery items have gone way up I'd like to think I'm somewhat familiar with the tech behind them. At the very least enough to use them well and do some basic troubleshooting when problems arise with them. And one of the main things I've observed lately is that sometimes it's the battery chargers that are ultimately the issue when problems start to become reoccurring.

I've had a 3 set cordless phone setup for about 5 years now and when they started to act up I got them all new batteries. Given that they had still been using the originals I figured ok problem solved. However not too long after using them with their new batteries they started to act up again. And it was a bit harder because the pattern was very hard to see.

While I'm sure that the original batteries were due for replacement the satellite chargers had stopped working properly. While the phones normally would stay in their normal charger that was not always the case which what threw me off at 1st. But I noticed that as long as I charged a phone in the main station it would work fine.

However the damage had been done and even my new batteries are not nearly as good as they should be. Extend what happened in my story to say a laptop where it's built in battery charging system has stopped working properly. Not only is the battery not getting a good charge it's likely being damaged in the process. Leading to Win7 telling people so even thou they think, "But I just got this thing a new battery!"

Of course it's not

[kurt555gs]

Microsoft would prolly claims that Windows 7 isn't killing kittens or puppies either, but we know the truth!

maybe this is a GOOD thing?

[v1]

It's possible that Windows is just getting better at reporting battery condition and catching failing batteries, and so the problem that has already existed for awhile is just now becoming more noticeable? Windows PC grade hardware can be any level of quality, just because Windows is identifying your battery has crapped out before it should doesn't make it MS's fault. Maybe you just bought crap or need a new battery?

Oh really...?

[YankDownUnder]

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!

Verification?

[hmmdar]

Is there any other trusted third party software that can be used to verify what Microsoft is saying?

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

[zippthorne]

Lithiums will last a *long* time though on very little maintenance current, or even no maintenance current. The thing that usually kills lithiums is the *cycle* life, and cells in a warehouse aren't getting cycled.

Read the article knuckleheads.

[Chicken04GTO]

All windows 7 is doing is reading battery controller provided information on itself. If the battery drops below 40% of capacity, windows reports it. The idea of Windows 7 damaging your batteries is absurd.

Since I know none of you will read the article, because it might get in the way of your circle jerk windows bashing:

"PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or BIOS). There is a detailed specification for the firmware interface (ACPI), but at the most basic level, the hardware platform and firmware provide a number of read-only fields that describe the battery and its status. The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity. The last two pieces of information--design capacity and last full charge capacity--are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. This information is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set or configure battery status information. In fact all of the battery actions of charging and discharging are completely controlled by the battery hardware. Windows only reports the battery information it reads from the system firmware. Some reports erroneously claimed Windows was modifying this information, which is definitely not possible."