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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."
I got excited for a minute because I thought the header read "Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Babies".
That would have been interesting.
This isn't MS covering something up, there was never anything to cover up here.
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.
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 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?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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.
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!
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.