Microsoft Looking Into Windows 7 Battery Failures 206
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."
There is some kind of battery black magic (Score:3, Insightful)
in the world, and it's been there since before Windows 7.
I don't think I've ever had a friend, significant other, or family member that actually had a working battery in their laptop after the first 5-6 months or so, leaving them all permanently tethered until their next PC (which would end up that way again after the first 5-6 months).
Meanwhile, my batteries have always lasted the life of the unit with more or less full capacity.
I've long assumed it had something to do with usage patterns and charging habits, but I've not really looked into it more than that. One variable was that they were all using Windows (in some incarnation) and I rarely boot into Windows at all.
Re:My battery died (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My battery died (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen batteries decline, though, exactly in this way, sometimes within a year or so of purchase. If you had to wait for a month, I wonder if it is just a coincidence. Notice that others in TFS did not buy a new laptop with W7, but upgraded, so they must have had their laptops for several months. And it totally explains why it does not get fixed when they go back to the previous system.
May be we should just stick with the simplest explanation until more data is available. But then, I don't use Microsoft's software at all, so I am more inclined to just sit on the sidelines at watch it burn, demolition derby style.
Re:My battery died (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not experience this (Score:1, Insightful)
Recently I installed a program that allows me to check my laptops battery, it currently reports I have 3069 mWh left of the rated 5200 mWh and it won't charge past this threshold (it only steadily becomes less). A constant and stable decrease like this can only be reported when it's calculated by the internal logic inside the battery (any measured value would fluctuate since the voltage will also fluctuate based on load and charge).
So to answer your question: the battery probably remembers like HP ink...
Re:My battery died (Score:5, 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.
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks for the interesting link. I was particularly intrigued by the chart indicating how much temperature has an effect on charge level. I'd wager that this is a major cause of a lot of these reported Windows 7 battery problems.
After all, Windows 7 is more resource intensive than XP, especially if you are using Aero Glass. Not only does that mean that CPU usage may be up, but also that the platform it is running on will be using more powerful CPUs. Both of these things result in more waste heat which can leak into the battery. XP, on the other hand, won't be heavily taxing the CPU/GPU under "ordinary use" (e.g., non-game) circumstances, and can run on less-powerful (and thus cooler-running) processors.
Re:My battery died (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:My battery died (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:My battery died (Score:3, Insightful)
When they say it was a "brand new battery that was working fine and it just died" it's really an old battery, they never really used the laptop unplugged before, and they're using the lappy unplugged much more now since win7 is so kewl, so they just noticed it's toast. (just a guess)
Also, if this was a winXP laptop, it's ENTIRELY possible that the hardware is, oh, maybe, WORKING HARDER now that they just threw on Win7??!?? Sure, win7 is "way faster" than vista, but it certainly is a different animal than xp and could certainly be taxing a laptops HD and video and ram more than a typical XP installation on the same hardware. If it's got 1GB of ram maybe it hardly ever swapped before, and now it's swapping occasionally, drawing way more watts on average - especially if the HD isn't able to spin down.
I threw win7 onto a XP netbook with 1GB ram and I haven't noticed any battery life changes yet - but I'm not using it any differently either. I will keep an eye on it tho.
However, since installing win7, my netbook fell out of my car once and dinged up the corner. I think Microsoft should investigate that too.