"Consider Replacing Your Battery"

Aphasia · 28 Feb 2011

logicearth said:

Aphasia said:

I have just forked out on a brand new battery as win7 advised me to do and it hasn't made any difference.

Then there is something wrong with your HARDWARE. Why is this so hard to understand? Windows 7 is only telling you what the HARDWARE tells it! The battery itself is a self contained system. Windows itself cannot tamper with the battery's inner workings.

You need to contact the manufacture of your computer. Only they can fix your HARDWARE problem.

Ok, I respect your opinion however this only happened after I upgraded to windows 7 software and you cannot blame me for suspecting Win7 being the culprit due to this and also bearing in mind the mass accusations as such web-wide.

So you are saying that some part of the hardware has killed 2 batteries, one being brand new?

How do you know that it is not a conflict/ read error on behalf of Windows 7? How are you able to rule this out?

This problem did not occur in Vista, my battery was fine, no 'consider replacing your battery' message came up. If a hardware problem as you suggest now exists after my upgrade to Win7, it would appear that Win7 has damaged some hardware of my laptop would it not?

Thanks

logicearth · 28 Feb 2011

Aphasia said:

This problem did not occur in Vista, my battery was fine, no 'consider replacing your battery' message came up. If a hardware problem as you suggest now exists after my upgrade to Win7, it would appear that Win7 has damaged some hardware of my laptop would it not?

Thanks

Windows Vista had no message, this feature is brand new in Windows 7. So Windows Vista would have never told you. Retrieving the current life of the battery is a new feature in Windows 7, thus why this message has only ever appeared in Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2...-messages.aspx

Windows 7 makes use of a feature of modern laptop batteries which have circuitry and firmware that can report to Windows the overall health of the battery. This is reported in absolute terms as Watt-hours (W-hr) power capacity. Windows 7 then does a simple calculation to determine a percentage of degradation from the original design capacity. In Windows 7 we set a threshold of 60% degradation (that is the battery is performing at 40% of its designed capacity) and in reading this Windows 7 reports the status to you. At this point, for example, a battery that originally delivered 5 hours of charge now delivers, on average, approximately 2 hours of charge. The Windows 7 the notification is a battery meter icon and notification with a message “Consider replacing your battery”. This notification is new to Windows 7 and not available in Windows Vista or Windows XP.

...

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.

If there is a read error it would be the BIOS/Motherboard or the specific hardware drivers your computer uses. Windows itself follows the ACPI specification, if the hardware does not follow this then the hardware must have drivers. These drivers are supplied by the manufacture.

Aphasia · 01 Mar 2011

Well would you adam and eve it, turns out it was a virus.

"Threat Win32:FakeAlert-VX [Trj]"

zapped it with Avast and now the red cross and message has disappeared.

I've even put the old battery back in (which win7 told me to replace) and still the red cross and message has gone.

Maybe this info will help others.

ickymay · 01 Mar 2011

glad you have it sorted

and thanks for sharing that

profcommie · 04 Mar 2011

I am having a similar issue with an HP dv9623cl. I recently upgraded it to Windows 7 and suddenly my battery only lasts 45 minutes. This means I can't get it to go through a single class without running out of power.

Battery ID Hewlett-PackardPrimary
Design Capacity 88800
Last Full Charge 26048
Last Full Charge (%) 29

This was with the laptop on sleep mode charging for approximately 6 hours

I resisted upgrading for a while bc vista was doing fine. Now my laptop runs better but my battery seems to be trashed. Right before I installed windows 7 i ran it for 2.5 hours and had 20% charge left

WindowsStar · 12 Mar 2011

BatteryCare Updated: BatteryCare

Plainview · 12 May 2011

Hello. I have Samsung R510 Windows 7 32-bit and getting this message:

Here is BatteryCare screenshot:

Can I get done with it without buying a new battery? It costs much

crescent · 28 Jul 2011

This is absolutely an ACPI problem, not a battery wear issue. ACPI is telling the battery it has an artificially low limit to charge and/or telling the system the battery has run down when it hasn't, forcing shutdown or sleep or whatever you have your settings on.

Disabling ACPI has magically raised the Last Full Charge level back from 35% of design capacity to 65% and raised the battery life from <60 min to 3 hrs.

Preamble
Machine- Acer Aspire 1410 bought 18 mo ago; lightly used (like once a week as a secondary netbook)- Battery gave the "consider replacing" sign recently. In general, it seemed to have a falling life much sooner than it should- 60-80 min of work time and falling rapidly.

BatteryMon and BatteryCare (which simply take the information spit out by ACPI) were saying my battery has 48840 design capacity and only 16839 last charge for a wear level of 65%. This dropped to 14000 one charge while I tried to fix this.

After killing ACPI from DeviceManager and running it down to critical a couple of times then recharging, my last full charge is around 32000 for a wear level of 35%. Even when I was running it down, it was clear the battery was lasting 3 hrs, much more than before.

I am going to keep doing it to see if the full charge can improve more and hope I can reengage ACPI since disabling it means no battery indicators.

logicearth · 28 Jul 2011

crescent said:

This is absolutely an ACPI problem, not a battery wear issue. ACPI is telling the battery it has an artificially low limit to charge and/or telling the system the battery has run down.....

You are making the wrong assumption. It is not ACPI that is the problem, it is the hardware. The hardware is what controls the information, there are only three ways for this information to be wrong that ACPI gets. One, the battery is reporting information incorrectly. Two, the motherboard and firmware for the battery controller is bugged and or reporting the information incorrectly. (Or its mangling the information in someway.) Three, the hardware specific drivers (drivers like you have for a graphics card) ACPI (aka., Windows) uses to communicate with the battery controller.

What you are doing has nothing to do with ACPI what you are doing it called calibration. Running a battery down as much as possible then recharging it in hopes the internal controller in the battery and on the motherboard resync the information.

You problem is purely hardware and or the hardware specific drivers, not Windows and not ACPI. ACPI/Windows is only reporting what the hardware tells it. If that information is incorrect that means the hardware is reporting the information incorrectly. The hardware is reporting the information incorrectly.

logicearth · 28 Jul 2011

Taro said:

Can I get done with it without buying a new battery? It costs much

Your battery is at the end of its life, 80% of the battery is dead.