"Consider Replacing Your Battery"

NoN · 08 Feb 2010

Pusspa said:

snlu178 said:

How I fixed my "consider replacing your battery".

1) Adjust all setting in your power scheme to minimize actions when the battery is low. (turn off all sleep or hibernate commands and reduce all warnings to 0 or 1 minute).
2) Run the following command:

To change the 'Battery->Critical battery action->'On battery' setting to "Do nothing" using powercfg.exe

activate the power scheme you want to modify.
open an elevated command console (windows key, type 'cmd' in start menu, press "ctrl+shift+enter", click 'continue')
execute "powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0"
your current power scheme will show "Battery->Critical battery action->On battery: Do nothing" despite the option being unavailable in the drop box.

3) Run your laptop until it dies...your pc will fully crash. Then fully recharge and run until it dies again.

This will recalibrate your battery. Because Windows 7 automatically shuts down your PC when it thinks the battery is low, it never recalibrates. You have to stop if from sleeping or hibernating all together to get the battery to recalibrate. I went from 66% battery wear to 0.0% overnight.

how do i remove this changed setting when i have finished?

In your Power Scheme =>Modify scheme=> Avanced Parameters, you can reset all to default when finished.

Also there's a link in blue color in power scheme=>Modify Scheme to reset all back to normal (recommended).

WindowsStar · 09 Feb 2010

Any chance this can help?

BatteryCare

Zepher · 09 Feb 2010

Is there any connection to a certain battery manufacturer?
I've intalled Win 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate on 6 Notebooks and 3 Netbooks and they all seem to be running fine and not reporting any battery errors.
The Laptops are 2x Sony, Lenovo, Toshiba, and 2x HP.
Netbooks are 2x Dell Mini 9, and an Acer Aspire One.

antt · 09 Feb 2010

There is an interesting discussion about this on slashdot- one of the points raised was that people often blame the messenger for killing batteries. here's an excerpt:

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.

I believe this is probably the reason for the battery warnings - people not realising how bad their battery was getting, upgrading to windows 7 and being notified that the battery was not holding charge.

DoubleGee · 10 Feb 2010

Hey guys, My laptop was working fine, untill the same message popped out to me as well, here is a screenshot of my cmd after I have energy check.

and the energy-report as well here >

Any help will be appreciated! :)

P.S. I've been using Win Ultimate x64 since Nov. 2009 :)

Delphin · 10 Feb 2010

antt said:

I believe this is probably the reason for the battery warnings - people not realising how bad their battery was getting, upgrading to windows 7 and being notified that the battery was not holding charge.

I agree with your answer antt

Barman58 · 10 Feb 2010

Whilst I concede that this may be a fault in the way that win7 is reporting the battery status and thus producing the perception that the battery has less available charge that is the actual case, I have issues with some of the other perceptions and reports with regards to this issue.

Win7 would have no need for, or the routines required to, write information back to the "EEPROM" in the battery.

Even if this information were corrupted this is an EEPROM, (Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory), that is - basically a re-writeable storage medium, and as such should be erasable and thus not "broken" just by having incorrect information written to it.

In my opinion this seems to be a case of a possible issue being overblown due to misconceptions as to what is actually happening, fuelled by the Internet blog grapevine. There may well be an issue with the incorrect reading of the values concerned but talk of a "class action" is un-called for

DoubleGee · 10 Feb 2010

I would aslo like to mention, that this problem occured, after I have installed some updates yesterday :)

KuleRucket · 10 Feb 2010

This has just started happening on my girlfriends laptop. I have a feeling this is related to an update, otherwise what would everyone start flocking here right now?

Last week I was using the laptop for several hours on battery power. I'm attempting the battery drain fix as I speak and the % is falling fast. It will be out in less than an hour. The power report for it was that it hard 30% left.

If Windows can write to EEPROM, then so can something else to fix it, so hopefully it can be fixed if my recalibration doesn't work.

Barman58 · 10 Feb 2010

Just thought I'd share this that appeared in my Inbox a short while ago ....

Engineering Windows 7 : Windows 7 Battery Notification Messages