"Consider Replacing Your Battery"

After reading about this more and doing a bit of research, I've come to the conclusion that my battery really does have a problem and it's pretty normal if you leave the laptop plugged in all the time like I have done. Windows 7 is just highlighting the problem and not causing it.

I'm glad the feature is there because I will make more of an effort to treat my next battery better. It would also be useful if the percentage of degradation was shown with the warning message instead of having to generate a report to find out.

I also hope this will bring a lot of complains and manufactures of laptops will have to do better in future. Cleverer charging hardware that disconnects when the battery is full charged would make sense. Even a switch to disable the battery when it is not needed would be valuable.

Thanks. I looked over the BatteryCare web site and it seems that there is a lot of information there dispelling some of the myths that have presented in this thread.

Contrary to what I have been reading here, a full charge/discharge does not do anything to help a Lithium Ion battery, and leaving the cable plugged in is also fine. What the real problem is, is heat. My laptop does get very hot and I now think this is what has killed the battery.

To those who are thinking of trying the "fix" above, here is a quote from batterycare:

"Full battery discharges (until laptop power shutdown, 0%) should be avoided, because this stresses the battery a lot and can even damage it."

Yeah laptop batteries work on discharge cycle lifetime. One full discharge and recharge counts as a cycle. So it is always best not to discharge fully.
Leaving your battery plugged in is not be bad for the battery in terms of overcharge (as there are circuits to prevent that).
But leaving it plugged in on some of the older laptops can cause the battery to heat up, which as you said is the killer (newer ones tend to be designed nicer in this regard, and keep the battery at room temp. Excepting HP- never forgetting my tx2000)

Windows 7 ruined my new battery too. I have Toshiba Satelite L35 and recently changed by battery. I was on Vista before n after installing Windows 7 PRemium edition, it doesn't work even for 1 min without powersupply. I hope they do something about it

Hi logicearth,

This is the setting I have currently. Problem is my battery reaches critical level within one min of disconnecting it from powersupply. Whats the point of having battery if your computer will hibernate anyway, its still a problem. Machine should work when it's on battery like it used to. Thanks for the help though :)

To the above comments on "battery running to 0% will hurt battery" it is either this or buy a new battery. Why not try to fix what Windows is doing rather than buy a brand new battery.

Basically, Windows is shutting down / hibernating / sleeping a PC when it THINKS the battery is at 1% or 3%. This is because it has a faulty read on the battery life. You have to use my previous hack to stop it from shutting off at 1%. Then when it drains to 0%, it will continue to drain for some time. When it finally crashes (and yes it Crashes, so be warned about the effects on your PC) it will tell the PC what the real battery wear is and real battery life is.

My PC went from being on battery life for 5 minutes or less to having nearly 2 hours of battery life on a 2 year old battery. Its simply Windows having a bad read on the battery and being unable to calibrate since it shuts down when it THINKS the battery is dying, not when the battery is dying in reality.

So try out my method before you buy a new battery, there is no warranty on the method, but why not give it a try, the worse you will get is to have to buy a new battery. ( I dont believe the 'you PC will die forever if you drain the battery all the way' argument. Really, you have never crashed a PC?)

snlu178 said:

( I dont believe the 'you PC will die forever if you drain the battery all the way' argument. Really, you have never crashed a PC?)

Funny you should say that, I recently learned that there was a very old mac portable that would fail to recharge if you drained it to 0% because the cells were wired in series.