Tip for laptop users: battery condition, sleep problems

Lot of us Seven users have a laptop as a main computer. Todays new Dells, HP's, Sonys and Toshibas are so advanced and powerful you can do marvels with them.

The laptop's battery is a consumer product. Battery capacity will fade little by little, and you often notice a weakened capacity of the battery first when it does not last a lunch break surfing the Web.

If you are interested to see a full report of your laptop's barrery condition you can get it by running command prompt as an administrator and giving the command powercfg -energy. It creates a HTML file Energy-report.html.

Energy-report shows everything worth to know about your battery. For instance, it tells you if a program or device is preventing your laptop to sleep or hibernate:

System Availability Requests:System Required Request
The device or driver has made a request to prevent the system from automatically entering sleep.

Requesting Driver Instance: HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_111D&DEV_76B2&SUBSYS_103C30F4&REV_1003\4&752edf3&0&0001
Requesting Driver Device: IDT High Definition Audio CODEC


USB Suspend:USB Device not Entering Suspend

The USB device did not enter the Suspend state. Processor power management may be prevented if a USB device does not enter the Suspend state when not in use.

Device Name: Generic USB Hub
Host Controller ID: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_293A
Host Controller Location: PCI bus 0, device 29, function 7
Device ID: USB\VID_050D&PID_0237
Port Path: 2

Maybe the most valuable piece of information is found at the end of the report:

Battery ID: Hewlett-Packard
Primary Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard
Serial Number: ?
Chemistry:Lion
Long Term: 1
Design Capacity: 73440
Last Full Charge: 69926

Design capacity tells you the full capacity of your battery in milliampere-hours (mAh). Last full charge shows the mAh after last time it was full charged. These figures above tell me for example that my battery has 95% of it's desiged capacity which means it is still quite OK.

Kari

Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report

BTW, Kari could you please tell me what do these figures mean?

Battery:Battery Information
Battery ID Hewlett-PackardPrimary
Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
Serial Number
Chemistry Lion
Long Term 1
Design Capacity 4752
Last Full Charge 4752

Dinesh said:

Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report

Sorry, Brink. Was so keen to tell about this I forgot the main rule before posting; I did not search the forums to see if this was already told.

Dinesh said:

BTW, Kari could you please tell me what do these figures mean?

Battery:Battery Information
Battery ID Hewlett-PackardPrimary
Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
Serial Number
Chemistry Lion
Long Term 1
Design Capacity 4752
Last Full Charge 4752

It means your battery is in mint condition. I'm just surprised how low mAh it has as designed capacity.

Kari

Kari said:

Dinesh said:

Power Efficiency Diagnostics Report

Sorry, Brink. Was so keen to tell about this I forgot the main rule before posting; I did not search the forums to see if this was already told.

Dinesh said:

BTW, Kari could you please tell me what do these figures mean?

Battery:Battery Information
Battery ID Hewlett-PackardPrimary
Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
Serial Number
Chemistry Lion
Long Term 1
Design Capacity 4752
Last Full Charge 4752

It means your battery is in mint condition. I'm just surprised how low mAh it has as designed capacity.

Kari

Even I was surprised about the Design capacity as compared to your laptop battery.

Dinesh said:

Even I was surprised about the Design capacity as compared to your laptop battery.

Yeah, can't figure your values out. Never seen so low mAh.

Kari said:

Dinesh said:

Even I was surprised about the Design capacity as compared to your laptop battery.

Yeah, can't figure your values out. Never seen so low mAh.

BTW, my laptop is 18 months old now. :)

Bud said:

How to get extended life from a laptop battery? Should you plug the AC in every chance you get? Or should I let the battery be cycled down and then re-charge it? Mine is a new HP laptop.

I connect my HP laptops (Pavilion and HDX series) always to mains if available. If I know I'm not going to need battery in a few days, I normally take it out when it is first fully charged.

This trick gives some 20-30 extra minutes because it cools the laptop down so it does not need so much energy for the fan.

Kari