Battery meter fluctuates

[cyberg18]

Hello,

I have a problem with W7. It's installed on a VAIO FE with dual boot (Vista + W7 32 bit). No problem with installation. Works great. Installed with driver pack for Vista from Sony without errors. Although, once in awhile, the battery meter fluctuates all of a sudden, and reads it up or down with changes related to power plan (brightness, ...) :sarc:. The thing is, it sometimes read the battery critical (eventhough it's not, over 70 % remaining), and hibernates :shock:. The only thing I was able to change is the power plan, so it gets asleep instead of hibernate (which is faster to reload). Never happened on AC. Battery seems to be physically ok with good autonomy and no problem like that on Vista.

Any ideas ? Could it be related to battery or ACPI drivers ? Is there something I could rollback in W7 from my vista files (drivers, ...) ?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards,

CyberG18
Windows 7, the way Vista should have been !

 

[Captain Zero]

I've seen this before. It's one of 3 possibilities.
1 - The battery is dying, might need to be replaced.
2 - Another piece of hardware is spiking and possibly overheating. Yes, Windows 7 runs great but it also requires additional resources. More processing, more heat, more power consumption.
3 - Not related to the battery directly but possibly the power supply. The battery is the first place most would think to look at - myself included. I think it's indicative of another fault with hardware. Possibly the sensor via ACPI is faulty and while it's potentially a driver problem, it's better to be safe than sorry.

If you're handy with a volt meter, check the battery. Since it's fine on AC like you said, it's a good place to start. Otherwise, try using Vista drivers for your mobo and especially ACPI.

And don't get electrocuted.

 

[johngalt]

He's dual booting with no such issues in Vista.

I'd say that rules out (almost positively) issues with either the battery or Power supply, as those should be occurring across the board if it were either....

Cyberg - I am willing to bet it is due to the drivers not being correct / working correctly in 7 - contact your OEM for any advice they may have and / or possible Beta drivers for 7.

 

[cyberg18]

THX for both your advice.

I would also think that it's more related to software/drivers more than faulty hardware since the battery holds charge and has good autonomy and that there's no such problem in vista. I've got engineers in the family, so I'm gonna ask them to check voltage of the battery.

Concerning drivers, I'll try to roll them back in W7 (for those in Vista). Sony doesn't support windows 7, so no luck to get help from them...

I'll keep you posted if I'm successful.

 

[macgyver2]

I have a similar problem. I have seen my meter reading 0% on a full charge or read some odd % when we know (wife and I) that its more or less. I think I remember this same kind of issue with vista on some laptops.

 

[cyberg18]

problem with rollingback drivers

I tried to rollback battery and ACPI drivers to the VISTA version, but I get an error message concerning reading access (even if I'm logged as an adminstrator with full privileges). Even tried overwriting them on the W7 drive while booting up on VISTA. Any ideas ?

THX

CyberG18

 

[zigzag3143]

I tried to rollback battery and ACPI drivers to the VISTA version, but I get an error message concerning reading access (even if I'm logged as an adminstrator with full privileges). Even tried overwriting them on the W7 drive while booting up on VISTA. Any ideas ?

THX

CyberG18

You might have to take ownership to roll back to vista version. After roll back I dont know if your ownership (instead of trusted installer) will cause a problem. Some one out there must know

Hope this helped somewhat

Ken