[SOLVED] Battery drains rapidly despite newly replaced battery!

Cowgoesmoo2

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Oct 12, 2014
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ASUS K501L-something laptop. (The K501's are about the same)
I've had it for I think four years, but three years of actual use. The last year I haven't touched it, because the battery started draining insanely quickly. When it was full it would show 80% or something, it would crash from 20% to dead real easy. Basically, long story short the capacity was 30 minutes of normal use and something about its calibration was so off. On top of that it runs really poorly. Doesn't run games like it used to.

So yeah I assumed I needed a new battery. I did replace it. So unless it was a defective battery, what the heck is going on? All I can think of is that at worst, I was clumsy when I opened up the laptop to clean out dust... I did that twice. The worst That could happen is I was so bad and clumsy opening it I damaged something? Yes, on the first time I may have been dumb and exposed the CPU by unscrewing things. I didn't know about thermal paste at the time and simply just screwed the heat sink back on, leaving air bubbles. I fixed that the second time around with proper paste.

But yeah other than that, i don't know what could cause this battery issue. It is a brand new battery, unless it was just somehow defective.
 
Solution
Are you running on battery, or plugged in?
On battery, you should expect less performance from the cp and to not use your discrete graphics chip.

Malware bytes continuous monitoring app should not be needed.
Run a scan occasionally to check.

Do a simple stress test using cpu-Z stress test.
Have HWmonitor running and show what it says, in particular show the current, min and max temperatures.
We are looking to see if there is a 100c. max cpu core temperature which will induce cpu throttling.

Look at the tasks that are running to see if there is anything not expected.
Microsoft office and windows installer for example.

JWNoctis

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Firstly, don't worry about damaging anything. You'd probably have had worse problems than mere battery drain, if you had.

How's the temperature looking? Do you see any load on your CPU or GPU at idle? Is your laptop blowing out plenty of warm air?

Could be something running in the background, the worst case of which a cryptomining virus. Nuke it from orbit if that's the case.
 

Cowgoesmoo2

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Oh. Now that I remember it, it easily starts chugging air. The fan blows rather hard while doing nothing on startup. But I was thinking maybe I was just bad at opening the laptop up properly and didn't close it well. It's also super super slow in general, I forgot to mention this. But it's not really at an age where this should happen, especially given its specs. Like it is just WRONG how slow it is. I don't know what I did.

Holy *. It could be a virus though. Have you any suggestions for what to get though? I have used MBAM extensively but I swear it kind of doesn't get everything when it should. Will try it and I will come back if it does get anything although I think it most likely won't find anything even if there is a virus I feel.
 
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JWNoctis

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Are there anything showing up at all, on task manager et cetera?

And if you have a Kill-a-watt, anything much over 30W at idle would be unusual for any reasonably recent laptop, except during battery recharge.
 
Was the battery replacement an original ASUS battery with the same part number as the original?
If not, you probably bought a cheaper "compatible" replacement that was not exactly compatible.
Some laptop batteries have chips which are necessary for proper operation.
 

Cowgoesmoo2

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Huh... well, this is the laptop battery-
https://.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F37Q5X9?psc=1
And my laptop is specifically K501LX-EB71

I don't know how to check the part number... But here's an example of a webpage which insists that the battery is just as good as the original. https://www.laptopbatterydirect.net/asus/asus-k501lx-battery.htm

Might anyone know how I could check if the battery is the right model?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So regarding voltage that someone brought up-
On startup it's easy for the computer CPU to max out. Running Microsoft Office click to run S&S, malwarebytes and windows AV and modules installer workers. All normal to some extent, but I can tell you that since startup, usage is generally 75-85% on cpu.
 
Last edited:
Are you running on battery, or plugged in?
On battery, you should expect less performance from the cp and to not use your discrete graphics chip.

Malware bytes continuous monitoring app should not be needed.
Run a scan occasionally to check.

Do a simple stress test using cpu-Z stress test.
Have HWmonitor running and show what it says, in particular show the current, min and max temperatures.
We are looking to see if there is a 100c. max cpu core temperature which will induce cpu throttling.

Look at the tasks that are running to see if there is anything not expected.
Microsoft office and windows installer for example.
 
Solution

Cowgoesmoo2

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Oct 12, 2014
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Well, it was on battery but I mean, that was the main idea behind all this- the battery is miserable and doesn't seem quite right despite being new.

Now that I'm using it again- I am reminded of how my computer runs like garbage even plugged in. Just doing basic tasks related to installation, the cursor can be seen to lag a noticable bit. That is weird.

This is what I did. MBAM'd it up, didn't find anything as expected. Installed EVERY possible WX update because I haven't turned it on in a while. Restarted it twice for good measure.

Ran CPU-Z stress test for CPU. Basically, while it was running the stress test, I only had that, MBAM open. Just opening the snipping tool causes a bit of lag lol.

https://valid.x86.fr/48dtjq
Here are benchmarking results.

View: https://imgur.com/a/Sh9368C

Here is the pictures I took of temps DURING stress testing.



Honestly is this laptop basically just a goner? No coming back? These types of inexplicable slowdowns are so typical of Windows laptops