Microsoft: Windows 7 Isn't Killing Batteries

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Li-Ion batteries start dying the day they're made.
Treat them right you'll get about 5 years. The average is 3 and people that abuse them gets 1 or less.
OS has nothing to do with it.
Store them at 50% and don't fully discharge it if you can help it.
 
Ummm like so many others have said. Windows 7 is not "killing" your battery people. It is either falsely reporting battery degradation or it isn't. Seeing how batteries are manufactured, and the standards that are enforced these days, lead me to believe that the vast majority of batteries may be of a poor quality. It's interesting that the first major OS to offer a service that notifies you of battery degradation is all the sudden finding plenty of rotten apples.... It would be interesting if people would begin to report on the actual brand being used and break that down by percentages of those reporting a problem at all. I bet we would see a pattern.
 
[citation][nom]Pyroflea[/nom]Want to explain to me how this software is destroying a power supply?[/citation]

Is the software not controlling how the battery is utilized? I am not saying this is the issue, but it bears some consideration that poor utilization can in fact diminish the life of a bettery. We have all seen this on cordless phones and cell phones. Why cant an operating system screw up charge and use cycles like a user can?
 
I am not saying that the battery is bad, all I am saying is that windows wont allow my computer to stay on with that almost new battery. It shuts it off 20mins after its on battery power. It could very well be a reporting problem. But it is a windows issue. The reason its a Windows issue is because it auto shuts down because its reporting a bad battery. Its not a bad battery. The only thing that I can think of is maybe its reporting a different voltage than what Windows likes. Either way my laptop wont stay very long on an almost new battery.
 
[citation][nom]thackstonns[/nom]I call Shinanagins on this one. Here is the thing I had a sony Viao running xp and replaced the battery about a month before I installed the rc of windows 7. ... It wont last 15minutes now.[/citation]
Or you bought a cheap NiCad battery as replacement (rather than Li-ion) and didn't follow the proper procedures to get max usage out of the battery. NiCad's are notorious for charge memory. The first few cycles, you have to completely deplete the charge then fully charge it or you risk the battery having a memory (the point at which you recharged it is where the life of the battery now ends)
 
[citation][nom]sublifer[/nom]Or you bought a cheap NiCad battery as replacement (rather than Li-ion) and didn't follow the proper procedures to get max usage out of the battery. NiCad's are notorious for charge memory. The first few cycles, you have to completely deplete the charge then fully charge it or you risk the battery having a memory (the point at which you recharged it is where the life of the battery now ends)[/citation]
Its Li-ion. Not NiCad, or NiMH. I know how NiCad, NiMH, Li-ion, and Li-polymer batterys work. I used to sell cellular phones. Did it for years. I know how to condition the NiCad, NiMH batteries. But most importantly, I know not to buy them. Also I know that Li-ion are only good for so many cycles, and degrade with heat and cold. I'm not saying the battery is bad, But the auto off feature when windows 7 falsly detects it needs replaced and shuts down the pc could be wrong.
 
I don't know if Windows 7 is killing batteries but what I can tell you is that I have a laptop Dell XPS 1530)that do last less with Windows 7 than Vista or XP.
This laptop with Vista will last around 3 hours 12 minutes and Windows 7 Pro 64 last only around 1 hour 22 minutes.
I did performed a clean installation twice and the same issue.
 
I have this problem of Windows 7 suddenly telling me to replace my 1 year old battery on my HP laptop. I don't think Windows 7 has anything to do with it though, since my friend's laptops are working just fine.
 
duh... Windows 7 secretly runs rm -rf "battery life"

honestly.. how can the OS be responsible... it may eat up more while its running but cannot do permanent damage like that
 
@zorky9
“clean installed windows 7 home premium 64 over a 32-bit vista home premium on an HP dv6700t. no problems with the battery. been using it since october. then again i've always taken good care of the battery with regular charge-drain cycles.”

@Al Coholic
“Personally I don't run Windows, but I have found that leaving your battery in your laptop while using AC power with the battery at full charge will in fact shorten the life of the battery. I remove the battery when I'm plugged in for prolonged periods. Also I try to run the battery down to at least 20% before fully recharging it. Batteries are rated for x amount of cycles (Charge/discharge) each time you charge your battery counts as 1 cycle, if you charge 1% or 100%. So if you leave your battery in all the time you are in effect killing your battery prematurely.”

Modern laptop batteries are lithium-ion based and they are very different from traditional batteries like nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries. That’s regarding both the chemistry of the batteries as well as how you best treat them.

There is no better way to treat the most common chemistries of lithium-ion batteries than to charge them to about 3.7 volts per cell and then leave them there. When ever you go below or above this 3.7 nominal voltage wear and tear imediatelly goes up.
Go below 3 volts/cell and chemistry degradation will start to spike while 2.5 volts can instantly render the battery useless.
Charge the battery to 100% capacity (after reaching 4.2 volts/cell trickle charge an additional 30% of the batteries speced mAh) and the wear and tear will go up considerably.
Charge beyond 4.3 volts and the battery will inevitably catch fire and in some cases explode.
Charging to 90-95% of full capacity will normally give you considerably more cycles at a small performance cost.

More recent chemistries of for instance lithium ion polymer (lipo) batteries can sustain a voltage well above the 3 volt barrier until the battery is almost completely discharged. That’s not good as long as you only use volt/cell safety measures since lithium-ion based batteries tend to experience high levels of tear and wear when discharged below 20% of maximum mAh capacity regardless of whether the 3 volt barrier has been reached or not. So as a rule of thumb never discharge a lithium-ion battery below 20% of its mAh capacity.

And lithium-ion batteries has no memory effect what so ever so cycling the battery will normally do nothing for you other than shorten its life even more (moving up and down away from the 3.7 nominal voltage). If anything the more you drain the battery the more you wear it out. It's actually better to charge a lithium-ion battery more often rather than draining it until the battery circuitry tells you the battery is depleted. It has no memory effect and this procedure will not harm it in any way. This is completely the opposite from the right procedure with other common types of batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries are also very sensitive to temperature. The higher the temperature the faster the chemistry degrades and that’s regardless of whether you’re using or storing them.

I don’t own a modern laptop so I don’t know if the user has any control over the safety circuitry found within all lithium-ion based batteries meant for laptops and mobile phones etc. But if I were to guess I’d say the user probably has none. Which is bad.
As long as any allowed setting is within the safety margins the consumers should be allowed to choose some settings by themselves. The first thing that comes to mind regarding bad usage is that any user hooked up to the wall most of the time while having the battery installed will have the battery circuitry constantly keeping the battery at a full 4.2 volts/cell meaning a high level of tear and wear.

It’s much better to drain a full battery for about 2 hours (assuming a full charge will give you about 4 hours), remove the battery and then hook up the laptop to the wall.
 
Well then Im sorry. I have worked on 4 brand new laptops. Just from the box, that complain it will give me the message. I loaded XP on mine and recieved 4 1/2 hours. Vista 4 hours. Win7 3 1/2 hours. Fedora 4 1/2 hours. So I think it might have something to do with core utilization/ hdd access. But I'm not sure. I always thought that its "replace your battery" was to but in a fully charged one in its place, and not that it is bad.

This kinda makes me a little upset. But I am in no way going to replace a brand new battery just because that comes up. And Roagie you might be right, mine is a cheap (Black friday door buster) Acer. I also set up 2 HPs and a Toshiba and all of them gave me the message.
 
Funny thing, when I bought an extra battery (Li-ion) for my Dell, I actually read the directions that came packaged with it.
The first install instructions said "Allow the battery to fully charge before use!".

For the Absurd notion that an OS can damage your laptop battery, Wake up! My battery charges when the laptop is OFF and plugged into A/C power. No OS involved, no performance settings involved, just hardware.

The reference values used by Windows 7 to calculate the capacity of the battery is reported by the system BIOS. The BIOS reporting is likely the broken link in this story.

 
Funny thing, when I bought an extra battery (Li-ion) for my Dell, I actually read the directions that came packaged with it.
The first install instructions said "Allow the battery to fully charge before use!".

For the Absurd notion that an OS can damage your laptop battery, Wake up! My battery charges when the laptop is OFF and plugged into A/C power. No OS involved, no performance settings involved, just hardware.

The reference values used by Windows 7 to calculate the capacity of the battery is reported by the system BIOS. The BIOS reporting is likely the broken link in this story.

 
Funny thing, when I bought an extra battery (Li-ion) for my Dell, I actually read the directions that came packaged with it.
The first install instructions said "Allow the battery to fully charge before use!".

For the Absurd notion that an OS can damage your laptop battery, Wake up! My battery charges when the laptop is OFF and plugged into A/C power. No OS involved, no performance settings involved, just hardware.

The reference values used by Windows 7 to calculate the capacity of the battery is reported by the system BIOS. The BIOS reporting is likely the broken link in this story.

 
[citation][nom]Raishi[/nom]No offense intended, but it's rather hard to pick out the difference between a sarcastic response and a genuinely idiotic one when there's pretty much a 50/50 split between them in most comment sections.[/citation]
^HAHAHAHA!
 
[citation][nom]arrghushakaboorga[/nom]duh... Windows 7 secretly runs rm -rf "battery life"honestly.. how can the OS be responsible... it may eat up more while its running but cannot do permanent damage like that[/citation]
I get your sarcasm but I just thought it was funny that you incorporated a unix command with Windows ~wink~
 
Windows 7 killed my LI-ion battery. On an 8 month old laptop with vista, I was getting 4 hours watching movies with a dimmed screen. After a week on windows 7, my battery is now dead. Just a coincidence? maybe, but I think something funny is going on here.
 
[citation][nom]tenor77[/nom]Li-Ion batteries start dying the day they're made.Treat them right you'll get about 5 years. The average is 3 and people that abuse them gets 1 or less.OS has nothing to do with it.Store them at 50% and don't fully discharge it if you can help it.[/citation]For long term storage (such as a rarely-used backup battery, like if you buy an extended capacity battery but still keep your original one) I'd charge it until the cells are at nominal voltage. Probably somewhere around 70-80% capacity. The extra 20+ percent could come in handy, and it won't hurt anything. If you let it sit for too long, and it self-discharges too far it could hurt its life. If it gets deep discharged it will probably be junk at that point.

Also, for your typical quality laptop battery (even OEM), 5 years is pretty optimistic. Maybe if you power it on, drain it to 30%, bring it back up to 80%, and then power it off. Do this once every 2-3 weeks and never use the battery any other time. 😛
[citation][nom]thackstonns[/nom]As I said I thought it was just a bad battery at first. I cant believe that I had a perfectly good battery that would stay charged, change from RC to home premium reboot and only have 20minutes of life.[/citation]Batteries can fail, abruptly. I ordered an extended (OEM optional) battery for a friend's WinXP netbook. Died within a month - using WinXP the whole time. Not Win7. Died abruptly too - went from many hours to minutes of battery life. It was still under warranty, of course. The original battery worked fine until the replacement arrived.[citation][nom]noneedformonkeys[/nom]sorry about the three-peat post, my mac safari browser crashed[/citation]Safari makes me a very sad panda.
 
if you want max battery life then get an apple they are the best when it comes to battery life, at least when you are just surfing the web, if you start playing games then forget about it. for that matter no OS will do well with battery power if you play games on it without being plugged in the wall.
 
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