A quick check of many laptops will show that batteries usually have a warranty of 12 months, which is about the length of time when statistically we expect to see noticeable degradation. Those of us that have owned the same laptop for a couple of years and taken it through regular charge cycles have no doubt felt the decline in battery life.
Windows 7 makes use of a feature of modern laptop batteries which have circuitry and firmware that can report to Windows the overall health of the battery. This is reported in absolute terms as Watt-hours (W-hr) power capacity. Windows 7 then does a simple calculation to determine a percentage of degradation from the original design capacity.
In Windows 7 we set a threshold of 60% degradation (that is the battery is performing at 40% of its designed capacity) and in reading this Windows 7 reports the status to you. At this point, for example, a battery that originally delivered 5 hours of charge now delivers, on average, approximately 2 hours of charge. In Windows 7 the notification is a battery meter icon and notification is with a message of “Consider replacing your battery”. This notification is new to Windows 7 and not available in Windows Vista or Windows XP.
The message may also shows up on your laptop saying : “Consider replacing your battery. There is a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly.”
So what is the serious issue behind this problem?
The most common complaint seems to be that battery life which used to last between 1.5 hours and 2 hours, is now less that 30 minutes. Some users at the forum are down to 15 minutes of battery life time.
Indeed, some users have complained that their batteries have been permanently damaged by the drainage problems.
Other problems reported are that the laptop will suddenly go into hibernate mode without warning.
A Simple Solution:
Setup Critical battery action to ‘Do Nothing’. Use the powercfg.exe tool. Essentially change the settings to “do nothing.” Here is how to do that:
- Activate the power scheme you want to modify.
- Open an elevated command console (windows key, type ‘cmd’ in start menu, press “ctrl+shift+enter”, click ‘continue’)
- Execute “powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0″
- Your current power scheme will show “Battery->Critical battery action->On battery: Do nothing” despite the option being unavailable in the drop box.
Note that your battery drainage will still occur, but the messages will not appear.
Next Solution: Calibrate the Battery
Follow these steps:
- Fully Charged Up the Laptop Battery to 100 % , then unplugged power cable, and I let the battery drain. Upon reaching 99 % drainage you will start to get the message … consider replacing.
- When the battery is fully drained, laptop goes into hibernate. Power it back on but then it shutdowns completely.
- Checked Bios to confirm if there was any power was left; it had 2 % left.
- Wait 15 minutes to completely drain the laptop of any battery power and confirm that it can not be powered on.
- Remove the battery; then in this condition while the battery is out press the power button this will drain the system of any power left in the laptop.
- At this stage the laptop should be fully drained now.
- Plug in the A/C adapter cable to the laptop and wait 5 minutes. Power up the laptop.
- Under this process while charging the laptop you should not get the error message.
This process should allow you to restore your battery to it’s optimum level.
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