Microsoft says Windows 7 battery 'issue' isn't one
By Paul Miller 
posted February 8th 2010 5:38PM
posted February 8th 2010 5:38PM
After Microsoft stated a week ago that it would look into reports of Windows 7 causing premature battery degradation, we've been staying up late at night with our frazzled lithium ion cells, reading them stories about Battery Heaven and generally trying to keep an upbeat tone around the Engadget HQ. Well, it turns out not everything is rosy in batteryville, but Microsoft says Windows 7 isn't the one to blame. According to the company's testing, the new tool, which reports when a battery is down to 40% of its designed capacity and suggests replacement, hasn't reported a single false positive. Additionally, the tool uses read-only data from the battery, and is in fact incapable of tweaking the battery's life span or internal data -- it merely reports the data it receives, and stacks the theoretical design capacity up against the current full charge capacity. Microsoft attributes the reports of the tool dooming batteries to an early grave to the mere fact that many people might not have noticed the degradation already taking place in their batteries -- most batteries start to degrade noticeably within a year. Of course, not everybody's going to just take Microsoft's word for it, and Microsoft itself will continue to look into the issue, but for now this sounds like a bit of a non-issue. The part about Windows 7 being less conservative with power use is a whole 'nother issue, of course.
All I know is when I was running Windows XP on my workstation my Kill-a-Watt meter would state 450 watts. Now with Windows 7 it states 540 watts. Granted I like how windows 7 goes into standby after 30 minutes of inactivity ( saving me about 6 KWH / day ), but I highly doubt adding 2 more SAS drives to my system would result in a 90 watt increase in consumption.
Hopefully Windows Mobile 7 won't eat energy like Windows 7
@blogwhitesitescom
So a new OS uses more power than a ten year old OS NEWS FLASH!
@blogwhitesitescom Some, but certainly not all. You can go to performance options and see how much aero is eating up, but it should be very little. More likely I'd go to power options and make sure you aren't on high performance mode.
The big deal there is that it prevents the CPU from throttling down on idle.
Certainly most people are not aware that a li-ion laptop battery needs replacing within 12 to 18 months for the machine to retain decent mobile performance. Most everyone I see computing on campus carries an adapter along to the library and plugs in before turning on, so they realise their battery performance isn't stellar. They just haven't had the possibility of replacing their battery pointed out to them before.
Microsoft has no commercial interest in batteries, so give them a break. Re those who notice a difference in performance between OSS: hmm, I don't know how to explain that. Assuming, that is, that your XP and 7 power settings are comparable--are they?
Why wouldn't we trust the MS PR team. I mean just look at how honest they have been with the Xbox 360's red ring of death.
This is happening to me.With Vista and even with the Windows 7 beta my battery was fine. Then I finally upgraded to Windows 7 when it came out. A few days later, it gave me the error that I should consider replacing my battery. Replaced my battery. A week and a half later, it's giving me the same error again. I contacted HP they told me it was most likely a Windows 7 problem and that I should revert back to Vista. :/ Been like this for a while now... Hope someone comes up with a fix, as it is right now, my laptop is basically a desktop.
No wonder why I'm kept on hearing a sound on my laptop once awhile even though I have nothing running. But those can be easily turn off by typing in "sound" then turn off the warning sound that went on once a while.
@cdf74dc9
Ya, that's one Apple crap right there. How could Windows 7 wreck your Mac?
No wonder why I'm kept on hearing a sound on my laptop once awhile even though I have nothing running. But those can be easily turn off by typing in "sound" in Windows search then turn off the warning sound that went on once a while.
@cdf74dc9
Sorry 4 double posting. Where is the delete and edit button?
I gots an Acer Aspire Timeline and that puppy kicks out 8+ hours of battery life on a charge. 7's battery reports seem spot on.
No problem funny that since I have a dual boot of vista and windows 7 and when windows 7 reports 0% charge I can switch to vista and have it report roughly 50%.
I can run it at 0% in Windows 7 for about another 45 mins.
Grr, I just bought a new battery. Damn you to hell HP/MS.
I still use XP and I'm laughing at this. I win at life.
@NizmoStyle:
>I still use XP
I'm laughing at that.
I am suffering from this issue too. I have a gateway M-series.
My Dell XPS m1530 battery life dropped from over 3 hours to less than 30 minutes on a full charge over 3 months using Windows 7
my HP laptop battery is screwed it says concider replacing your battery.
:(
@timmyjan
As I've just posted in another comment, I've had 2 HP's with completely useless batteries now.
1 is older but always worked fine. 2nd is quite new and was originally on Vista and working fine. Both work fine when plugged in but as soon as that power cable comes off, so does the laptop(s).
The Dell I've put it on is working fine though. Maybe it only affects certain hardware and unfortunately HP is one of the affected.
@timmyjan
Mines an HP as well.
Once again, when's the engadget app going to come out for android?
I was suspecting it but I hope is true…
Let’s see what microsoft will do
My battery is completely dead and from Lenovo will cost me 130£…..
so it's a numbers thing.
someone gave the wrong number for a full charge....
i have 7 on my 2007 HP laptop.
The battery life sits between 5-10 minutes on a full charge, not nearly enough time for this crap to be used as bathroom reading material.
It is an issue still. After Microsoft issued that statement, they also posted this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2010/02/08/windows-7-battery-notification-messages.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage
Basically it says "The last two pieces of information—design capacity and last full charge capacity—are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. "
EXCEPT they are not handling properly if the DESIGN CAPACITY is 0, null, or some insanely large number. If one of those conditions are true, Windows 7 will complain about the battery. Even if the battery is BRAND NEW. Some batteries do not report Design Capacity, Battery Health, and Cycle Count values, they will either show 0, null (unknown), or some really large value, eg: Infinity % for Battery Health, or 705004 for Design Capacity (its supposed to be 55,451, and yes, the battery is BRAND NEW, less than a week old, and straight from LG, and it is lasting for more than 2.5 hours!). When that number is compared to the LAST FULL CHARGE CAPACITY of course its going to be a lot LESS and Windows will conclude that the battery is bad.
So, Microsoft needs to handle these value properly, since new batteries are reporting 0, null, -1, or unknown for the variable "Design Capacity" when clearly the battery is usable and works properly (actually lasting more than 2 hours).
You can also follow me on Microsoft TechNet:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprohardware/thread/c6c043e6-eeb1-4e61-870d-896ca2f865d6
@DanLee81
I have a 9-cell battery on my laptop, it's 4 month over 1 year old.
I still have have 5 hours of battery life (almost 9 hours when the battery was new), wear level 61%, and Win7 complains about my system shutting down. I don't care about the message, if it AT LEAST showed me the battery time (I am using now a widget.. which I don't like to have)
@DanLee81
They are handling 0 and -1 values correctly, an engineer commented about this in the blog post.
Will there be an update for this?
@JedixJarf Yet I haven't been asked to replace the battery on my 09 MacBook pro. Snow Leopard warns users like Win 7, except Win 7 has actually killed or dramatically shortened the life span of several commenter's batteries for unknown reasons.
this actually happened to my laptop today around 1. then i read this and microsoft's msdn blogpost and was gettin gpissed cause asus livesupport sucks dick. then i got home. and it was fixed. no idea what in the hell occurred
@id10terror
The OS may look nicer and do more, but it's marketed to help reduce battery strain. And my battery became almost useless within 3 months of switching, which was a while ago. Got a new battery that works fine for now, but still cost $110 to replace.
Laptop batteries usually are rated to handle 300 charge cycles before they start noticeably degrading. Usually the warranty covers them for a year. It's physically impossible for software to affect the battery's lifespan. If it degrades it's because its been charged too many times.
Acer Aspire - 8 months old, Windows 7 just telling me that my battery is screwed.
Arse.
HP 9515ca 17" laptop... just over 2 hrs battery on XP. Switched to Win 7 beta, still fine. Current version of Win 7 started giving me the "battery needs replacing" alert shortly after installing, and my battery life began deteriorating from there. I temporarily reinstalled XP to troubleshoot the issue, and gained most of my battery life back. Like a sucker, I went back to Win 7 though because I liked the interface far more. I'm currently down to 10 mins battery life & am hauling my power adapter with me to take a poo.
Is HP really to blame if my laptop works with all other operating systems?
Microsoft: where I'd really like to take a poo right now.
@lemonfresh That is a good point.
Windows 7 can't do anything to your battery... period. It only reads the data.
However, in your power options you can have Windows automatically force your computer to shut down when power reaches 7% or 3% (believe those are the defaults). If W7 is reading the remaining battery life falsely (whomever's fault that may be), disabling this option could be a temporary workaround.
I would still be pushing HP for a bios update more so than W7.
One thing I know. I have a computer with XP that is somewhat old, but the battery was still good for about an hour. Far from the original capacity but good enough for most usages.
Instaled 7 on it and was happy. It was fast and responsive. Unfortunately some issues such even less battery life (~10 minutes) or not being able to recover from sleep without removing the battery made me go back to XP.
Now in XP i still have the same 10 minutes I had with Win7. So my conclusion is: Yes, Win7 messed my battery up.
I wonder what MS would say regarding my battery lasting for almost 4 hours when my Acer notebook is booted in Vista, yet I will get no more than 5 min when running Win 7. In case some gets confused about that, its a dual boot machine.