Acer 6920 Battery Life Under Windows 7

After upgrading to Windows 7 Professional the battery life on my 6920 has taken a dive.

I've always thought that the meter was just messed (never used it long enough on battery to test), but today my battery completely drained in a little over 30 minutes.

Under Vista, I was getting around 2.5-3 hours of usage....


anyone else experiencing this?

 

weird
if i remember correctly, i think i actually saw a slight improvement on my 6920. but seems like my asus g50vt took a slight hit with windows 7

 

yeah i don't know what's wrong... but i'm assuming something it's something big because that's a 2 hour difference...

 

Darrick, that definitely doesn't sound right. I'm still getting 2.5 hours on my 18-month-old battery.
Try monkeying around with the power settings, maybe the latest Nvidia driver.

 

it is very weird... i was just testing it again, and after 40 minutes, it was telling me i had a little under 2 hours left, which would be around the normal life of the battery

but then it decided to hibernate itself and when i woke it up, it was down to 3% battery remaining.... ????

 

do you guys happen to have acer's battery utilities installed?

 

No - haven't since July last year.

 

TehSuigi, do you have the smaller capacity battery? Mine is the 8-cell (71WHr) and I'm hitting ~3.5 hrs on lowest brightness, wifi on though (4 hrs w/o wifi). Battery is also almost 18 months old w/ pretty much no degradation. I have the battery at 100% charge at all times and use A/C 99% of the time (for UPS purposes).

 

i just intalled batterybar,
it's telling me i have 35.8% battery wear...
that's not good, is it?

 

i just tried the battery again
batterybar was showing 65% when the laptop shut down on me...

turning the laptop back on, it says i have 5% remaining, and my battery wear has jumped from 35.8% to 49.8%

Designed Capacity: 53280 mWh
Fully Charged Capacity: 26862 mWh

is it possible i have a faulty battery (or a severely mis-calibrated one)? would this be covered under the 2 year warranty?

 

Now, I am on Vista for my AS6920G.
Before that, i tested my AS6920G on Windows 7 and Forceware 186.82.
The battery life is longer than Vista slightly.
However, I tweaked too much on the Windows 7 and the Tune-Up Utilities screwed up my System. So, I rolled back to Vista meanwhile. T.T

 

I just started experiencing this last night. All of a sudden I got a warning to replace my battery. I checked the stats, and apparently it's only holding about 37% of what it was designed to hold @ purchase. It's been just over a year, which is hilariously convenient... however, I purchased an extended service plan so it'll get fixed. I've looked at other forums for the same topic, apparently this is a big problem.

Edit to add: I've fully switched over to windows 7 professional 64 bit (legit) and I have not overclocked anything. I'm using the current nvidia driver.... also, just as I was about to post, a warning came up saying 5% battery power available, need to find power source... it's only been thirty minutes since I unplugged it. Also, the change was quite dramatic. I was getting normal- decent battery life, and all of a sudden it went ll crappy!

 

"I'm using the current nvidia driver.... "

Which driver is this?

 

sounds like the exact same problem i'm experiencing!
i don't think both our batteries could have worn out that fast...

i want to try running it past the warning, does anyone know how to disable the automatic hibernate/shut-down on low battery feature?

 

Sounds like something with Windows 7. I hope other users can chime in their experience. If not all users are experiencing this, then maybe it's a specific combination of hardware or software/drivers?

 

No problem here, chief. Actually seen a slight revitalization of my system's aging battery life.

 

i want to try a complete discharge to see if the problem is with windows 7

is there any way to turn off the hibernate-at-critical-battery-level function in windows?

would idling in the BIOS work?

 

Darrick, check the Power Options under Windows 7. Pretty sure the Critical Battery Level and Critical Battery Actions are there.

 

This means your battery needs replacing as its worn out. My fully charged capacity is at 14652 mWh (LOL), but I keep it on AC power anyways.

Here's two pictures:

http://i48.tinypic.com/30cywl5.png

http://i50.tinypic.com/2qa8w81.png

Also I don't think batteries are covered under warranty...

 

i have a feeling the reading is incorrect cause the fully-charged capacity dropped by 10000 mWh in half an hour

 

Hi everyone,
My laptop suffers from the same problem (Acer Aspire 7730G).

I'm also a Windows 7 RC user - since the day I bought this my laptop.
But this issue appeared out of nowhere this month. It may be related, but I'm not really sure, to one of these things:
1. I upgraded my BIOS to 3636, and now to 3809
2. I messed up my Windows installation trying to install some themes while forgetting to activate System Restore. Therefore I did a repair installation of Windows 7 RC.

Symptoms, same as mentioned above:
- very short battery life (used to be almost 2h, now it's about 30 mins)
- battery (as reported by Battery Bar and Windows) discharges at a pretty fast rate until it reaches about 75%. Then all of a sudden it drops to 5%!
- I've used a hack to disable auto hibernate when the battery is critical. This allows me to use my laptop 15 minutes extra (thus totaling 30 minutes on battery). All these minutes the battery charge stays around 1.7%.
- after my last experiment to see how long my laptop runs on battery, Battery Bar shows 70% damage, and now Windows warns me too that I need to change the battery. Maximum charge: 14.652 mW.

My laptop is still in warranty and I could easily ask for a replacement battery, but maybe writing here helps narrowing the problem for others too

 

yes this is definitely very odd

i think this has also occurred in other models as well

maybe someone should make a general "Acer Windows 7 Battery Problems" thread so those of us with this problem can try and pinpoint what's causing it.

 

the symptoms im seeing are awfully similar to those described here

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3537

im just confused as to why they only started to show up after i installed Windows 7...

 

I contacted Acer, and after a few emails they've determined that my battery is faulty.

Since my machine is still under warranty, they're willing to exchange it.