Is this excessive battery drain (while the laptop is TURNED OFF)?

I put Bios 3303 on my 1410 when I first realized I had this problem - no change, still discharges ~5% per day.

 

The problem is, if you leave a battery connected for long periods of time without using it (like storing the notebook somewhere), it can damage the battery and cause it to leak and corrode. That's why it's always a good idea to pull out the battery for storage.
If anything, you might just have to pull out the battery every night when you shut off the computer. A pain I know, but that may be the only solution.

 

That's true of alkaline batts, but not lithium cells. There's not the typical electrolyte being used that causes leakage.

Regarding pulling the batt for storage, I agree, however this discharge rate is so high that the batt can be irreversibly damaged if deep discharged too much. At 5-6% discharge per day, the pack is dead in < 20 days.

Worse yet, the greater the discharge level, the fewer cycles you get out of a lithium pack. So this high discharge all by itself is going to shorten the life of the pack more so than a laptop that properly shuts off and draw little (uA - nA) of current.

What isn't known is if all 1810T and AS1410's have this problem. DWkor had a 1410 that didn't have this problem - don't know if it was a dual core celeron though.

 

That's interesting, but I've seen in some notebook manuals that the manufacturer recommends pulling the battery for long term storage (as you agree ). I didn't know that was only alkalines that can corrode though (good to know).
I would think, part of the point of pulling out the battery at night is to help prevent that "deep discharge" as you put it, to help extend the battery life. I've often used my laptops without the battery, running on AC only, which effectively is removing the "UPS". (So make sure you have backups of your data in case ).
Les said he doesn't have the discharge problem in his 1810, so it's kind of curious really. This problem has been the only thing holding me back from getting one, but I may anyway since I rarely use the batteries these days.

 

With respect, but Les indicated that he takes it off the charger in the morning then at 4pm he has 97-98% left. Over 24 hrs, thats 5-6% drain.

Link for reference:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5798896&postcount=2790

 

I found a wake on lan setting in the BIOS and seems to save a percent. I'm more in the 5-ish range where before I was 6 or 7 ish.

Its was in the Main top menu item under Network Boot. Set to disabled.

 

Anyone had any luck with using a Solar charger. Wonder if there may be enough power to at least slow the discharge to a more reasonable timeframe from ambient light in my place?

This netbook is going to be feast or famine in terms of usage for me. So it could end up sitting over a month. Even pulling the battery, I will need to charge it to prevent a full discharge.

Can these sit plugged in the wall indefinitely without hurting the battery?

 

No, lithium cells should not be stored at 100% charge as that will result in capacity loss faster than storing them at 40-60%. Capacity loss is not the same as charge level. My batt is rated at 4400mAH, it will give up 4.4amps over a 1 hour period of time. If I lose capacity, when fully charged it may only now give 4.4amps over 45 mins. Think of capacity as "how big your gas tank is", and charge level as "how much gas is in your tank".

If you pull the battery when it's 60% charged, it will hold this charge for a long time and the battery won't lose much capacity vs storing it at 100%. It's only because it's in the laptop is the battery discharging very quickly. (the laptop is discharging the batt, not the battery or the circuit inside the battery pack).

 

I don't think that the Network boot option has anything to do with Wake on LAN .... W-O-L works when the system is powered ON but in a low power state, network boot is related to starting the OS from a network share.

I am begining to think that all 1410s and 1810s have the battery isuue... only its not been noted yet...

 

Hmm quite interesting, I read that wrong.

 

I wouldn't look too much at the short term losses. Too much variability plus the battery gauge probably isn't accurate to a single digit of precision.

I've been using a 3 day period of time for my testing. 84% left after 3 days is certainly not a measurement error.

 

This is SU3500 one. Canadian version though - one which was sold by onsale.com with 3Gb of memory. Don't remember exact model number.

One other (possible) difference - I've never upgraded bios to anything higher than 3117 on this laptop. So if there are some changes in the settings which persist after upgrade/downgrade, it could also affect the behavior.

 

What laptop do you have and what bios are you using? 1410/1810 has network menu hidden in the bios.

 

You have me intrigued. How do you get to this hidden menu and are there other hidden items in the bios?

 

InsydeH2o is quite powerful bios with ton of the options. You can see the list of the available features here (and search for "Wake" keyword). You can read the thread and comments - this is related with VT but gives us good info about InsydeH2o.

Unfortunately Acer decided to hide the options/tabs/settings there. I wish I have enough knowledge to hack/modify those power settings.

 

Wow there be a LOT of options there.. if only they let you at them :-(

 

Two other people (maybe 3) over at SlickDeals have noticed the same battery drain problem when OFF on their 1410's with the SU2300 processor. (don't know if other CPU versions are affected too, this is the only one I've been tracking as this is what I have)

 

I too have this problem on my new 1410. I left it off for 2 days and when turned on it wa at 85%. Anybody figure this out yet?

I read on SD that somethere said it was a board (power?) but someone else said there is no power board. Confused and wondering if I should return.

 

I'm the one that posted the link about the AspireOne with the power board problem, and I'm sure I'm probably the one that said that the 1410 doesn't have this separate power board - which it doesn't per photos I've seen online.

I think the only hope we have to is try and get as many people be made aware of this problem and hope that it will get Acer to correct the problem.

If 100% of the SU2300 equipped Acer AS1410's have this problem we're set! I just can't get a lot of people to test this to see if their's too have this problem.

 

Interesting... what do you all figure this procedure "resets"... :-?
The physical charging circuit, or the SW battery "meter"?

I'm assuming that holding the pwr button for 30s discharges any residual energy in the caps... :-/

 

Don't know. This is just what Acer tech support said for me to try.
Didn't make any difference.
For what it's worth, 3-4 more people have cropped up with the same problem with this same su2300 equipped AS1410.

Not that this is what I would consider 'normal' (drawing power when OFF), but it does appear to not be a problem limited to only my laptop.

 

Recently bought a AS1410-2706 from TigerDirect.com with the SU2300 processor. It also has ~5% battery discharge per day. Trying to decide if I should keep the laptop or not...

 

Well I did it (just to be sure) and tbh I didn't like the idea of putting the battery back on while the system was running... :-/ But I did it anyways, because that's exactly per the instructions and Windows basically could not report the status of the battery, period... but after a reboot Windows was able to "talk to" the battery again...

HW Monitor states that my 62160mWh battery is "fully charged" at 58852mWh. The battery itself is officially rated at 5600mAh. I'm not an engineer, so I will have to assume that 62160mWh is roughly equivalent to 5600mAh (formula, anyone?) and regardless of that figure, that the battery can only hold 95% of the "designed capacity".

Now I'm ready to test the drain stats...

 

any update Traveller?

 

Hey,
I been toting around my Dell XPS M1330 for the past four days ( 96hrs), having essentially avoided the 1810TZ just to see what the battery would do and I just cranked it up, amazed to see that the battery was still 100% charged. HW Monitor showed 58852mWh as always... .

So you, or the specific model+BIOS you use definitely has a problem, I'm afraid

EDIT: It may be important to note that I have disabled my Ethernet device as I have no use for an Ethernet connection, having both WLAN and WWAN access points. AFAIK, "Wake on LAN" functionality is only available for LAN (& not WLAN, etc). so this could be a factor... Instead of toggling WOL bits why don't just disable the device entirely? Are you even using Ethernet? Then you can avoid all the changes below...

Finally, to properly test drainage, first connect the Notebook to an AC source and then (immediately) start it & check the battery status. Who knows how much effort it takes to crank up your Notebook on battery; in any event it wil certainly skew the results...

 

Good suggestion! I'll give that a try! I don't use the RJ-45 ethernet at all.
Did you just disable it in the network properties menu?
Dave

 

Use the Device Manager. Better yet, use 1810Tray

 

Okay, I've disabled it in the hardware manager. Will charge to 100% overnight and then unplug it for a couple of days to see if the drain stops.

 

Formula: Power (mWh)= Current (mAh) * Current Voltage (V)
54868 mWh = 4400 mAh * 12.47 V

 

Thank you sir I actually was thinking in that direction (P=IV?) but when I used 12V, I didn't get very far...

REP +1

 

This might be premature, but normally my notebook looses 2% of battery charge while tuned off over night, but i disabled NETWORK BOOT in the bios and my battery was still at 100% when i turned it on today.

 

No luck here. Disabled wired ethernet adapter, turned off laptop, fully charged it overnight, unplugged it Fri morning. Turned it on 2 days later and it's at 89% charge.

That's for booting from the network instead of the HD, CD drive, USB drive, etc. Shouldn't have anything to do with power consumption when off.

Just in case I'm disabling mine too and will see what happens. If it still drains I really should just ship it back as an RMA.

Edit: I'm sending it back. Enough with me trying to figure out what's wrong. I just filled out the RMA request on Acer's website. Wrote a note and attached it to the laptop and am charging it to 100% so it can 'drain' on the way to them in shipping.

Since I only use it on weekends, I shouldn't miss it much. I just hope their RMA center doesn't follow a script like their tech support does and just blame the battery.

Dave

 

Funny thing the blue charged power light on the front of my 5810T usually turns off a few seconds after i shut the notebook down when on mains power , but since i disabled the NETWORK BOOT the blue power light stays on, but i always turn the mains power off during the night then the blue light does go off.

 

my "mains" (AC) blue LED is always on when on AC and the battery is charged... :-/

 

Same here. When plugged in it is orange when charging, blue when not charging .

 

Well two days and my battery is still showing as 100%

 

Ex-ce-llent
Well I'd like to think that there is a link between Ethernet "wake/boot on" and the battery consumption*, how else can we explain your & my success. It does make sense, when you think about what "wake on Lan" implies; The Notebook has to be actively "listening" for a signal via Ethernet... .

What really kills me is why is WOL / BOL "enabled" by default on a damned Notebook??? How silly is that...

*However, Probedude tried all-of-the-above and still had no luck...

 

Yeah , you right wake on lan should be disabled by default.

 

If the problem is with the BIOS and not actually in the hardware, then there should be a way to mod the BIOS to solve the issue - just like the bios MOD to activate VTx.... now what we need is someone with the skills to do that...

Or maybe Acer will address this issue ina a future BIOS update.. After a flurry of BIOS updates around the time W7 was released Acer has not made any further updates though... lets hope they are working on it..

 

The one thing I didn't try was disabling "Boot from Lan" in the bios.
Was going to test it but then convinced myself that it was just selecting the boot order, not a 'wake on lan' type of setup.

I was already losing track of time and decided I really should just RMA the laptop before too much time had passed.

What I'm hoping for is:
- the problem gets fixed
- that the RMA center doesn't screw something else up - like ding the case, monitor, or give me a functional problem that I didn't have before.

Dave

 

No worries, I haven't even messed with that BIOS setting and still have no battery drain problems...

 

Well, I'm unlucky enough. Disabling "Boot from lan" does not help..

 

Got a ship notice on my RMA. Will receive it at the end of this week.

 

I my 1410 back from RMA repair for the battery drain issue. Nothing was done.
"Repair Comments: Power switch is software driven and will use power even when not powered on. Within factory specs."

I guess that ends that.

It would be great if laptop reviews would measure charge loss when a laptop is off. It may be common for some brands and models, but it should be published and not left to us end users to find out on our own.

Dave

 

Hi,

Try this:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=465257

 

I turned off "wake on lan" in the bios (it's called something else) - made no difference. Was at 73% power 2 days ago when I turned it off, at 60% tonight and dropping when I turned it on tonight.
Dave

 

That's a load of B.S....

It wouldn't hurt but a few of us (inluding myself) have already posted little to NO loss (within your testing period of a few days). Thus The RMA center was just not that concerned and/or convinced about your problem, something that sometimes happens with all repair centers, not just ACER-related...

 

Wish I could talk to a live person that cared over at the Acer repair dept.

Dave

 

I feel for ya / wish I could suggestion something else but I'm out of ideas... :-/

Good luck / keep searching, though!

 

the 1410 is so mired in QA problems, it's ridiculous. No wonder it had a relatively quick run.

Battery drain issue (check), RAM slot high pitched whine (check), White and/or EMI noise from headphone output (check), HSF metal on metal grind (check). I also have occasionally had the stiff/sticky keys that I've seen at least 1-2 describe.