Timeline 4810 win7 battery (and other) issues

For the past 5 months that ive owned m laptop, i have been running the Windows 7 RC. However, given that i will be leaving the country for the next four months (during which time my RC license will expire) i did a clean install to an RTM (retail) copy of windows 7 ultimate 64 a few days ago. Since then, ive noticed some bothersome issues:

battery life is fluctuating heavily, and the predictions are nowhere near as high as they used to be (with the win7 RC i got 7 hours or so in practical use)

the Launch Manager software is not really working, when i unplug i dont see the battery logo come up on screen like i used to when i unplug, and instead get random changes in brightness and beep sounds when nothing seems to be happening (i think thats related to the optical drive management software) the other touch buttons, like wifi do show a logo on screen when clicked, but the battery button does not.

in the time i have spent writing this post, the battery indicator has predicted 5 hours, 5 hours 30 min, 7 hours 30 min, and 6 hours, all between 85 and 83%. i know it fluctuates some because its calculated based on usage, but this is way more than it ever did before.

in addition i cant install the VGA drivers from acer because it says my computer doesnt meet the minimum specs when i try to install.

anyone else had similar issues or solutions?

 

I'd back up your files and do a clean install. There are ways to do a clean install / activate with an upgrade copy.

If that's not possible, try downloading the Acer management software... the power management etc. It sounds like you're having issues with the computer not running at full speed (cpu) even when plugged in. I had that issue with the driver when I tried to install it on battery.

 

it WAS a clean install to the RTM version actually (i wrote 'upgrade' without realizing it in the OP, have edited that now, my mistake), yesterday was when i did all this, it was a fully clean install of windows 7 ultimate 64. i re-downloaded and installed all the drivers and everything, since none of the battery management or launch manager drivers come with win7 of course, but im still having these issues.

Battery life seems to be the main issue, and its pretty bad. Right now it predicts 45 minutes left with around 20%. im playing music and web browsing, thats it. if you do the numbers that comes out to around 4 hours of total battery life, which is pitiful compared to what i got with the windows 7 RC (i had the Acer power management running on that too.)
when this timeline had the windows 7 RC on it, 20% battery usually yielded a prediction between 1 hour 15 and 1 hour 30, about double what its saying now.

I cant have this laptop getting 4 hours of battery life when i go to europe, the whole reason i got the thing was because i knew having 8 hours would be incredibly useful when traveling about. i do feel the urge to reiterate how disheartening this is to anyone from microsoft reading this... i essentially lost half my batter life by upgrading from a BETA to the real deal, and that aint right

 

Bump!

I really need some advice here! battery is at 93% and predicting 4.5 hours, and this is supposed to be an 8+ hour timeline! i really dont understand how a clean install to Windows 7 RTM is making this thing so much worse! i had the windows 7 RC and i got 6-8 hours, and this is showing under 5 at nearly full!

 

i only getting 6 hours out of my 1810t on max powersaving settings maybe you have to put it on powersaving mode

 

Looks like I found a companion after long two weeks

Yes I faced these problems for first few days. I later reinstalled the system again not knowing where I did wrong. The next time I installed everything I used command prompt opened as in Administrator mode to install the Acer softwares (All the power management related stuffs). Even after this Windows showed my system as having max battery of 5 hours and 30 min. But I don't know what did the trick whether the windows 7 updates or the power management softwares self learning, with in one week the system started showing even upto 12 hours of battery.

Later on the advise of a poster [I thank him for the advise] asked me to install the BatteryBar software in which it shows the battery discharge rate. Look at the discharge rate and the Acer/Windows battery meter reading and you can easily understand why Windows reading fluctuating so much Windows seems to use the discharge rate directly on each and every refresh.

This is what I understood, hope it helps you.

 

interesting... so for you the problem seemed to just solve itself over time? i know you said you would see up to 12 hours, but now that your battery issue is "solved" how much battery life are you getting on average? with the RC i got 6-7, and that would be an acceptable level for me. 4-5 makes me simply feel ripped off

 

If I am just browsing using my wireless on, I get between 6-7 hours, thats slightly more than what I used to get on my Vista. After using my laptop for now two weeks after the last installation, for basic use I am sure to get 8-9 hours. But hey, how can I sit on my laptop for that long too I need to do some load test when I get more time. But I can assure 7-8 hours is definite for normal use.

Now, once you install the BatteryBar you can see that the discharge will fluctuate based on the processor usage (check manager), DVD Drive/Hard disk read/write and active wifi usage. For example if you are downloading something which needs longer time, the system may give you max of 5 hours. But simple browsing I easily get to the 6 hour mark.

 

i installed battery bar (i had read that same advice months ago when i put the Windows 7 Release candidate on it) and it says 4:57 as the batterys full lifetime, but i havnt been patient enough to see the battery fluctuate, going to do a full test starting now. put on the power saver battery profile and the acer power manager software (installed as an admin in cmd) is on. i also set the power profile so that the screen doesnt turn off no matter what. let ya'll know what my results are later on

 

my test (windows 7 RTM 64 bit, acer power manager software was turned on and i had installed the software today) gave me a pitiful 4 hours 30 minutes. i had itunes playing continuously at medium volume over headphones and i set up a web site to refresh every 30 seconds and let things go.

Im going to take JimmyJ's advice and wait 4-5 days, test again and simply see what happens. i really hope it works, and if anyone else has any other advice it would be greatly appreciated

 

Not sure how accurate BatteryBar is as it gives different readings to the windows battery level gauge. I have the 1810TZ and to get a better picture of what is happening run powercfg -energy, in my case it puts the report in C:\Users\myname. What it does show is a correlation with BatteryBar in the full design capacity and last full charge but also includes which/what is using resources and potential errors. Worth looking at

 

Once the system starts up allow it to idle for sometime and then look at the discharge rate which battery bar says[Just point the mouse over the battery bar]. If your dicharge rate on idle condition is more than 8000mW then something is eating into your battery.

Also please do the suggestion which sunbeam mentioned above it will give you a picture of who is the culprit Thanks sunbeam I will give it a try too, never done before.


Oh missed to ask you one thing, you grapgics card is it Intel 4500MHD or the ATI 4330?

 

i ran the powercfg (but i didnt realize until afterward that i had the batter plugged in the whole time, which also led me to the question, when i run powercfg should i try to be doing what i usually so while i use the laptop- obviously without the charger in- or leave it idle?) i think i might need help figuring out what to do with a lot of this stuff, and i think i might post my info once i do a better powercfg run tomorrow

it is the intel GMA onboard.

i havnt been able to test it idle yet, but with internet and IM open it was showing it going up to just under 8000 discharge rate, again that is with things happening

 

Well I guess under 8000 is normal, mine comes in the range of 6500-8000 while using the wireless and crosses the 10,000 on active downloads.

Check how much is the maximum capacity your battery has. In the battery bar popup the value can be seen along with 'Capacity'. Mine is 61528mWH. I have a wear of 1.8% [Shouldn't have fully discharged my battery often I guess.] So at 8000 rate mine would just touch the 8 hr mark. Isn' that good enough

Also please note that BatteryBar seem to use historical usage data to calculate remaining hours, so I always use a calculator to find out how much is really left atleast it makes me happy

 

my idle discharge rate ended up being over 10000, so i ran powercfg and am going to go into services and make a whole heck of a lot of changes

as for capacity, 57000. my ware is 7.8% (!) and ive owned this laptop since august.

im really not sure whats going on... its like a horror movie, nothing i do seems to make this battery perform like it used to on an OLDER version of windows 7

i used battery bar when i had the windows 7 RC on here, but i stopped using it because it was like a doomsday clock, it always predicted at minimum an hour less than what windows predicted (despite the fact that i would always get the windows predicted usage time in my tests) And seeing the HUGE amount of ware just made me sad, and a little confused because i dont think i should have 7% ware after 5 months... now it seems to give about the same gloomy predictions as windows

ive been going into 'services' now and trying to shut down unnecessary things but SO many of them are simply regular system services.

 

I have a 3810TG and like yours, my battery capacity is also around 56xxx mWh. It went down to that level because I discharged the battery to zero. But it actually has stayed at that level since new for the last 3 months or so. So I'm guessing, it isnt really that worn yet and will likely remain stable at this level for some time to come.

Just FYI, my power draw under W7 (with Intel 4500 GPU) is roughly:
6-7W idle
8-9W Wifi surfing
10-11W Surfing with USB 3G modem
12-13W watching 720P video with DXVA

This is with the backlight at minimum.
My CPU is an SU9400 and my HDD is a 7200rpm Hitachi 7K320.