ASUS G51V (BestBuy) Battery Problem

Two years ago, I bought the ASUS G51V gaming laptop from BestBuy, which came with Windows Vista. I have since upgraded to Windows 7 and done one or two system restores. For the first year or so that I had the laptop, the battery life began to deteriorate very quickly, to the point where 100% would last about 5 minutes before immediately shutting off - no hibernation, no nothing. The power would just cut off. Since then, I've been running it off of AC power.

I'm about to go off to college, and need to be able to use my laptop without having to plug it in. I ordered a new battery for it, and just got it in the mail today. I put it in with the laptop on, and my laptop identified it, saying it was at 74% charge, and charging.



But as soon as I unplugged my laptop from AC power, it shut off. I left it plugged in for a while, restarted it, gave the battery a few minutes to charge, and looked at the battery life only to see it was still at 74%. I tried doing a battery calibration through the BIOS, but I don't see any "Power Options" in it, and though I have the files to do so, I don't know how to update my BIOS and don't want to rick messing anything up, especially since I'm not sure it will even fix the problem. Can anyone help me with this?

 

Go into the Power Plan, and disable the low battery turnoff %. Then let the machine run down to 0. Then power it back to 100%.

As for the BIOS, take a USB stick that is formatted for FAT32, and put the ROM file that you extracted from the file you downloaded onto it. Reboot, and hit F2 for the BIOS, and run the EZ Flash utility (2nd Tab) and load the file from the USB stick. Follow the prompts.

 

I ended up getting the BIOS updated through EasyFlash. Just stuck it in my C drive. That calibration won't work though, because it shuts off as soon as I take it off of AC power. Doesn't even switch over to battery power.

The thing that makes me think it's not the battery is that it's been doing something close to the same thing with my old battery for over a year now.

 

For future reference... I've seen about 8 people brick themselves using EasyFlash and using their C: drive (NTFS) This is why I tell people to use a FAT32 USB stick when using the BIOS utility.

Maybe you have something wrong on the contacts or motherboard. I think it's RMA time for you.

 

Ugh... I was afraid of that. Thanks for your help.