L502x battery issue?

I've had my system for a little over a year now, and use the battery pretty heavily during the school year at the university. Recently, I've noticed my battery percentage takes an odd dive towards the end of its discharge. I was at 17%, getting ready to plug it in, when I got the Windows pop-up warning message that I was at 7% and the machine was getting ready to hibernate

Do you think my battery's dying already? Or maybe I need a driver? I did a clean Windows install at the start of the summer -- didn't notice this phenomenon before then.

Thanks!

 

I don't know why Windows would report 17% and then suddenly drop to 7% without warning, it might just be that your battery calibration is a little bit off. Also, check your battery wear to see what you are at. You can use HWMonitor (free) to check that.

I've never had to calibrate a battery before, and I know there's various methods to do it. The most common one I think is to charge up your battery to full, reboot your computer and go into BIOS, and then just let your battery drain while in BIOS. Apparently this somehow helps cycle the battery.

Personally I don't think calibrating really helps, unless you're noticing and unbelievable drain (e.g. 2 months ago you got 5 hours, now you only get 2 hours). But I could be dead wrong... Hopefully others can chime in on this matter.

 

If it was only an isolated incident, then it probably was a decalibrated battery gauge. You should just recharge the battery to 100% to help recalibrate the battery gauge and continue normal use.

 

Thanks for the input guys, coincidentally I left it plugged in for a period of a couple days. Needless to say, it's completely recharged again (not that I don't fully recharge nearly every time anyway). I can't recall another time I had this weird jump, so hopefully it was just a quirk in the calibration like you are saying. We'll have to see! If I have further problems I'll let you know.

 

Here's an update: I left the machine on standby yesterday with about 20% of the battery left...came back this morning and the unit was dead. I thought fine, that's normal, it should just have hibernated. So, I plugged it in. I booted up to the "Windows did not shut down successfully" window, followed by a battery showing just 1%! My power options are set to hibernate at 5% battery (windows default)...what's going on here?!