Dieing battery? GPU is also acting up.

Lets start with the battery; I believe it's dieing. It will charge quickly to about 60%, but after that, it take hours to reach 100%. I assume since the battery is over a year old and gets used everyday that it's slowing wearing out? I can't get any information on it's health and I have never reset the Battery Gauge. It does hold a charge just fine and still gets the same battery life it always has.

The GPU problem is a rather odd one. It isn't giving me enough clock speed in games. Say I fire game X up, and I'm only getting 30fps. I look at GPU-z and both clocks are both at 300MHz. Stock, it should go up to 550 and 800. Any ideas on why it's not going up? I have to manually input those in an overclock tool for the GPU to work correctly. I overclock 90% of the time so this isn't the biggest problem in the world. This isn't a sign that the GPU is failing?

If you need more information, let me know

Thanks,
~350

 

Have you checked the Powermizer settings? Perhaps something is throttling the GPU down.

 

I'm not familiar with that... A quick Google search shows it's for Nvidia cards. Does this effect ATI cards as well?

I should have said this in my original post. These two problems are not related. I thought I would kill two birds with one stone.

 

no, ATI cards have power saving features as well, it is in the Catalyst Control Center, usually called 'power play' or some such (I had a ATI card in a laptop last year, there is a power saving feature, and it works best when it is disabled), it sounds like this is your issue (check what Windows power plan you are on as well); it could also be possible that your laptop has a down clocked version of that chip (though not too likely)

try out 'battery bar' and see what it tells you for battery life, charge rate, and wear

 

The battery said usually starts to wear out after 2 years, depend how well you kept the battery charged the lifespan varies. From your explanation the laptop rapid charge the battery up to 60% then starts 'ticker' charge. The ticker charge method if i remember right is to make sure a fully charge operation and helps less need to recalibrate it often. And effected the area by update BIOS firmware.

As for the ATI Power Play, its enabled by default when you install the AMD driver, and like Agent 9 said it is soldered into Windows Power Plan on your taskbar corner. Change the power plan to Balance or High will enable the CPU and GPU performance to max. I use ATI as well

 

You can try unplugging your laptop, draining the battery down, shutting off your laptop, taking the battery out, putting it back in, plugging it in, and letting it charge for a while so that it is back up to 100%, and then turning it on.

(Please note:I'm terrible at the technical stuff. I'm just suggesting something that I would try.....)

 

Well the GPU problem is fixed. Sure enough it was Power Play that was downing my clock speeds. I'm not sure why though, as it has been on for months and I haven't had a problem with it.

I'm going to do a Battery Gauge Reset right now and see if the battery improves.

 

Well the battery is getting even more odd. I have my battery to stop charging at 80% and I just let it charge to 100%. It was charging at ~3mW compared to ~35mW when below 60%. Then out of nowhere it shows that the battery is done charging and it at 100%. The fact that I told to stop charging at 80% is throwing everything off? I don't really know how to explain it.

 

there is an option in the lenovo care to reset the battery, maybe thats what is in need, but Im thinking of degraded battery and possible failure. My battery now holds 10min of charge