Help with notebook battery

Hi,

I have an acer aspire 5580 thats a little over a year old.
Recently, the battery has only been lasting 20 minutes. I've had other issues..errors with burning cds and with the notebook being really slow. Long story short, I reinstalled everything and its working like a charm. I also recalibrated the battery. (turned off notifications/actions and did a deep drain) I should mention that all of these issues started at the same time.

Before, the battery lasted 20 mins before I got warnings and a minute later it would shut down. It would take less than 1/2 hr to charge as well. When I did the deep drain, it lasted an hour and then took 1.5 hrs to charge.
Now the battery meter is not reading correctly at all. It goes from showing 100% constant for about 20 mins to giving me a warning all of a sudden.

Is there any way I can get the battery meter to read correctly? Or do I need to do another drain/charge? Alternatively, do you think my battery is about to give up the ghost?

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

You could try the freezing technique. Some say that it worked for them. I tried it with two batteries but did not work for me.
You wrap the baterry with newspaper or kitchen roll, then put it in a plastic bag, then leave it in the freezer over night. when you remove it from the freezer leave it a side until it reach an ambinat temperature before testing it.

I've been told once that if I'm getting only about 40minutes on my battery, that this is a sign that my battery needs to be replaced. I mean maybe it's time for a replacement.

 

Do the deep drain / full recharge cycle a couple of times, allowing an hour or so before starting the recharge.

Also use BatteryMon or the Battery Info page of RMClock to see the fully charged capacity and the drain rate.

Batteries do lose capacity with time. I expect to lose about 1/3rd of capacity per year. However, some batteries are better and some are worse. Maybe you've got one of the latter.

John

 

Thanks folks.
I'm not going to try the freezer trick, for the simple reason that the battery does still work. And I think 1hr (with wireless on) is reasonable considering the age of the notebook and how I've used the battery.

Sorry to bug, but I was wondering. I installed batterymon and its having a hard time with the battery too BUT do these numbers sound right to you?
The full charge capacity seems way out of whack to me.

Design Capacity 44400 mWh (4036 mAh)
Full Charge Capacity 726773 mWh (66070 mAh)

After 10 minutes, batterymon is not showing any decrease in battery life which tells me its still not reading it accurately. I guess another couple of discharges are in order? Each discharge does seem to be improving things. I'm guessing it'll either fix the probably totally or my battery will just finally die its final death.

Thanks!

 

Those are strange values for the battery capacity. I would expect the Battery Info page of RMClock will give similar numbers because they read the same basic info. The other bit of relevant data is the power consumption when running on battery.

I would note that web browsing with sites which use flash can use significant power. Multi-tabbed browsers means you can have these pages running in windows you are not viewing and they even continue to run if you leave the browser open when you cut the internet connection. I use Firefox with FlashBlock.

John