odd battery situation anyone ever seen this

just got a system in here and it only came with a 4 cell battery. this is a clevo 12.1". battery and system are brand new.

charged it up fully and installed vista. unplugged it and started to use it to finish a few things. battery went to 63% and then just dropped to 7% and shut down.. i thought maybe it didnt get a good initial charge it the reading was off. so i let it charge for about 4 hours this time again it said it was 100%. this time at 54% it just dropped to 7% and shutdown. actually have to pull the battery to get the system to restart either with the plug or battery otherwise it doesnt do anything.

swapped ram, hdd, wifi, and cpu out for different ones...

this time charged to 100% once again. now it hit 46-47% and dropped and shut down.

i ran a battery calibrate program but this time it made it all the way through the charge????? it was run down at 50% cpu usage

i also checked it with hardware control monitor and believe it or not that reports the battery as being already 33% wasted this is a brand new battery...

now the first 2 times i had it happen was the same minute (within the first minute or so) i signed online with it to test the internet connection. was not online for a minute bam 7%...

i thought maybe it was the wifi card (intel 5300) so i swapped it out with a realtek one just to see what happend. only to have the same result. so its not the card..

so do you think this is just the battery or possibly the mobo. ive never had a battery behave quite like this one..

the other odd thing is when i start charging it. ill plug it in and it goes up to 7%-maybe 14% then all of a sudden shows 30+% charged within like one minute of saying 14%??????

this is a clevo slightly older model m720r...

any ideas? i can have them rma the battery but im wondering if it may be the notebook itself or not..

 

Get a new battery. People post these issues from time to time on here and it is always an issue with the battery. Might have to do with one cell being weaker then the others, so at the 50% voltage it opens the circuit to protect itself and thus cuts most of the capacity off because the other cells can't support it.

Either way, RMA the system+battery, or the battery. Theres nothing you can do (or should have to do) with a new system.

 

yeah i figured that i hate to have to send back the whole system.. ill try for a new battery first... if that doesnt work then back it will go.. this sucks. what really sucks is even in the rundown test this thing only lasted 50 minutes on power saver mode!!!!!.. man i know its a 4cell but that is aweful. i hope the new battery is at least closer to 1.5hours....

 

If your really losing 40-50% of your battery life to this then 1.5 hours would be fairly reasonable. Also, a proper battery may give you longer life per % used. I don't know much about the Clevo 12" line though, so you'll just have to trade it and see what happens.

 

yeah as i said it says 100% in vista but in all the monitoring programs it shows it as 33% gone already .... so the battery is not reporting properly i would assume