8 Minute Battery Life

I've got a Compaq Persario R3000 and when charged to 100%, I unpluged the power cable and 8 minutes later I get a Low Battery Alarm, 2% battery left.

My Dell XPS Gen2 had better battery life than this does, and it had a huge 6800 Ultra card in it.

Any ideas?

 

obviously time for a new battery.

www.shopping.hp.com

 

Not what I was hoping to hear, but thanks for the quick response.

 

Geez that's fast...how old is your battery?

 

The notebook was bought in October 2004

 

Yeah, I really hate to break it to you, but that's about the shelf life on these things. Especially if you're using it a lot. I know not what you want to hear, but welcome to "disposable technology"

 

*sigh* Time to check eBay. Thanks for the help!

 

8 minute? wtf...lol

 

MobileMeter's Battery Info tab will tell you how high your battery's wear level is. Yours is likely extremely high.

TechExcess.net carries HP batteries. Sometimes they do neat battery/power brick combo deals. Always nice to have a spare brick for travelling.

 

2 Years is weak.

Your battery might only need calibration.

Maybe the chemical of the battery is still very good, but the power gauge is wrong.

To calibrate your battery, you need to charge it at 100%, and then drain it completely. In order to completely drain your battery, you have to let it go down to 0%. Windows will not let you do that with their warnings (it will shutdown when the gauge reads less than 3% ... but that gauge could be wrong).

You will need to charge at 100%, then go to the BIOS, or any DOS-based interface. I suggest you go into the BIOS, it's easier. Let the notebook run of its batteries, until it shuts down by itself. Then charge the battery back to 100%.

You should now then try and see if the situation improves. If it does not, I guess it's time for a new battery.

 

You could try calibrate battery. To stop windows from shutting down, you can go in safemode or leave laptop in bios. That way you can drain battery completely. But I doubt calibration would be that off.

BTW, I had similar thing happend( not 8 min, but 20 min) on my previous dell latittudes within 1 year. But that has not been the case with Toshiba and Thinkpad. Toshiba I used to give 2:30 min when new, after 2 years of use it was giving arounf 1:45min to 2:00min. Calibration only helped by around 10 min I remember.

 

It never hurts to try re-calibrating the battery. Short battery life can be normal wearing after certain re-charging cycles or it could be just a calibration issue. It should be noted that it is actually the charge-discharge cycle that caused the wearing of the battery rather than the age of the battery. If you drain the battery everyday, you'll need a new battery in a year or so.
Another place for getting HP batteries is batteries.com. They had a 25% off coupon last month and shipping is usually free for laptop battery. Search around for coupon.

 

I would like to differ here. Li-Ion batteries specific to laptops have shelf-life also. Even if do not use the battery at all, it is going to loose it's capacity in few years( ofcourse not as much as if it is used).

It looks like it is more so, if the storage temp is high. So, cooler the battery, the better life.

And BTW, Li-Ion batteries does not like deep discharge that much, so do not try to empty the battery. There is no memory affect to Li-Ions, but you need to recalibrate to synch with Power meter once in a while.