No Battery Current(I) Meter on ZV6000 & R4000 Series Notebooks

Normally when running on battery power you will get the % used and time in minutes, remaining. These notebooks do not have this feature!

I have also found that Mobile Meter has no reading for Current(I) under the charge rate.

No charge information and no dis-charge information.

It looks like HP has either not designed a battery Current(I) meter into the motherboard, or more likely, they are not reporting the battery charge and dis-charge Current(I) information from bios to the operating system (Windows).

Although this is not the biggest issue in the world, it makes it impossible for us to get an accurate "Wear Level" from Mobile Meter, or the time remaining under the current power consumption.

I would encourage people to call HP and ask them about this. Try to get them to kick this thing to engineering. I believe a simple bios change could correct this one. It' very hard to believe they do not use this information in their own charge circuit.

But then again, they have done several things that are hard to believe.

 

Yes, I was annoyed when I found out that my zv5000z didn't say the battery time remaining. I think the problem lies not with the notebook itself but with the battery. It's just a guess, but I think the battery needs to support "intelligent" monitoring in order to report the estimated time remaining.

Hope this helps.

 

Krispy,

I thought all Lithium Ion batteries were "Smart/Intelligent" or am I mistaken?

-Vb-

 

Or that part of MobileMeter just isn't compatible with HP notebooks, or HP didn't implement that part of ACPI correctly so MobileMeter can't read it... actually, the latter is probably the case.

 

You guys may be talking about a different meter, but my R4000 series laptop has a battery meter in the sys tray. Reports the percentage of life remaining.

 

Yep, it only reports the percentage of life remaining, but most laptops also give the time left(in hours, minutes...)

 

wait the zv6000 doesnt have a battery remaining meter? you mean indicator in the computer or on the battery? i know that some batteries have a button on it that you can press to show the green led lights of how much battery is still left.

isnt the battery indicator on the laptop a software that compares with windows?

 

It would have a battery icon at the bottom right of your screen in the system tray that would tell you what percentage of battery life is remaining. It just doesn't show it in a "time left" format.

It doesn't bother me much. Seems to me the time left method would not be very accurate because it could say you have an hour left, but it doesn't know what you will be using the laptop for during that hour. You may start using a more demanding application that will use more power than you were using at the time the reading was taken, and therefore the time left estimation would in the end be overstated.

 

We're talking about MobileMeter, an exceedingly useful app.

 

Brainstretch,

- Does that software tell how much time remaining for using the notebook batt?

- About the batt status, yeh, I found the same difficulty on my L2000. Could this be attributed to the AMD processor? 'cause the remaining time info was available on my previous HP laptops (ZE4949US and ZD7000), which both of them run on P-M and P-4 respectively.

 

No, just CPU and HD temps and CPU speed.

No. My zv5000z gives remaining battery time info.

 

Exactly! It is important. I still maintain this is most likely a bios issue, but, I could be wrong.

It's so frustrating that we can't just call and get answers.

We have to walk around wondering why, or can, or will it be fixed.

No real recourse.

 

My apologies for a liberal use of the term smart/intelligent. I was just trying to point out that the problem of not reporting battery time remaining lies with the battery and not with the notebook.

 

Brian, where do you find the battery time remaining? I don't see it on mine.

Russ

 

Hmm, I thought it did... maybe it doesn't, just percentages.