So, how screwed is my battery?

Being someone that doesn't go out very much, I tend to only use my battery maybe once every 7-10 days, and over the last... 3 weeks I suppose, I hadn't really unplugged my computer for more than 10 minutes at a time.

Now I go to use it today, I've been getting really bad numbers with it.

First few minutes were okay, stayed at 100%.
After about 8 minutes, It went from 100 to 41%.
10 minutes after that it dropped to 34%.
3 minutes after that it went back up to something near 70%
and a few minutes after that, It dropped to 20%, which is where I plugged it in because I was downloading a ISO and I didn't want to risk screwing the download up, and even the charging rate was being erratic, ranging from jumping 5% over the course of a minute to not going anywhere for a good 15.

Now I'm at home, I decided to do a drain on it to see if its just calibrated really badly after sitting for 3 weeks, and I've gone from 100%, down to 50, 30, 12, 7, 34, 10 and 0 over the course of 45 minutes, and magically, now I have 60% again

I'll report later and see if I can get the ~2 hours I normally get out of my HDX's battery, but am I right in assuming it's just a screwed meter?


Oh, and I only had 20~25% wear on the battery before today, now I'm getting anything between 30% and 75% wear according to Batterybar

 

Sounds like you have a defective battery. Either that, or the sensor that is reading the outputs and inputs from your battery is messed up and isn't reading the proper numbers.

 

Did a full discharge early this morning and let it sit out overnight, and let it charge to what it says is 100%, and running another run down right now has dropped the wear from 40% back down to 31%, so at least its sort of normal now. The battery itself is some 16 months old now so..... meh.


At least I'm not getting the wildly variable percents anymore.

 

Hopefully the calibration worked and your getting accurate readings now. If anything, there are always batteries that are pretty cheap on ebay. They aren't as good as the HP ones, but for the price you can't really complain.

 

It took about 4 different drains before it stopping jumping between numbers, but its settled around 32% wear, even though I'm still getting about 100 minutes or so. I'll worry about getting a new battery if it goes up to 50% wear, or I start getting less than a hour.

Maybe I should have gotten one of those extended life batteries with the 3 year warranty >.>;