Laptop power bug in RC1?

Greetings - I installed RC1 on my dv4z yesterday - and all was well until I started to run it on battery power. The dv4z doesn't have good battery life anyway but I have encountered a problem. This morning - I completely shut down the system - and noticed that it was at 51% battery. I rebooted it four hours later and found it at 28% battery. This never happened on Vista - and I have been running it in Power Saver mode. Does anyone have any ideas or have you heard anything about this? TIA...

 

When you say completely shut down do you mean you turned the notebook off or did you hibernate it? If you hibernate or use sleep mode it does still use a small trickle charge.

However if you did turn it off and then back on and the battery percentage reported was lower then one of two things could be the cause.

1) Your battery is naturally dying, remember lithium cells gradually lose their ability to hold a charge as time goes by.

2) This one is the more likely of the 2. Battery percentages are only an estimate so you will notice that sometimes the percentage and time remaining that is reported is often incorrect. I found this to be the case in both windows XP and windows vista so I would expect it to happen in windows 7 as well.

However as you said windows 7 has not been officially released yet therefore there is a chance that everything isn't calibrated yet.

 

Evolution - Thanks for your input - good point on #1 - dying battery. The dv4z was not booted for over six months - and the battery was as dead as a doornail when I came back home. It was OK for a few days - on Vista anyway. I just booted it on battery power, after it had sat unplugged for six hours, and it showed 79% in Win 7 and 78% a minute or two later in Vista. It is otherwise a pretty nice system - especially with the LED LCD - but I hate to sink another $100 into it for a battery.

 

Just for the record here, Hibernation doesn't use power once the system shuts off.

 

oops that is correct my mistake ! Sorry

 

I noticed the same error today too and I thought that maybe I was dreaming when I left my battery power at 30% only to notice it has come down to a complete 0% not turning on without the power cable after trying to turn it on after 8 hours.

I hope this was some error from my side. Will try again

 

Hmmm - I smell a rat with HP batteries. If you go to HP shopping you will see that the dv4/dv5/dv6 series 6-cell replacement batteries have a bad reputation. I went to the HP site and they suggested that I calibrate the battery - which is running right now. I'm hoping that calibration will solve this - but it is odd that the problem suddenly popped up.

 

You might want to look in your power profiles and see what your settings are. When I checked mine on my Asus G2S I saw that the power button was defaulted to putting the computer to sleep, not shutting it down.

 

Thanks to all for your input and concern. I finished the battery calibration and have some good news. The system ran for 2:59 before finally shutting down at 7% - so I'm pretty sure it would have run three hours if I hadn't changed the (default) critical battery setting from 5% to 7%. The bad news is that it reported unusual battery levels each time I checked it thru the three hours - one time it said 74% - I came back a few minutes later and it reported 82%. Hopefully the calibration fixed the percentage-remaining errors. Anyways - otherwise - Win 7 RC runs like a champ and I continue to be happy with it and the dv4z.

 

Running full 1000Nit brightness, keyboard lit, 2 programs runnings, I am showing 7:49 remaining after I unplug from a full recharge. I have squeezed 10 hours out of XP before. The most I ever showed with Vista is around 6:30 hours. So basically, I am showing a little better than Vista.