Windows 7 upgrades Vista laptops to lower battery life

Windows 7 upgrades Vista laptops to lower battery life
Time to replace your brand new battery

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/windows_7_laptop_battery_issues/

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Operating Systems, 29th January 2010 06:39 GMT

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Laptop owners upgrading their Windows XP and Windows Vista machines to Windows 7 are complaining that Microsoft's new OS has severely reduced their available battery life.

One user tells The Reg that after upgrading his circa 2007 HP notebook from Vista to Windows 7, the machine's battery life dropped from two hours to a half hour, and countless others are voicing similar complaints on Microsoft's TechNet forums.

The problem is caused by a new tool designed to alert users when their battery needs replacing. In some cases, according to TechNet posts, this alert appears time and again - even as a battery continues to run as it always did - falsely warning that the machine may suddenly shutdown. But in other cases, the machine does shutdown prematurely. It would seem this occurs well before the battery has run out of juice.

In a statement sent to The Reg, Microsoft has acknowledged the issue, saying it's related to the way Windows 7 reads system firmware. "We are investigating this issue in conjunction with our hardware partners," the statement reads. "The warning received in Windows 7 uses firmware information to determine if battery replacement is needed. We are working with our partners to determine the root cause and will update the [Technet] forum with information and guidance as it becomes available."

According to some users posting to Technet, the issue dates back several months, to the Windows 7 beta. But others say they didn't see a problem until the final "release to manufacturing" (RTM) build. "I was having excellent battery life until I installed the RTM of Windows 7 - all RC and beta builds that I installed I had nearly three hours of battery. Now, I have about 20 minutes and Win7 shuts down my laptop," writes one user.

"This change in behavior happened when I went from an RC to RTM. Instant behavior change. Needless to say, I - like you that have posted here - [am] not happy."

Microsoft confirms that its "consider replacing your battery" warning is new to Windows 7. But the company also says that in some cases, the new tool may be working properly. In other words, if it says your battery needs replacing, it may need replacing. But for so many laptops owners posting to TechNet, this is clearly not the case.

One poster says the problem has occurred on the same machine with two different sets of batteries. "At first, I was thinking the laptop is a couple years old, and sat on a shelf gathering dust, not being stored properly," he writes. "I went to replace the batteries, and realized that HP had recalled them. So i replaced them with brand new batts from the factory. And wala! same issue."

According to posts, the issue occurs across many multiple laptop makes and models, and Microsoft's statement seems to confirm this is the case. ®

 

if anything ive noticed an increase in battery life not a decrease, from 2 hours to 2 hours 30ish mins not much but no decrease

 

There was a fuss a while ago about netbooks having significantly less battery life under Windows 7 compared to XP.

 

no problem here... battery life seems to be the same...

 

This is quite interesting. I wouldn't know if it has less battery life on W7 as I am always plugged in. But this article sure makes me wonder.

 

The fact that we have seen no such reports here on NBR gives me pause when reading this article. I'd think by now there would be a groundswell of complaints here by now if this were true.

Gary

 

I have heard of isolated incidents, but I get the feeling that it more has to do with users not installing the manufacturer power management software when they do a clean install... On my old M700 there was no significant hit in battery life when I moved from Vista to Win7.

 

There are a couple of people on NBR who complained about lower battery life on 7 vs Vista upon upgrade (or clean install). I know because I was one. When I installed 7 I got 30 minutes to an hour less battery life. However, after a couple days of usage everything was back to normal for myself, maybe getting about 10 minutes more battery life. Not sure what's up with that, but maybe something to do with resource management like SuperFetch? These days after a clean install and putting all the updates I get consistant battery life to that of Vista.

EDIT: Looks like Microsoft is acknowledging the problem now.

 

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/02/microsoft-says-its-looking-into-laptop-battery-issues-with-wind/

 

The Net is buzzing with news of Windows 7 trashing laptop batteries. It appears to be a major flaw in the OS that has been discussed on Microsoft's Technet for seven months now, but Microsoft is only now acknowledging that there is a problem. Beware!

I've switched to Linux for my new laptop since many users report that Windows 7 has actually destroyed their battery's ability to hold a charge.

Read more here:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15524/windows_7_consider_replacing_your_battery_error_class_action

 

posted 5 days ago.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=455315

 

So where is the "buzzz" here on NBR? Has this been reported by users HERE? Thus far on NBR all I have seen are references to EXTERNAL reports of this. Not saying it isn't true, just wondering why it hasn't shown up here.

Gary

 

Merged all 3 threads on this topic.

 

I have noticed in Windows 7, that the battery time remaining meter sticks, and if you click on the battery icon it will update itself.

 

Sorry, I did a search but didn't see this thread before I posted. This is very alarming to me since I just bought a new Laptop and don't want to take any chances on Win 7 messing up the (very expensive) battery. I've been using Microsoft OSes for 20 years but now I'm sticking to Linux. I just don't trust Microsoft. Software problems I can deal with but when my hardware is at risk, well, goodbye to Windows. I don't have endless cash to buy new batteries.

 

Windows 7 can tell you when you should replace you rbattery? I didn't even know that to begin with.

That said, I'm actually noticing improvements, but I only ran Vista on my laptop for about... 1 month before going to the RTM build. So, my battery is still somewhat new I suppose.

 

Yes, Windows 7 can tell you when you should replace your battery -- the problem is, you shouldn't need to replace it SOON on a new laptop. If you notice that your battery is losing capacity much more quickly than it should, you should read the news about this issue:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15524/windows_7_consider_replacing_your_battery_error_class_action

Apparently, many laptop owners have had their batteries toasted by Windows 7 and are considering a class-action lawsuit. Since I can't afford to be buying new batteries all the time, I've switched to Linux.

 

this happened to me
battery life went from 2.5 hours > 30 minutes > 10 minutes

got it replaced through acer, seems to be working okay now

 

I noticed my Acer Aspire One D250 lost around and hour with Win 7 installed with XP i got about 3:15-30 now with Windows 7 I am luck to get 2 hours.. Its only about 5 months old

 

If your battery life keeps decreasing, you might want to ditch Windows 7 before your battery becomes useless. I have a brand new Acer netbook and the original battery lost capacity very quickly (a couple weeks) so I bought a new battery and switched to Linux. No problems now.

I've owned about 15 laptops and netbooks (4 from Acer) and never had any battery problems until Windows 7 came along. Even though I like Windows 7, I won't use it until this issue is addressed by Microsoft. And i sure won't buy another machine with Win 7 pre-installed.

 

Hey, I'm DanLee81 on MS Technet, the guy with the LG R500 laptop on these forums (usually in the LG area of these forums). I was the one who started the Microsoft Technet thread back in June 2009.

I actually bought two new batteries to prove that it is not a hardware problem. The first battery I plugged in with Windows 7 as the OS. The battery died within a week. The 2nd battery I ran with Windows Vista, and I ran it for a month with no problems. Once I formatted the computer, went to Windows 7, installed all Windows 7 drivers, and made sure the system was running properly, I installed the battery. The battery lasted a little over a week and then died, exactly like the last two batteries. Batteries have an EEPROM in them storing values like the battery's total capacity, what it's last charge capacity was, voltage, etc. The chip monitors all the characteristics/voltage of the battery. Basically it keeps statistics of the battery to make sure that the voltage is the same and the battery is charging properly. Once it detects that the battery is bad it stops the laptop from charging it. OEMs do not have ACPI drivers. Windows has always issued the ACPI, battery control drivers in their operating system. My observation is, Windows 7 is writing corrupt values into the battery's EEPROM causing the battery to think that something is wrong when it really is not. Once that is compromised, the battery will refuse to charge properly. On some batteries that I've seen, the value of the max capacity changes to 655360 (odd to see that number here), and the battery health percentage turns into a really large value (eg: 724500%)

From what I've heard/seen, it seems like it is happening to these manufacturers:
- LG
- Samsung
- Asus
- Acer
- Sony
- HP
- Compaq
- Dell
- Toshiba
- Fujitsu

Who knows, the list could be bigger, but this is from what I've seen and heard about with the battery going bad as a result of installing Windows 7.

I really hope that Microsoft fixes this soon. Its been 8 months since I've been trying to get a fix to this issue.

 

I had mentioned with the RC I was having battery issues but was largely ignored. I have already lost some on my U81a but it hasn't killed it yet. It figures though M$ ignored the issue until class actions started to be mentioned...........

 

Thanks for the Info- Good explanation

Does anyone know if its just the Win 7 RTM or RC and Beta as well that it happens with?

 

From what I've read, it seems that all the releases of Windows 7 have this issue.

Many thanks to YG007 (above) for the detailed explanation. And thanks also for the posts on MS Technet. If we make enough noise about this problem, Microsoft will be forced to do something soon. The bad press seems to be building by the hour since yesterday. A lot of the major computer sites and blogs are picking up the story.

 

The "story" is building steam, but the number of first hand reports of the issue are not. Is this another case of mass hysteria like what happened a month or so ago with a widely reported "major issue" that turned out to be nothing at all? I am not saying this one is NOT real, just raising the question that if this has been going on since June, why have we not seen first hand reports on NBR until this week? Clearly something is happening, but I am not sure how wide spread this is. The list of machines affect posted in this thread includes Sony. I follow the Sony forums here every single day. I have not seen a single report of a failed battery due to Win7.

Gary

 

Good point, Scuderia. I hope you are right and this isn't a widespread problem. But, since Microsoft responded to it recently, they must deem it worthy of their attention and it takes a lot of flack to get their attention. If they can ignore a problem, they will, but they say they're "working on a solution" for this one.

I'm hoping it only affects certain batteries from a specific manufacturer. An announcement of this type would do a lot to calm the rising hysteria. I'd like to go back to Windows 7, but I won't until I hear of a solution. My original battery was killed by Windows 7 (on a brand new laptop) so I'm wary now.

 

I checked and my battery officially lost 1 hour and 27 minutes from running windows 7.. The ad for the Acer Aspire One D250 claims 3 hours of battery. I was able to get a little more off of XP. Running Windows 7 for a few months (taking out the battery when its finished charging has slowed down the "killing" of the battery) and on Ubuntu I get 1:37 minutes with 100% charge. Time for a 6 cell upgrade.
P.S. I Already posted about this earlier, but it was just estimation. This is official.

 

I dug around on technet for a while tonight and this does look pretty scary. But what confuses me is how little we have seen about this here. We have a lot of folks who frequent this forum and until this story broke on the internet, I have not seen a single report here. If you are worried, open a command prompt as an administrator and type "powercfg -energy" without the quotes. It will run for a bit and then create an HTML enabled report. Scroll down and look for a section that looks like this:

Code:

Battery:Battery Information
Battery ID Sony Corp. 
Manufacturer Sony Corp. 
Serial Number  
Chemistry LiOn 
Long Term 1 
Design Capacity 86580 
Last Full Charge 83950 

If your last full charge is way down from the design capacity (as you can see mine isn't, whew) then your machine is having the issue. What is really perplexing is the reports indicate that just switching the machine back to a different OS does NOT fix the issue. What ever is happening APPEARS to be permanent. I say appears because as of yet it is not clear what is going on. I also have not been able to find out if the issue can be prevented by running on AC. My suggestion would be check to see if you have the issue and if you do, run on AC without a battery in place IF YOUR MACHINE SUPPORTS SUCH A CONFIGURATION until this is sorted out.

Even though my machine does not seem to be afflicted, I wanted to report back since I was casting such doubt. As they used to say on "Hill Street Blues", let's be careful out there!

Gary

(And if you don't know what "Hill Street Blues" was don't ask, I am older than dirt... OK?)

 

There's 2 reasons for that:

1) The NBR community is Mac-fanboy zealous when it comes to personally attacking people who say bad things about Windows 7. You'd have to be either crazy or stupid to bother asking for help when you know everyone's just going to treat you like an idiot for having trouble, regardless of whether or not the fault is yours.

2) The issue is likely confined to a select few models. Windows 7 is 3 months old now*, yet none of the major tech sites had ever covered it (or were even aware of it) until a few days ago.

*Only GA was counted to arrive at this number

 

Oh please, the "fanboy zealous" is way over the top. Folks here are in no way like what you describe, yes there may be a few but the vast majority are not.

Point two is right on the fact that it does appear to affect only certain models but the rest is dead wrong. The discussions on TechNet date back a LOT further than just the past few days. I guess TechNet is not a major tech site, huh? If you are talking about blogs, well maybe you have a point.

Gary

 

Obviously, not all laptop owners are experiencing this problem. But enough are having battery issues with Win 7 to get a response from Microsoft. Their recent statement is what generated all the Internet talk about it over the past few days. People who thought they just had bad batteries or bad laptops are now coming out of the woodwork screaming about how Windows 7 "toasted" their batteries. Some of the reports are very credible because they were done in a a scientific experiment type of way.

 

there are a number of people on the acer forums (including me) who are having trouble with their batteries under windows 7, but i guess not enough to warrant any attention

 

only the battery discharging when the notebook is off is known to me , but most notebooks have that problem to one extent of another , do you have a link if it is another type of problem.

 

If its EEPROM and Win 7 is writing corrupt values there theoretically should be a way to fix it right? Other than installing a new OS. Correct me if I'm wrong. -Would it be covered by warranties?

 

Ok. First of all, I should have posted this issue here back in June 09, but I thought that since it's a Microsoft issue, what better way to contact Microsoft than to create a thread on thier forums. Man was I wrong!!

Anyways, if the batteries EEPROM is compromised, I think it would be very hard to come up with a utility that fixed these broken batteries because there are so many different batteries out there, and even with the same model battery, each one is unique! On the three LG R500 batteries I have, the max capacities are: 1) 54,580, 2) 55,240, and 3) 53,990. So, with all these values in everyone's battery lost, how would the utility know what value to write?? Unless it has the user input the value, which could lead to a lot more problems.

The LG thread in this forum also has people stating that their battery is going bad as a result of Windows 7. People from NBR are talking, but they are all in separate threads, so people don't notice as much if it were to be one huge thread.

 

This is all speculation because there is no such progam, but each battery has a model or serial # the "app" could detect the value that way.

 

Well, first of all, maybe this is just a matter a poor English, but the first statement above is highly misleading. It is not the case that "it seems Windows 7 is corrupting the EEPROM chips in some of the batteries". What is correct that there has been some speculation, without any basis whatsoever as far as I can tell, that this might be the case. As such, this is nothing but idle speculation, on the same level as many other urban myths and similar nonsense. It is very hard to imagine how Windows 7, or any OS for that matter, might be able to damage the batteries' EEPROM.

Second, you may want to read the license that comes with your OS. You know, that endless document that every software maker urges you to read, but nobody ever reads? In a nutshell, what this says, among other things, is that Microsoft does not guarantee that their software will do anything useful at all, and that they are not liable no matter what cosnequences your use of this OS has, whether it damages your dinky little battery, or sets your house on fire. I should add that pretty much every piece of commercial software on the planet comes with a similar disclaimer, no matter what company it comes from.

Finally, reports of any battery problems whatsoever have been extremely sporadic, to the point where it seems likely that these are simply freak accidents that may very well be due to manufacturing defects of the batteries or motherboards in question. I have not seen a single report of a reproducible problem of that sort.

And, no, I am not a fanboy of anything, but this whole story just smells like urban legend.

 

I had two batteries for my Dell Studio 1555 back when I moved from Vista to 7; a 6-cell and a 9-cell. Neither one lost any capacity; in fact, my 9-cell battery appeared to get a good 10-20 minutes more uptime in 7 than in Vista.

 

I'm back to using Windows XP Professional. I get better battery life on XP anyway. Better than Win7 and better than Linux. And no battery issues have, to my knowledge, been reported concerning XP. My little netbook runs a lot better with XP ... web pages load faster and everything is snappier.

 

Very early in this research, but I did notice that Windows 7 seems to be harder on batteries than Vista was.

Dell XPS m1530, 2 year old battery...

I use Battery Bar as a monitor on the task bar to keep an eye on things...

I cloned my Vista home premium on another drive before installing Window 7 on it. I noticed that the battery seemed to have a shorter life, but I figured I cannot complain with a two year old 9 cell battery. At full 100% charge, the battery shows a 1.42 hour life.

Under Vista home premium, I was showing 3.75 to 4 hour life on a fresh battery, but that was months ago, and who knows what life is left in an old battery.

Then I tripped on this thread, and decided to put my old drive back into the laptop to confirm my recollection of battery life.

I was surprised to learn, that the battery meter indicated that there was 4 hours left on the battery! I installed Battery Bar to get more information on what is going on.

Here is what I found. The actual remaining battery life was the same in both OS's. But the discharge rate in Win7 appeared quite a bit higher than in Vista... 35,000 mwh vs 23-25000 mwh in Vista.

Now I have not been experiencing the Win7 battery killing issues others have been having in this thread. Using Powercfg -energy, I found my last charge was 67,810 mwh of the new battery capacity of 86,580 mwh. So it appears I have lost 21% capacity in two years, which is pretty good in my view.

But I would like to find out if Win7 is indeed discharging the battery at a faster rate than Vista, of it is in fact a software problem in Windows 7.

 

Well this post just appeared on a blog from Microsoft:

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2010/02/08/windows-7-battery-notification-messages.aspx

Gary

 

Man this thread kind of got me worried. I have yet to face an issue with Windows 7 on my Vaio TT, and from what I remember battery life was the same as it was under Vista. Then again I am using the battery care function at 50% so that could be what is helping. So, should I be really worried if I haven't noticed an issue yet, or is this something that could occur later?

 

Thanks Gary for the way to check to see if this is occurring. Here's my results:

Battery:Last Full Charge (%)
The battery stored less than 50% of the Designed Capacity the last time the battery was fully charged.
Battery ID 490SanyoDELL KP4227
Design Capacity 86580
Last Full Charge 39494
Last Full Charge (%) 45

Those #'s don't look too good, do they? Now my battery isn't exactly new, I had to get a replacement battery from Dell a few months after receiving my notebook (9-Cell batteries on the D630 are notoriously flaky) so I guess it's a miracle for it to be lasting this long. I can get about 2.5 hours out of it now so I guess everything is ok..I hope.

 

So it's been over a month and no more info has surfaced on this alleged problem with Win7. Has anyone else seen ANY follow on articles in the media or on the internet? It sure went quiet real fast. Sounds more like much ado about nothing.

Gary