Acer 1810 TZ Battery life slump

I bought an Acer 1810 TZ last year and the battery life has been great, 6 - 7 hours life no problem.

This has reduced significantly recently and I assumed that the battery was worn out and so I purchased a replacement, taking care to match the specifications as closely as possible.

I'm not getting better than 2 hours from the new battery. I've charged plenty of times as I expected to ave to "condition" the new battery.

I can't recall having made any changes to the power settings or any other aspect of the laptop configuration.

I'm at a loss as to why my battery life has diminished to this extent.

I ran a program to get some further info about the old and new batteries, see attached files.

Panasonic: Old battery
Simplo: Replacement battery

Note: They weren't equally charged when I obtained the info. below.

Any pointers gratefully received.

 

The battery or batteries are unlikely to be causing the problem.
It's probably power consumption that went up. Probably a driver that has power-saving feature disabled- it may be VGA or Wi-Fi or different settings in Windows power-profile.
You may try to hunt for this or use eRecovery to revert to original Windows installation and update drivers one by one checking if power consumption went up.
BTW- expected battery time from both your batteries (full) is 4-5h which is pretty good and far from 2h.
Measured discharge rate in one file is 12W and in the other 13.7W- assuming that both times computer was idle it's quite a significant difference.

 

Many thanks your detailed reply. It occurred to me after posting in that I have made changes - Windows 7 updates. Perhaps that's where the cause lies.

I'll dig around in settings. Anyone who has specific pointers to add, please don't hold back!

The laptop was idle for both of the reports attached.

 

Update:

I can't see where to launch the Acer power managment tools. I've uninstalled and reinstalled but still can't find anything I can launch that's Acer branded.

It occurred to me that it might be Outlook causing the issue, I'd started using that in preference to Thunderbird (v.3 was yuk). I've uninstalled Outlook and in Power Saver mode things are looking more promising.

I also noticed Samsung printer/scanner software on here too. The printer isn't in use on here, in case it's try to locate it I've deleted that too.

Projected battery life on my old battery is moving between 4 hours to 6 hours on 93% / Power Saver so I will see how this goes and report back. Battery report attached: Does that look more like typical discharge on idle with wifi connection?

Is there a way to recalibrate the battery monitor at all so that it's accurate e.g. fully charge to 100 % then reset?

 

Yes- that looks OK and on pair with your estimated battery time.

 

Also spotted that USB dongle software was opening on Windows launch. Disabled that setting and exited, 53% idle on LAN doubled to 3hr 28m.