Battery on 3810T no longer fully charges

After 6 months of moderate use, the battery on my 3810T seems to not want to fully charge. The battery indicator in windows (win 7 home premium 64bit), shows the max charge at 88% and the front led stays yellow for a long time when plugged in (over 12 hrs) before finally just turning off instead of going to blue to indicate a full charge.

Anyone else experience this?

 

I have exactly the same problem. I get 88% max and that its. Charging LED stays orange and never turns blue anymore. It happened virtually overnight.
I tried to find some calibration utilities, but there is nothing.

 

I have exactly the same thing happenning with mine. I'm down from 8 hours to 5 1/2. The notebook is only 7 months old. Probably get a new battery after 2 years. Its not like its a $1000 Sony or something.

 

This is happend to mine and i sent my battery back to acer last tueday

just waiting for a replacement, this is the 3rd thing thats gone wrong with my 3810tg, wont be buying a acer again

waited nearly a month for a lcd replacement the other month

 

Same thing here, I bought a 3810t for my friend and after 8 months it will not charge over 88% I thought it was the battery but then when i but the same battery on my wife's 4810tz it charges to a full 100% !!
I also used another power adapter and still the 3810t would not charge to over 88%

 

i have an 1810TZ and similar problem - my machine is about 5 months old and I have been very careful with the battery. I use powercfg - energy to report on the battery (and other stuff) and it has gone from 97% best(when new) to about 85% capacity now.

At this rate I would have about 50% capacity at end of year. Contacted Acer and they said they would send me a replacement battery but I am now wondering if it is in the computer itself not allowing a full charge to be achieved.

Has anyone managed to find a solution to this and whether it is the battery or the computer

 

Exactly the same situation here. Any solutions?

 

Same here since December 09.
However I still get about 6 hours of battery life.
It would be nice if somebody would confirm if this is a battery problem or like Dart22 said something gone wrong inside the laptop or even some software issue?

 

Since I last posted I contacted Acer and they sent me a new battery and it actually has about about more than 1% greater capacity than the original - actually 62.837wh vs 62.16wh design. And so far has held to this charge

 

To those having the "not charging to 100%" problem.... anyone running the original Vista that came with your timeline? I have this theory that Windows 7 is the culprit here. My battery died on my too after about a week of running Win7. When it was flawless on vista for 6months.

 

It is fair to say that if Acer are sending out batteries FOC they know they have a problem with batteries

 

Problem solved guys ! i took my 3810 to acer's service center and they replaced the battery and now the laptop charges to 100% and the LED turns blue again.
so, it turns out that this 88% charge thing is a battery problem!

 

No one believes me

 

Tamrac, there goes your Windows 7 theory.

 

Not really... the theory is that Win7 actually damages the battery. So this is expected.

 

My battery had this issue a few weeks after I upgraded from Vista to Win 7 64 bit too, so maybe the upgrade did do something to the battery.

But, I just got Acer to replace my old battery and now it seems to work fine. Get to 100% and a blue light.

Pretty painless switch too. Only took them a couple of days to send me the new battery and they even had a free return address label to send back the old battery.

 

Might be the problem:

Acer Support - Frequently Asked Questions list for Updating firmware on Simplo batteries

 

Tamrac

Windows 7 simply reports the charging status and apparent vs design voltage/capacity it gets from ACPI / the BIOS. If This had ANYTHING to do with Windows 7 then people would be reporting 100% charge achieved when off (BIOS/MB running charging) but 88% in Windows.

Next Week : Windows 7 is slowly killing my daffodils. They were good before I installed it and now they look a bit droopy

 

I believe this answers the OP's question.
I had a similar issue with 3810TZ battery, it refuse to provide any charge at all so I had to bring the battery for a firmware update at Acer Support Centre.

 

Yeah, it seems like a problem with the firmware...

 

Hi...
Anybody know where I can find this equipment to rewrite the firmware on the battery

I'm with several notebooks with this problem

thanks
Fernando Saraceno

 

If they are still in warranty I would suggest just doing an exchange of the batteries with Acer as they would all have the updated firmware. You would probably have to contact Simplo directly for a tool such as this.

 

What is the warranty period of the battery?
6 months or 12 months?

 

Usually 3- 6 months . . but remember it has a manufacturing defect . . it hasn't worn out . . so usually local law or a court would agree to a longer period being reasonable. Ask them for a repair and see . .

 

Damn, I think I just got hit by this bug too. The battery seems to charge super slowly once it hits 88%. And it just happened today!

And from that Acer link, my battery seems to fit all the criteria. Sigh.

 

I am guessing the firmware cannot cope correctly with an aging battery and so most batteries from that source will have a problem. Best get it back to them before they go into denial

 

IFsaraceno, if you open the SOP link at the bottom of that acer page it is clear there is no DIY solution to allow this to be done in the laptop, USB device box battery connector and drivers needed.

 

This says the battery date code must be 948 or earlier.

Where is this code?

Is it the first three digits on the battery p/n sticker or something else?

 

I'm not sure, but are there 3 digits before the p/n? That could be it.

 

Just got my battery swapped at the Acer service center in Singapore. Great service, no hassles. New battery charges up to 100% again.

 

Guys, I've had the same problem as you and got annoyed by the thought that in less than a year I got to get the laptop in service. I had that feeling that again I'm stuck with a low-cost model that has a low-cost viability . But I might have found the answer for the problem . This way, I can still enjoy the feeling that the timeline series really is a great step from acer.

So this is how to solve it:

1. go to Acer Support - Welcome to Acer Support
2. find your own acer model (i.e. mine is aspire 3810t)
3. there will be a table with things to download. go to BIOS tab and you'll find a lot of versions available, some of them with a small description. you need the last version (1.28) - they do mention that this one solves a battery charging issue
4. download all the BIOS versions that are newer than your own BIOS (try to install any of them to find out which version you have) - you need to install them one by one cause you aren't allowed to jump to the latest...
5. after installing BIOS v.1.28, watch how the battery icon in the taskbar already started to move

Hope this helps you.

Paul

*note that this may very well be what the guys from Acer Service did for those of you who went there

 

Good to know that 1.28 bios fixes your problem =)

 

Had this issue and 1.28 fixed it. Thanks!

 

bios 1.28 fixed my battery problem too. It used to charge only up to 87-88% now it's all the way to 100%
Great support!

 

This is really soooooo awesome!!! I´m over 89% *happy* *dancing*

Only the problem with the fan isn´t solved yet. The fan is to loud! In BIOS v.1.13 the fan was very quiet and sometimes he stopped. This was very silent.

How to fix this problem?

kleini

 

Hi guys, I have the same problem abd the same bios but the battery still does charge.
It happened on win7 and I have installed a dual boot with ubuntu just to check and I got the same problem...battery plugged in, recognized by the os but not loading

I read that you guys were trying to work on the battery firmwaren any luck working on that ?