V1JP Battery

I recieved my V1JP a couple of days ago, and i have charged this laptop for the third time and the wear on the battery is 10%!!!

There are posts by other V1JP's owners out there that share a similar problem.

I am going to time my computer battery and monitor it to see if the wear affects the battery life. I think the software used (NHC) may conflict with the asus battery.

Ill keep the results posted

 

whoops!

This sounds awfully familiary....

See the "Battery Wear" thread, as well as the "V6J problems", a more recent thread.

I'd certainly disable all 3rd party (and even ASUS) power management software to avoid conflicts. And monitor the wear level afterwards. But I have a feeling the problems cannot be solved that way...

Do you also experience power LED blinking when it shouldn't? Spikes of charge when battery is 100% charged? When does the wear go up? On full discharges only? Or also on half discharges? How far does it drop on a discharge?

 

Despite NHC and Everest showing the same Wear %, there is a third way to check.

Open Everest, Click on Computer, then click on Power Managment. This will show some information regarding your battery.

You will see Designed Capacity - 75900mwh
Fully charged Capacity - _________mhw
Current Capacity - ___________ (___%)

Sometimes you can overcharge the laptop battery meaning your battery doesn't have 10% wear, it could be still 5%, but both NHC and Everest are incorrectly reading it.

Also Does your battery charge to something like 94%, or 100%, or something in between. Download Everest Free and have a look at those numbers.

 

I have downloaded everest and it tells me i still have 10% wear like the NHC. this is strange since i have only had my laptop since wednesday. my laptop charges normally, all the way up to 100%

I experience no random led blinking, only lights up when charging. The wear happens when i connected my laptop to charge, and i noticed it when it had fully charged. The wear percentage will not drop...

 

I've got my V1Jp for almost 8 days now, and I've noted nothing strange regarding power. I usually use it on AC power, but I emptied and recharged the battery twice. NHC still shows battery wear at 0%. The only thing that caught my attention, after I installed NHC and ran on batteries, the remaining time value oscillated +- 10 minutes, but I don't think that's a problem.

 

Where do you get the statistic of the battery wear 10%??? I don't fully understand "battery wear?"

I'm looking at Microsoft own power management, the power meter tab. I don't see it.

 

You can get it with Mobile Meter, RMClock newer versions, or NHC (I believe).

It's not a problem that expected time on batt oscillates +-10mins, the Windows estimate fluctuates as more or less current is drawn from the battery. It might even vary by half an hour or more depending on how heavily the computer is used

 

Well I use Everest and NHC to measure the battery wear.

My laptop was replaced due to a faulty disc drive, and the new one i have used for 5 days now, and have charged it several times. The wear is showing 4 % which is far better than the previous laptop which was 10% and only 2 days

 

There was a suggestion, that newer ATK drivers could fix wear problem (but if I'm correct version was newer than available for V1j on asus site [try different model]).

 

I doubt that will fix it, but it is worth a shot. If this is anything like the V6j problem, it won't be fixed by a Windows program.

 

The number of days is (directly) irrelevant; you should check the wear level against the number of discharge/recharge cycles (or half-cycles). Also take into account that new batteries are most of the times overspecced (e.g. they declare 73000 mWh as max designed charge, but have 74200 mWh max charge when they are new).

So for a meaninfgul figure, check how much the wear increases (if at all) during a battery cycle.

 

What makes me wonder if V6j and V1j have this wear problem in linux, if not it really can be this atk driver or something else in Windows....

 

I've had symptoms manifesting themselves in Linux as well (blinking battery LED). I didn't wait for a complete battery discharge - I just might do it in this weekend.

 

Does anyone know if it is the operating system / BIOS / (ATK)driver that decides what the available maximum capacity of the battery is or is that mechanism built into the battery itself?

And if this mechanism decides that currently we are at a given wear level, what does it base this decision on?

 

I know what your saying lenardg. Bender would most likely state the ACPI is the culprit, that it keeps all the details regarding the battery.

I think the battery also keeps track of this by itself. If you remember there are such thing as batteries with little LED indicators to tell how much capacity there is left.

I personally don't think the BIOS or ATK drivers has anything to do with this, but that's just my opinion. I think it would be ACPI, bad batteries or bad circuitry...or some combination of them.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

I have no idea of the implementation details of these things... we'd need an expert on the issue to answer these questions.

Edit: sorry. didn't see above post.

 

The battery is tracking itself via internal circuitry. The computer is also trying to track the battery. The important thing to consider here, is that the problem is regardless of operating system. The battery will still be worn if you use it the same in Linux as you would in Windows. This means that there is a problem in either the batteries or the BIOS. Either way, its not something we can fix, so we need to convince Asus to stop shoving this off and fix it.

 

Usually bad programming

Caleb, ASUS does not see the abnormal battery wear as an issue but as a feature. Its perfectly normal to them to change batteries every 2 months x_x

 

You mean, change it on their expense? ;-)

But seriously, I cannot imagine that is is good for a company to keep sending its users new batteries under warranty all the time, every two months. It is just bad that way. Or is it that not too many users bother or are aware of this issue at all?

I do not remember was it on this forum, but somewhere I read that the wear level (ASUS batteries) increases when you run the battery down to 10% or below and charge it up again. And this same place said wear level stays the same if you just recharge it when it is half full. I remember the user writing that he/she would now be using the notebook only until the battery was half empty. Could this have any truth at all?

 

This has truth in it, it works for me at least. But anyway, that is not a battery that is working fine and if I can't use it lower than 50 percent, it means I only have half a battery.

I think the V6J is not a very popular model, perhaps because it is rather expensive. In addition; many users wont notice something is wrong until battery life drops to less than 2 hrs, which will take some time to happen. So in fact, ASUS doesnt change really that many batteries, and its easy for them to ignore the problem; they dont even have to ignore it willingly, perhaps they dont realize there is a problem at all.

But its not at all clear that the V1js suffer from the same thing, so cheer up:

(sorry about missing apostrophes; Im writing this on a French keyboard and I cant find the darn thing )

 

MysticGolem, how is your V1JP battery doing? Did the wear increase since you last wrote about?

 

At theirs during the 1st yr...but at ours for the rest of the lappy's life x_x

 

Let me quickly explained what happen.

Upon further investigation, about 1 week ago, my wear % was 15...not 20 % like what NHC reported. The reason why there was a 5% difference is because I don't restart my laptop, it remains in hibernation all the time.

So, using Everest, I took the current charge and divided by the capacity and ended up with 15% wear, but NHC reported 20%. I restarted the computer and now NHC reports proper charge levels and it is 15%.

1 week later, my battery is officially 20%, my max charge levels is much lower in watts.

Now my battery only last 2 hours and 35 minutes compared to the first week of school where I had 3 hour lectures and it would last 2 hours and 50 minutes, because I would fluctuate the brightness and WIFI on or off.

From now on, I am only using 2/16 screen brightness because I need to conserve it as much as possible. Also I carry my power brick and charge the laptop when I get free time.

I have not got my battery replaced because I need it for studying, tests and assignments are coming up next week. After that my reading week starts, (break) and I will get it replaced during that time.

I am hoping that the modular bay battery doesn't suffer from Wear % problems because I don't mind the main battery having this problem but imagine both batteries going through the same problem...this would be annoying.

Anyways, like I've said before one of the biggest reasons why I bought the V1JP is because of the modular bay battery, so that I don't require to bring the power brick to school.

So I basically get 3 hours on my main, and I would potentially get 1 hour and 50 minutes on the modular bay battery. It is still not available yet, but I am anxious for its arrival.

So lets assume I can easily achieve 4 hours and 30 minutes, and the lowest possible battery life I could want is 4 hours. Meaning I would have 30 minutes to play around and "donate" to this wear % problem LOL.

For every 1% of wear I loose roughly 1 minute and 30 seconds of battery life.

I can't wait for my break, but there's so much work to do in such a small amount of time.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

We should really be asking, who the heck is making the cells for these batteries?

I'm guessing they dumped Sony for batteries, so who is making them now? Maybe this other company has other issues...

 

Samsung...

 

Perhaps an even more interesting question: who is writing the firmware on the battery?

 

I'm looking to get the V1 soon, but the only thing that is holding me back is this battery issue. Is there anything new regarding this? Has it been fixed?

 

Let hope with the VX2 dont have this problem as the price tag is about $3,000+/-

 

No idea, but three weeks later, I've recharged this thing about 10 times and it's holding at about 3% wear. BUT, I haven't been letting it go less than 40% in all cases...

 

Here's an update from Albert who I have contacted about this issue.

So things are moving forward, lets hope this continues to go in the right direction.

I just received my modular bay battery, It came with 7% wear on it, estimated battery life at 25 watt consumption is 1 hour and 20 minutes.

So my Total should be 4 hours easy, and if you want to stretch you can get up to 4 hours and 20 minutes, provided you keep your discharge rate low.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Erm... *came* with 7% wear? Either you got a bad deal or the calibration is off by 7%...

 

If a battery comes with 1-5% battery wear, this is considered normal. I have also not yet ruled out whether this is software generated wear, bad ACPI affecting this. Or if this is real battery wear.

I will be able to tell over 2 weeks of usage, and see whether my battery increases in wear %, which would mean the ACPI is also affecting the Modular Bay Battery and thus my battery most likely have 0% hardware wear, and I will be able to do real life tests soon, to provide information regarding this.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

I think it's normal for a new battery to come a little bit overspecced, i.e. with a max charge about 103-105% from the specified max charge.

At least this was the case for all my replacements for the V6J (and there were 4 of them).

 

hi,

(Didn't read most of the posts on the thread, sorry)

Any news on the battery front?

NHC tells me that my battery wear is at 56% currently. It seems to increase at a rate of about 5% per drain cycle. I've turned off the critical battery warnings and am getting approx 2,5h on normal use (rough estimate), so the watts are there...

...but what to do? Has this bug been acknowledged by Asus at all?

 

It is being increasingly acknowledged by Asus. Until then, I am almost done with a program that will give you the proper battery percent and a good estimate of the battery life you will have.

 

I have also sent (another) email to ASUS Nederland about this, trying to convince them how much cheaper it would be for them to acknowledge this bug and fix the BIOS/battery firmware, than changing hundreds/thousands of batteries (and maybe mainboards) throughout the world... but no reply since now. Maybe this was not the correct approach who knows...

Last year I did get a bit further with them, research was allegedly initiated into the issue but then they stopped answering my emails.

Personally, (not wanting to get your hopes down) I have little faith that anything substantial will ever be done by ASUS in this issue. Although it's not cheaper (on the contrary) it's much easier for them to ignore the issue than to acknowledge and fix it.