M1330 battery issue

Hi guys,

I own a Dell M1330 with the six cell battery.
Since one month something weird happens with the battery.

Power Saver Mode:
after ~1hour (battery is at 60-70%) suddenly the battery drops to 7% and I am out of juice.

Maximum Performance
after ~40minutes suddenly the battery drops to 7% or it goes directly into hibernate mode

Any ideas?

thanks

 

How long have you had the battery for? I assume it's more than a year or so.. It seems like there is quite a lot of wear on it.. Try disabling the auto shutdown/sleep/hibernate feature at a particular battery level, and then drin it fully to calibrate it again... Although you probably need a new one anyway..

 

i guess the battery isn't calibrated... or the battery isnt reporting its discharge correctly or windows isnt reading it correctly

http://lifehacker.com/software/laptop/how-to-recalibrate-your-laptop-battery-130735.php

take out the battery, press button.... the lights(each = 20%) represent the charge on the battery

hold onto the button for >5 s....no lights = good(not that much wear on battery)... each light = bad ( = more wear)

 

thanks for the tip.
I have the notebook since one and a half years now...
I tried the trick with holdin the battery button. After 4seconds all the lights go out and immediatlly come up (all of them). after 1 second the lights go out for good.
what does theat mean?

I will try to recalibrate the battery.

 

It means that the battery has over 60% wear.. and you need a new one..

 

... thanks.
would you recommend a 9 cell one?

 

If you need the 5 hour battery life.. certainly.. I have been using a 9 cell battery exclusively.. and haven't found any reason to complain..

 

I had the M1330 6-cell battery give the 67% capacity warning message after about 1.5 years of use. I was a bit surprised as my D610 battery was still usable after 5 years of use (though the C500 before that had a battery which became useless fairly quickly).

I hoped to continue using the M1330 battery for a while after getting the warning to replace it but it didn't take too long before the system started to report that there was no battery (when there was) - i.e. it was completely dead and I had to reconfigure the OS to shutdown to Hibernate instead of Standby to preserve my sanity.

I replaced the 6-cell battery now (about 105ukp in the uk). I am hoping that this (second) replacement motherboard does not have any problem with the battery charging which might have caused the issue in the first place.

Anyway, I am now wondering if battery choice should not be made on weight/power alone. Would a 9-cell battery tend to have a longer lifetime? I am thinking the power discharge per cell is probably less than for the 6-cell battery and for a given amount of usage on battery the discharge cycle would be shallower - does that have a big impact on battery life?

 

yup in theory one third longer, probably in reality 20% improvement.

 

just take care of your battery

if you can, dont discharge+charge the laptop everytime it reaches 90%.. rely on AC, or run down the battery a little more each time (save on the battery charge cycles)

do a deep discharge every so often

undervolt your CPU / underclock your GPU, turn down brightness to save on battery

 

For LiIon batteries I don't think there is a memory effect. It is probably better not to discharge them too deeply - the only possible use of a deep discharge is to help it recalibrate it's capacity but I think that may not be necessary and it probably also shortens the battery life in doing it.

Sometimes I think leaving the PC on AC for long time periods without using the battery can be damaging - but probably only if the charging circuitry is not working very well.