At first battery lasted 5 hrs, now 3...whats up?

Title says it all, my battery used to last around 5 hrs plus, now I get about 3. Nothing has changed except it seems like my laptop gets hotter on my lap than before. Any idea why my battery is wearing down so quickly.

I have the 9 cell.

 

check your battery health level. my came with 9% wear which is sad.

 

How long have you had it?

 

I think batteries need some "reconditioning". If you drain the battery to below 3% then charge it full, it should "reset" it. There was an IBM/Lenovo utility that did that, and it helped a lot. They say litium ion doesn't keep memory...but I do not know if that is entirely true...

 

^^ I'll try that tonight. I drain it until it shuts itself down. Then i'll fully charge it over night.

My laptop is only 1 month old, give or take a week.

 

If it gets hotter than before, then that could be your problem. It means that either your CPU or the GPU is working harder (faster) than before. Maybe a power saving option has changed (Windows ACPI, nVidia PowerMizer), and your CPU/GPU is running full speed all the time or some background application is eating up processor cycles.

Are you doing anything different now, than you did before? Like using an external USB device, Wifi adaptor etc.. ?

 

I am pretty sure LiIon batteries don't like to be at a low charge at all... they like about 40% and more or less full both result in more wear.

 

That's what Battery University seems to think. Lithium-ion batteries aren't like Nickel-cadmium batteries.
http://batteryuniversity.com/partone-21.htm

 

The 40% charge is for storage (typically 6 months or longer). Also says run only to 20% in normal usage. The real danger of running out the battery is if you don't recharge for an extended period of time, the battery continues to loose charge and can fall into a "deep discharge state" the circuit cannot protect against this natural loss of charge it can protect against running down to an unsafe point. So run it empty if you want just recharge sooner rather than later.

 

If you used the rmclock utiility to get rid of your audio jack bleeping noise, that would explain it. The common rmclock fix eliminates or changes some of the idle states so the cpu is working all the time - which makes it hotter and drains the battery.

If you havent done that, then you can ignore this post, lol.

 

Yes, it is entirely true, you have given the OP bad advice based on old-technology (NiCad) batteries.

 

I haven't installed anything new that I know of that would run in the background. The only 1 that I know of is a roxio DVD creater. It starts up when i boot my computer, its something like a hard drive watcher and also a drag and drop option. i can't turn them off unless i do an msconfig thing. either way it doesn't seem to be using much ram or cpu power.

 

If its not caused by any apps then it must be the hardware itself. As mentioned before, have you checked the wear level? Have you recalibrated the battery?

 

yeah i knocked the battery down to 5% and I recharged it last night. I didn't notice any difference.

How do I see how much battery is burned. Like you said 10% was unusable...how do i see that?

 

There's a button on the battery that you can push. If you push it for a short click, it will display the amount of charge on the battery. If you push it in and hold it in, it will display the wear on the battery. When displaying charge, lights are good. When displaying wear, lights are bad.