Faulty battery reading

Hi i am have troubles with my battery indicator. My laptop says i have about an hour when fully charged but this is wrong since the charge level drops quickly for the first hour and then when it reaches 7% or 3 min of battery life it just stayes there or sometims even increase. In other words when i get to 3 min of battery life left i actualy still have about 45 min. I have had my laptop (inspiron 1520 with 9-cell battery) for almost 2 years now and at first i could watch a 3 and a half hour movie on one charge. I know that batteries deteriorate with time and i haven't really been talking the best care of mine but still i expect it to give me at least 1 and a half now. Any help on how to fix the battery meter is appreciated.

Thx
Sinbad

 

Try calibrating it. First check if the BIOS has a calibration option. If not, do it manually: Fully charge the battery to 100%, start working on the battery until 0% and then fully charge it again to 100%.

 

You can follow Phil's advice in recalibrating the battery, as faulty readings are usually fixed with that.

As an additional suggestion, you can also download a program like BatteryBar which may give you more accurate readings of your battery compared to the windows meter. I use both the Windows meter and BatteryBar, and most of the time, BatteryBar gives more accurate readings (given that it's on High Performance).

BatteryBar will also inform you of your battery wear level and overall lifetime. Since you've been using it for around 2 years, I'd expect that your wear level has increased significantly. I've had my XPS M1530 6-cell battery for almost a year and my wear level is somewhere between 14%-22% (using SIW and Battery Bar respectively).