Is Your Notebook Battery Losing Life Fast? It Might Not Be a Battery Problem

<!-- Generated by XStandard version 1.7.1.0 on 2007-02-24T10:32:12 -->

Battery Problems with Asus Laptops

Recently there have been a lot of complaints by Asus notebook owners finding that the battery life of their newly purchased notebooks was deteriorating rapidly. Battery life would drop 35% after just a couple of months of usage. I decided to provide as much real proof as possible in this review showing that the problem is not the battery per se, but rather a firmware coding issue with the notebook that causes it to grossly under estimate actual battery life left and shut down prematurely. In other words, the notebook thinks there is 0 - 5% battery life left when in actual fact there might be up to 30% -- or an hour's worth of life. This may also be a problem for other notebook users outside of the Asus brand and is therefore worth anyone reading to understand what causes a notebook to shut down when it thinks battery life has become critical.

I have owned the Asus V1JP for 2 months now; I have been watching my battery life deteriorate every week. I know such quick deterioration is not normal so I was going to replace my battery thinking it was the problem. However, many users have reported the very same problem, seeing a vast amount of wear percentage on their batteries in a small amount of time and thus causing much lower battery life.

Notebooks Known to be Affected by this Problem:

• Asus V1 series
• Asus V6 series
• Asus R1 series
• *Asus Z71 had a true problematic battery

I did not end up replacing my battery because I wanted to first further coordinate with some other members on the Asus forum to figure out what is causing this problem.

During the conversation in the very active thread discussing this topic, people suggested these as possible solutions for &quot;fixing&quot; the battery:

• Restart the computer multiple times
• Ignore third party programs and just use Windows Battery Miser (battery level indicator program within Windows)
• Delete all third party programs
• Complete a Battery Calibration
• Do a guided Battery Calibration written by jsis.
• Use the recovery discs to get back to Asus default condition on the laptop
• Format the laptop and start from scratch
• Remove battery from laptop and restart, then place it back in
• Continuously replace your battery when wear percentages appear abnormal

None of these worked, and the battery callibration was suggested by Asus service center staff as something that should be done every couple of months, but this did not help.

Let me try to explain why each of these solutions did not work and why.

Battery Calibration

Battery Calibration is a Bios tool in which it will charge and discharge your battery to calculate your current level of watts in your battery, basically your battery life (battery calibration tools vary by manufacturer, so refer to your user guide).

Before I ran the calibration, I read that many had found this tool causing more battery wear after being run (or at least more battery wear was indicated), up to 5% more wear than there was before. Despite knowing that, I attempted the calibration. I tried a regular calibration, compared to jsis method of calibration. This takes a long time and unfortunately it was not able to rectify my wear percentage problem.

My wear was 20% going into the calibration and after it was 25%. Then I attempted forum member jsis' elaborate method of calibration which requires you to remove the battery half way through the charging process. This also did not solve my problem, but it did work for jsis. Instead of helping, my wear had now gone up to 30%. With 30% wear, when I take my laptop to school and use it, I only get 2 hours and 15 minutes or so -- very dissapointing. I used to get 3 hours.

Battery calibration DOES consider the ACPI (read about what the ACPI does for laptop power management at Wikipedia) when running this tool, meaning there is software involved in the process. The Bios is also a factor. If the calibration tool worked right, it should have reported my battery life as 3 hours now, but after running it says I have 2 hours of total life indicating 30% wear.

More about the ACPI will be explained later and how it turns out to be the offending factor in this whole battery life issue.

Formatting and restarting the computer

This is another solution some members suggested to try, and I did try it, since I currently have a 1 week break from university! It's called &quot;Reading Week&quot;.

I used the recovery discs provided by Asus, and then had a look at the Windows Battery Miser and it still stated only 2 hours and 15 minutes of battery life. I then decided to completely reformat the laptop and used my own Windows XP Pro CD and install all the drivers myself from the Asus V1 driver/utility CD. Everything went fine except now my Windows Battery Miser stated 2 hours of battery life -- another 15 minute drop!

I then installed a program called Notebook Hardware Control and Everest Ultimate, 3rd party programs that also report battery life; my wear percentage was now up to a whopping 35% and battery life continuing to decrease.

Third Party Programs

A few members stated the third party programs like Notebook Hardware Control and Everest Ultimate caused battery drain problems, making many members on the forum neurotic and crazed about this battery wear % and battery life problem.

However, third party programs helped me understand why this problem is occurring. To start things off, many follow Windows Battery Miser as a reliable source for battery charge level and battery life. That’s fine, I also use it myself.

Here’s the thing, compare your Notebook Hardware Control and Windows Battery Miser charge level and battery life. They are exactly the same, and do you wonder why? This is because the source of the data is coming from the same place. This is called the ACPI (read about what the ACPI does for laptop power management at Wikipedia), but can also be attributed to the BIOS as well. I will explain this further in the review.

In effect, these third party programs and Windows Battery Miser are gathering their data from the ACPI and displaying that result, but these are the wrong values. This also shows that the BIOS calibration tool is also using the same ACPI source for the test, and thus the calibration tool did not do anything for me to alleviate the issue. If the ACPI is wrong, calibration won't do a thing.



This screenshot shows how CoolMon2 takes data from the ACPI, which further supports the fact that the ACPI is the problem.

What is the going on with the battery?

After completing and testing all possible solutions, I looked to my own solution and conclusions. I had the following theories:

• Could it be a bad battery?
• Is it bad coding?
• Could the motherboard be of blame?
• Are there circuitry issues?
• Could it be user abuse?

I have tested some of these aspects above, and so have others. I have tested my battery for being bad, it is not, I will explain why further in the review, because it leads the workaround to this problem.

There is bad coding, because I have tested it above, look what I have been through to solve this problem and it is still not rectified with those suggestions.

Many have already had their motherboards replaced to fix this problem but in most cases this did not solve the problem, some also attribute this to bad circuitry which is not the problem.

Could it be user abuse? Not really, because I have been here for such an extended period of time, just like many others, we know how to take care of our notebooks, so please don’t call this abuse on our end.

Battery Life Test

Now that the basics of what is going on in the background on the Asus forums, I just did a test showing what happens to your battery life and the workaround.

As many have already read my review on the Asus V1JP I've had for 2 months now, my battery life test showed I got 3 hours of battery life right when I first got my laptop. Every week I was losing roughly 3-5% battery wear and server a minutes of battery life over time. Once again I am using the same settings for this battery life test.

Mathematical Calculations of Battery Life and Wear

This is where I can also prove there is a direct correlation between wear % and battery life. For this let's assume the critical alarm is turned on, just like everyone has it on.

Given

• Battery Capacity is 77whr (B)
• Average consumption is 25whr (C)
• Brand new battery has 0% wear (W)

This will differ from laptop to laptop, but this is the general settings for my V1JP.

Battery life = (((B x W) – B) / C)
BL = (((77 x 0) – 77) / 25)
BL = 77/25
BL = 3 hours

This shows if you have a 77whr battery, and if your consumption rate is on average 25whr, and your wear % is 0, then your battery life is 3 hours, this matches my original battery life test in my review.

Battery life = (((B x W) – B) / C)
BL = (((77 x 35%) – 77) / 25)
BL = ((27 – 77) / 25)
BL = (50/25)
BL = 2 hours

This shows if you have a 77whr battery, and your consumption rate is an average of 25whr, and you rwear is 35%, then your battery life is 2 hours, this also matches the results, and you can see it on the Up Time on CoolMon2.

This also shows how battery wear does affect your battery life. You can even calculate another interesting factor.

Wear battery life = 100% charge = 3 hours of battery life with 25whr consumption on a 77whr battery.
Wear battery life = 3 hours x 60 minutes = 180 minutes on 100% charge with 25whr consumption.
Wear battery life = 180 minutes /100% charge = 1.8

This value 1.8, means how much battery life in terms of minutes you lose per 1% of wear. So if your wear percentage is 35%, then multiply 35 x 1.8 = 63 minutes, which is exactly how many minutes you will lose to your wear %. My laptop shows this exactly with 35% battery wear. I hope everyone understands and follows this!

Test Settings

• P4G Mode: Quiet Office
• Screen Brightness: 2/16
• Light Task: Typing this article and some browsing
• WIFI On

I use these settings to test my battery life to keep up with the consistency of what happened before and to calculate what happened today.

Discharge Rate Comparison

• V1JP Review: Discharge averaged 25 W
• School: Discharge averaged 23-24 W
• Battery Article: Discharge averaged 25-26 W (fist 2 hours)
• Battery Article: Discharge averaged 28W (for the remaining time due to increased fan RPM and blinking battery LED)

Here are a several images showing how my battery was being run down as I used it under the conditions above.



At one you can see my battery charge is 0% and it is still running. Let me explain why later in this article.



Notice the Up Time in CoolMon2 which is the program I used to monitor my hardware. You will notice that is my battery life, and the program starts calculating it as soon at the notebook it turned on. So my test is done on a fresh reboot.

Furthermore, my battery life test resulted in 2 hours and 43 minutes , it did not last 3 hours because during the last 40 minutes, the battery LED was blinking constantly, and the fan RPM was high, the discharge rate skyrocketed to 30whr, despite doing menial tasks, like typing this document. If my discharge rate was lower, like 26, then the battery would have last another 10 minutes or so. But for this situation it is ok that the battery life was lower than my initial test in my review, since I was unable to keep my discharge rate low enough to achieve a closer number to 3 hours.

Questions that come to mind:

1. How is the notebook running despite 0% charge?
2. Why does Windows Battery Miser also show 0% charge
3. Why is my notebook running despite all other notebooks would shut off?

Answers to these questions:

1. My notebook is still running despite a 0% charge because the battery really does have a charge, to be exact is it the amount of my wear %. Meaning, my wear % is 35, that is how much charge % I have left. This shows that this is a software related problem with the ACPI and or BIOS.
   
   
2. Windows Battery Miser also shows 0% charge, so does NHC so does CoolMon2; this is because the all of these programs gather the data from the ACPI. This is the problem; the ACPI is what needs to be fixed, along with the BIOS to ensure there are no more problems.
   
   
3. Many are now wondering how I manage to get my notebook to run with 0% charge despite everyone else would end up turning off. In Windows there’s an option located in Power, then click Alarms, and then uncheck the CRITICAL ALARM so that the notebook will not turn off.
   

The workaround temporary solution

So after testing for close to 1 week, I have found with the help of others on the forums, that turning off the Critical Alarm somewhat solves this problem.

When you turn off the Critical Alarm Windows will still show incorrect values but will allows you to continue to use the battery as is until it dies, then your notebook will shut off. However there are some implications.

Real Battery Wear

This refers to actual battery wear, where the battery is physically deteriorating and will lose its charge. If your ACPI is bad, like mine, you will not be able to use third party programs to figure out how badly worn your battery is.

Instead you will have to conduct a battery life test just like I did.

If your ACPI is good, then you have nothing to worry about. All programs will correctly display your charge level and battery life without problems.

&quot;Fake&quot; Battery Wear

This refers to the software aspect, where the ACPI is bad and now your computer reports high percentages of wear and low battery life.

The implications are that you will never know the true values of charge level and battery life because the ACPI is bad and has bad coding. Many users are unaware of this thus they don’t know what causes their notebook to turn off when the battery is low on charge.

Critical Alarm

Many users have their critical alarm turned on; this is used to protect their work. This is a good thing to keep on since it will protect all of your work. However, the critical alarm is also based upon the ACPI information, if the ACPI states 5% charge, then the critical alarm will put your computer into hibernate. Thus resulting in only 2 hours of battery life, when in actuality your battery still has another 30% charge or more left, which can yield another 1 hour of battery life.

Conclusion

Hence, the battery wear and battery life problem can be attributed to the ACPI being badly coded, thus yielding a lower amount of battery life than anticipated. The ACPI is the source information for Windows Battery Miser, all third party programs, and is also correlated to the BIOS when conducting the calibration tool, which did not solve this problem either. The only workaround right now is it to uncheck the critical alarm, turning it off, so that you get the entire length of your battery life, but there are implications for doing so (such as not actually knowing when your battery will give out and losing work). The ACPI is the problem; companies need to test their products and coding to ensure problems like this do not happen!

 

this is quite a detailed review!

hopefully, you get a solution to your problems very soon.

 

Fantastic article Mystic!!!.... Yesterday I was reading your thread and after that I made my own tests based on your comments... well... I had 26% wear (I use mobilemeter)... my laptop is 28 months old (almost 1% per month). When it was brand new usually got about 85-90 minutes on normal usage... lately between 50-60 minutes... After the test and disabling critical level alarm I got almost 25 more minutes!!!.. .I agree with you... it must be ACPI related...and... I forgot to mention...my laptop is Toshiba Satellite A60...so it is possible ti replicate in other brands and this "wear factor" is no only Asus related.

 

so the bottomline is that you probably have to test your laptop to the point that it really shuts down (with critical alarm off) to know exactly how long it lasts, and then you must have a good sense of timing to protect your works

 

Outstanding read...thanks for taking the time to do all this research and testing! I would imagine this applies to any brand system too.

I do have a small question. This forumla appears to be wrong:

Battery life = (((B x W) – B) / C)

Should it not be a little different:

Battery life = ((B - (B x W)) / C)

Written the first way we get negative battery life values. I know it's a small thing but just caught my eye is all.

 

Nice review, everything has to be a mystery, eh?

Your formulas are the same thing rewritten in a different order. Both get the same answer bod oddly one get a + number the other gets a -, so obviously you choose the + one.

Hence:
20 = B
40 = W
C doesn't need to be included to prove my point.

Way 1:

(((20 x 40)-20) / C)

(((800)-20) / C)

Final Answer: 780 / C

Way 2:

((20-(20 x 40)) / C)

20-(800)) / C)

Final Answer: -780 / C

 

Fantastic article, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. A lot of research went into it, I can tell.

I've never had any problems like that with my Sager nor any of my previous laptops. Despite the fact that my laptop is about a year and a half old, I still get about the same battery life as when the laptop and battery were brand new. Hopefully it will last me for a while longer.

 

HAHA where are all the Asus groupies now?

 

Hehe thanks I saw the error in my formula, and noticed it also came out in negative, most people understand there's no such thing as negative battery life, so yah, my hand crampped up using those brackects. LOL.

I also had an instance when I first had my Critical Alarm Turned off, my notebook when into an immediate hibernate, and when i turned it on and all my files were still open. But now that I tried to repeat what happened, I can't seem to get it to do in an instant hibernate.

If I figure out how I did, I will let you all know.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Phenomenal article, and great original research. I think it's a great great piece of writing for us all.

 

Sitting here, enjoying my perfectly working Z33 with no battery problems whatsoever.

Really, this is kind of alarmist. There are THREE models out of the entire Asus lineup that have had this issue. Yeah, it sucks if you have a V6, V1, or R1, but otherwise you're fine, and there is no verification that ALL of the individual units of those models are affected.

I don't get why it gets so much attention on the front of NBR lately, it just makes Asus look bad, it's not like other manufacturers don't have similar issues (HP keyboard thing?)

 

It might be good to get attention, though, nice to see more support to get a fix. I hope that our solution isn't just temporary, and I hope that we can get Asus on board. Thanks for typing that up Mystic.

 

Well, with the exception of the V6, we're talking about the newest Asus models out there. Let's hope, at least for all the groupies' sake, that this isn't a new precedent.

 

Groupies? What is that supposed to mean?

But, this is a precedent, and thats why people such as Mystic and I have been trying to prove the problem so that we can make Asus fix it, instead of let it continue.

 

I think this research into their problem is a great effort and really worth applauding.

And every single computer mfg will at some point or another produce a system or systems with some sort of issue that users will need to sort of force the company to deal with...well, except for Apple, they simply stick their heads in the sand...oops, did I just write that? hehehehehe....just trying to lighten the mood a bit...Mac people...love you all...really...

 

I have been following this subject with considerable interest because I am seeing something similar with my Samsung X60plus (which incidentally, has very similar specs to the V1).

I also have the previous version of the Samsung X60, now 11 months old and with battery wear at 19% so I was concerned to see my X60plus with 7% battery wear at only 3 months. I then ran the battery calibaration in the BIOS and the reported wear shot up to 15%. I contacted Samsung support and the advice was to fully run down the battery (by switching off the alarm as in this article) then fully recharge it and repeat the cycle 3 times.

I have done the run down part and it went as expected except for staying for 10 minutes at 4% charge. The overall rundown rate was about 1%/minute so this represents finding about 9% more charge from somewhere. However, I didn't see any prolonged running once the battery reached 0%: The computer shut down within 2 minutes of reaching 1% charge. When I restarted the computer, the battery wear had dropped to the 7% it was a few days ago.

I'm now on the first recharge cycle. I was surprised to see the battery reaching 80% charge in one hour with the charge rate at 40W. Something doesn't stack up because 80% of the 57.72Whr capacity is 46.18Whr, which strongly points to the battery not starting from empty. I don't know what the charging efficiency is, but I would be surprised if it is as high as 90% (ie 40W charging for 1 hour = 36W of charge into the battery).

I compared the batteries for the old and new X60s. They have the same part number but the old one says "Battery cells made in Japan" while the new one says "Battery cells made in Korea". So there is clearly a difference source, but this may be coincidental to the battery wear issue.

Finally, and slightly off-topic, I see the V1's current drain when running on battery is around 25W. I am getting the same drain on my X60plus. In my view it is excessive and is most likely attributable to the X1700 which lacks, on my computer, any form of power management. My old X60 with T2300 and X1400 could run at around 17W.

I will report more tomorrow on my own experiments.

John

 

The update to yesterday's post. I've been through 3 discharge cycles on my Samsung X60plus and can't get the battery wear below 7%. I did notice that the second recharge took about 5 minutes longer to reach the 80% mark, which is consistent with the recharging starting from a lower level. In all cases the computer shut down promptly after the battery reached 0%.

I find it interesting that I appear to have a similar battery problem to some of the Asus models. I wonder whether the common point is either the source of the battery cells or the BIOS. I noted yesterday that the cells in the problem battery are made in Korea. My Samsung uses a Phoenix BIOS and it was the battery calibration routine in the BIOS which raised the wear up to a misleading 15%.

I have also tried running the battery until fully drained on my nearly new Samsung Q35. However, I can't get the battery wear below the 2% which was there the first time I looked.

John

 

Just a note, my Z33's 12-cell reached 7% wear after around 4-5 months and has stayed there ever since... I think it's normal for there to be some initial wear as the battery settles into use.

 

Hi MysticGolem!

After reading ur post I found out that my toshiba satellite M 70 has same problem. It shuts down half an hour before the actual time. I came to know after more than a year of using it.

Nice job by u!

 

I have some interesting news everyone.

I have called Asus, and talked to Albert, I explained my research to him and showed him everything, including this article/review. He understands that this is a problem, and I showed him that even other notebooks are affected, like the V6 and R1 series.

He will be contacting the technical staff regarding this issue and presenting this. I have Albert's contact information and he has my information. Together we hope to find a solution to this problem, however it can take up to weeks for anything to happen, so hang tight everyone.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Mystic,

I started talking to him about this months ago. I have sent over 30 emails back and forth with him. Recently, he has just stopped responding to them. Hopefully you have better luck.

 

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

 

Here is the fix to your formula: Battery life = ((B x (1-W)) / C)

Nice research. It would be cool if something comes out of it from the sides of notbook manufacturers!

 

I talked to Albert too, he acknowledged that he was working with you. Hopefully with both of us, we are more convincing. Thanks mystic, I owe you one.

 

Maybe useful to people having this issue. Also posted on another thread but with a different topic.

Procedure to maximize battery endurance under the battery wear issue

1. Try not to discharge battery past 30%.
2. If wear goes higher than 20-30%, disable Windows autoshutdown. In this way you can take advantage of the "hidden" charge level while ACPI reports 0% charge.

MysticGolem has noticed, and I can confirm, that when the battery is really over (i.e. the true charge approaches 0) the notebook will not just die but go into Hibernation. Which is very nice.
However, try to estimate how long you have on battery after it reads 0%, and shutdown/plug in earlier than that (preferably higher than 5%).
Even if you cannot estimate this point properly and the battery is shutting down by itself, I do not believe that the ensuing deep discharges really damage the battery, because the firmware on the battery should cut off power earlier than any damage is done.


3. Once 10-11 months or so have passed, send the battery in for a replacement. Then repeat the procedure above.

Like this, a battery should last for about a year. And after 20 or 22 months, when the replacement battery is dying as well, just buy another one.

 

Also some (new for the forum, but old for me) information that might shed some light on this issue.

My M6BNe was repaired for crash damage in the summer of last year. Top,bottom,palmrest,LCD were replaced, together with mainboard, heatsink, and most importantly battery.

Now I have not followed the wear of my first M6Ne battery, but I'm pretty sure that it was almost as good as new when my M6Ne was sent into repairs. I hadn't used it much.

The point is, the new battery also exhibits the battery wear symptoms. I have therefore almost never discharged it below 30%. I have done that 3 or 4 times and the wear is currently at 7%. The symptoms are a bit different, in the sense that this battery while stating n% battery wear, will charge to actually past that point to 100-(n-1) or 100-(n-2) percent. Also, the ACPI reports 0 charge rate at all times (i.e. does not report the actual current flowing into the battery).

Now, I will not test this battery by fully discharging it more often than a few months each full discharge. That is because all the notebook is out of warranty because of the crash damage, and I don't want to damage the battery just for the sake of testing.

But, some conclusions could be drawn from this. Since the same type of mainboard with the same BIOS were put into my notebook, it seems that at least in my M6Ne case, the problem is related to the battery (possibly battery firmware).

 

I will be able to help with this soon. I spent yesterday writing a program that mimics the Window's power meter. I say mimics because it looks very similar, except this program can tell you what the real battery percent is, then create an estimate of your remaining life. Even once Windows says zero, this program can still provide a relaitvely close estimate of life.

It has a tray Icon, and you can hover over it to see percent and time remaining. It should be done pretty soon.

It won't be 100% with its battery estimates, but it will be significantly closer than Windows.

 

Do you have any details on the implementation idea? Time since 0% and discharge current, or how? Just curious Maybe I can give some suggestions.

 

I will do a writeup of how it works once I have it completed. I am down to just fine tuning some of the graphical parts. It is getting the proper actual percentage and it is estimating life properly (according to my view of what it should do). I am very pleased with it so far. Here is a screen shot (teaser):

When this screen shot was taken, Windows Reported 67% with 2:05 left.

 

Great work, and certainly useful to many of us. Will rep once it's done, I'm saving it for then

 

Ha ha, as you should (save the rep till you know the quality)! I am hoping to have the first version done in the next two days (still in classes today). Then, I plan to work on a version with more settings, and persistent settings, as well as one that can do better estimates of battery life, and can determine wear on its own. Now, hopefully I can do all of that within a reasonable time frame.

 

Wow nice job Caleb! As you know I have the V1JP, due to school I have unable to do a review on the Modular bay battery on it, but I have done many tests on it.

When I recieved the Modular Bay battery NHC reported 7% wear, today I checked it says 0% Wear. The V1JP is programmed to use the Modular battery then use the Main battery, meaning my modular battery will always go under 30% charge.

My estimated battery life with the modular bay battery is 1 hour and 30 minutes.
While my main battery has 46% wear and will last 2 hours and 50 minutes under the same conditions, of course the Critical alarm is turned off.

So my grand total is an easy 4 hours of battery life with a lot of room to play around with other settings like bluetooth, higher brightness, more demanding tasks.

Caleb, I like what your doing, take your time, and if possible adjust your program to show discharge rate, two batteries, and have the system tray icon show the estimate battery time, just like NHC.

I can't wait till my notebook states 4 hours + of battery life in the system tray

Man if I knew how to program like you, I would make a lot of mini programs like these to help me do stuff in a typical day.

PS: I know you may not be able to test dual batteries because your notebook doesn't support it...so uhm, i'm not sure, but I guess you can still send me the program and we can work together on the dual battery solution for W3J, V1J and other notebooks that have multi-bays.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

I'm miles ahead of you Mystic. It has a tray icon (even a changing tray Icon) that displays actual percent and estimated life. I don't know about doing the discharge rate (that would be difficult to access with VB.net). I plan to release the first version very soon, I am about to start writing the ReadMe for it.

 

Oh ok Great, good to hear that. It will be definitely nice to replace to replace NHC with this. Also will your program be open for others to make plugins?

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Has anyone tried not installing the battery hotfix (for WinXP, at least) and see if the same thing happens with the battery?

I am currently running with the hotfix uninstalled, will report if things change. I did get two stop errors 0x00... after uninstalling it, but that might be unrelated...

BTW, my ASUS V6J is back from RMA with two batteries that I will use by rotation, right now I have an expected lifetime on idle use of 4hrs 20 mins per full charge, oh life's so good with a new battery

 

I always love having the new battery. Its so nice to have that lifetime. Mystic, the program will be open to others. I don't know about "plug-ins" necessarily, but I plan to have it open source. I am having trouble getting it to package right, thats whats holding it up right now.

 

good luck with the programming, caleb. beta testers are on standby...

wear level 54%. that is, on my nerves about this whole battery deal.

 

I have had some testing done. I am having one final problem before release, its close though.

 

MysticGolem, just curious, what was the BIOS version on the laptop when you initially got it? Also, I'm going to assume that Albert or other ASUS people told you to put in the latest?

Haven't been really deep-discharging my batteries often, so I guess my chances of getting this are lower. Very rarely below 50%, only once or twice below 40% but over 20%, and only once or twice completely where the system hibernated itself due to critical alarm. This unit sits on the dock during the week for the most part, then goes out with me on the weekend where I end up using it whereever. Thing is, it's still at the same level for the last month and a half (ie: 3%). It had been 0% to start, then went to 3% within the first week, and pretty much stabilized there.

I guess at this rate, I won't be able to send the battery back within the 11 months like E.L.E. pointed out from that other thread... just ordered the secondary battery, too...

 

Oh ok Caleb, hopefully you can package that program up soon, I can wait to see it.

AlexF, thank you for your response, you may be right on one sense. I am currently using all STOCK drivers, the one that comes from the CD because I want things to be in an all original state. However a Bios update may fix this problem. I am not sure, but I will definitely try sometime this week.

Unfortunately Albert did not suggest a BIOS update. I also have a modular bay battery, and upon receiving the battery it had 7 percent wear, then I started to discharge it and the next day, I saw 0 % wear. It has been almost 3 weeks with this battery and it still says 0% wear. You can expect 1.5 hours of battery life from it.

One other thing I haven't tested is taking out my main battery and swapping for a new main battery while the notebook is turned off. Turn on the computer, and hopefully see 0% wear because it is a new battery. Then turn off the notebook and put back the old battery with the wear and see what happens to the wear %. Unfortunately I don't have a new battery to test this, but i think this is something I will need to test.

Also just an update, ever since I got my modular bay battery, my notebook has gone into hibernation twice, once the batteries are fully drained out. This is excellent and what I expected.

I did play around with my main battery to get it to reset back to 0% wear, by removing it, discharging it, all sorts of weird things while the notebook is on or off, but nothing seemed to work.

I will do a BIOS update and see what that does.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

My English is poor, sorry.
My Notebook is a V1JP with Vista BIZ.
I am living in Hong Kong, China.
I brought this Notebook on 2007-2-14(+/- 3 days, can't remember)

Sent to exchange for the LCD panel because a red bright dot occur within one week after i brought it.



As you can see, my battery wear level is nearly 70%.
Every time I do the calibration in BIOS or drain the battery to zero making the windows go to hibernation automatically(with critical alarm off), wear level will increase 5%.

NB will go to hibernation automatically(with critical alarm off) when the voltage shows in everest nearly 13000mV
( may be 131xxmV ).

After fully charge the battery, it can last not more than half and a hour.

So sad......

 

Send the battery for replacement, and follow the instructions in my post above on how to maximize its life.

 

OK, thanks.

i will follow it for sure.

just waiting the wear level of the battery to 100% and see what will happen......

 

Yep, that is interesting in itself. Please post the results. Disable Windows shutdown on low battery, and check how much battery life you have. It should be the battery life that you had when it was new.

If you have the time to do all that, of course.

 

haha I am also monitoring my laptop on a weekly basis, i am at 66% wear!!

I can't wait till I hit 100% and then see what happens.

FYI, I have just disable my Webcam in my Device Manager, and now I consume on average 4 watts less!!!.

My Discharge rate is averaging 21 watts, compared to before I was averaging 25 watts.

Now that I have a whole week of no school work, I plan on writing an update review on my V1JP to show how this notebook is holding up to my everyday uses.

As previously stated, my Multi-bay battery has 0% wear which is nice, I hope that after my main battery hits 100% that this wear % bug doesn't spread to my modular bay battery. But we will see..., technically I can spend the next few days running battery calibrations and increase my wear % by 5 each time, lol. But I rather just normally add the wear...ironically this is not even normal wear, haha.

Keep us updated Caleb on your program!

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Please, add W3N series to the bunch.
Me and a friend of mine have W3N and they both show this faulty behaviour!

 

Before seeing the below image,please try to make a guess that what will happen if the wear level % continue increase till 100%, OK?















This is the image i posted before showing that my battery wear level is 67%,


and here is the answer for what will happen when the wear level reaches 100%:


As you can see, the wear level will return to ZERO%
and the fully charged capacity is 982125 mWh, it is obviously wrong.

I thing it is just like when you calculate 0 - 1 = ? using unsigned integer, it will return the biggest integer to you ( for 32 bit unsigned integer, it should be 2^32 = 4294967296)

Also, the wear level will reduce a little bit randomly, which means sometimes it will reduce 5%, not increase 5%, when fully discharged.

Moreover i can't use the 'hidden' capacity of the battery. When the wear level % ~95% the battery only last about 15 mins and the computer will go into hibernation.

It is so sad that ASUS did not do anything to fix this serious bug......

I am very disappointed.

Now, i am waiting the battery to charge to the designed capacity and see what will happen at that moment. I think it would be a little danger.......
God bless me......

 

The Battery will charge to 982125 mWh !!!!!!!!

Of course NOT!!!!!
I think the fully charged capacity of the battery is around 70000 mWh now.
It WILL stop charging the battery AUTOMATICALLY.

But it raise another problem:


Current Cap. will always equal to fully charged cap making it always shows the battery has 100% cap!!!!!! Also, the discharge rate is 98205 mW, it will not change, just always shows that it is 98205........

Disappointed. Again.

 

Hm, I don't know if I fully understand all of what you have said (this bug is just so weird), but I have a few questions. First, at 95% you said you had 15 min of battery life, what about at 100%? Did Windows start ready appropriately again? Also, when you get to a full charge, what happens? Does the charging light ever go off?

 

Outstanding info guys. Thank you for all the hard work.

As I'm new to Vista (and my V1JP), I think I need to ask a dumb question: how do I disable the critical action?

If I go into Control Panel->Power Options->Change Plan Settings(for the given plan)->Change advanced power settings->Expand Battery->Expand Critical battery action, I find I can specify "Sleep" for the battery option, but I cannot disable it. I have changed Critical battery level to 0%... will that do what it is we're trying to do?

Thanks again!