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

my w3v battery went from 5-10% wear tp 96% wear in a month

 

I think your battery is just old and dying. I've seen several (at least 3) such situations signaled on the forum in the past few weeks. It seems this is the pattern by which the W3V batteries die... quick and painless

 

My V6j is off being repaired. I don't know when I expect to have it back, but when I do I will let everyone know if it was correctly fixed. I am very hopeful, as I have heard of at least one confirmed case of this fixing the computer.

 

Caleb what are the results did they fix it? My 1 year odl V1j is runnning on the third battery and the problem persists. I'm running my third battery almost only in AC mode the wear lvl stops going up then but every time the battery charge level is under 30% the wear lvl goes up 5%. Sad

 

I haven't officially checked the wear level in quite a while, but it seems to be better. The last time I checked, though, it was fixed.

 

I see, so if u check let us know if it's fixed. I bought my V1j in Europe/Poland and i'm running on my 3rd battery now , every time i called them to repalce my battery they told me that it is a normal condition, crap, 3 months of use and 48% wear lvl- that's not normal to me. I'm so angry and don't know what to do. So if Your laptop is really fixed tell us what have they repaired/changed. Thx

 

Could you please check it semi-officially? As in, look at it and report it here and also state approximately how many times you discharged your battery past 25%.

This would be extremely useful to all of us V6J users, because most of us will have our warranty for still 6 months or so, and you could save us a world of trouble (and spending money on batteries) by just saying whether it is indeed fixed by your RMA, and what hardware exactly was changed that fixed it.

Thanks very much.

 

My warranty is already up, but I'd still like to know how it was fixed in case I ever want to pay for the repair.

 

Has this issue pricked ASUS yet? I hope they come up with a bios fix or sth. I dont want to see incorrect values of my batt life.

 

It isn't a big issue to Asus yet, but I am back to working with their tech support on a solution. I have to say though, they aren't moving at all quickly on this.

 

http://asusbatterywear.googlepages.com/home

That link was posted somewhere on this form a little while ago (maybe even in this thread). I was hoping for a workaround like that, but it seems he got his laptop fixed which means that it IS possible. I've sent a few emails to him, but I haven't gotten a response. Anybody have any idea?

 

That is me. I try to respond to everyone, but I don't always get to all of it. Unfortunately, mine wasn't fixed, though it wasn't exhibiting problems right when I got the computer back. Sorry.

 

Its affecting the new V1s to, an quite seriously, Ive lost 5% of my battery jst by draining the battery 13%. Wear level is 11% for now

 

Any other V1s and V1j owners, please read this and contact Asus. The more people that say this is a problem, the more likely a solution. I might not benefit from a V1 solution, but I know how bad it is to have this problem, and I would hate to see such a nice computer crippled by such a pathetic issue.

 

I never payed much attention to the battery life until I started reading this thread..So I guess I have a few questions now.
I currently own an Hp Nx9420 notebook, which originally had a battery life of 4 hours(REAL 4 HOURS) at lowest light intensity and about 1h50min at highest light setting...right now , after 1 year and a half, it has 3h30min and about 1h37min...so I guess the wear isn't very bad...
I've read a few battery maintenance tutorials and all they did was to confuse me more I mainly used it as a desktop replacement, I NEVER took the battery outside the laptop , I charged/discharged it at least 4 times a month ,but it was mostly plugged in. My questions is, because I will be getting a Sager 5790 pretty soon, did I do the right thing? I'd like to have a battery that can last as long as possible, and I was wondering if anyone knows exactly what type of maintenance do the laptop batteries require for longer life..

Thanks a lot guys, this forum is the best in terms of infos,news,reviews,and so on

 

There are several things you should know about modern Lithium-Ion batteries. First, they decay. It is a chemical process, and it is unavoidable. Your loss in battery life seems completely reasonable for chemical decay. The second thing to note is that all of these batteries have a smart chip in them to control charging and discharging. If they are left plugged in the battery will prevent over charging. When using them, the battery will prevent itself from being discharged too deeply. That said, what you are doing is fine. Some people claim that it is bad to leave them plugged in all the time, but you can't over charge it and there is no sort of memory affect, so you won't have any problems from that. The cell phones and laptops that I have had have always maintained life just fine from being plugged in for long stretches (even for weeks at a time).

 

I figured as much. Since already 3 laptops I've had went through the same type of treatment and lived

 

Well that's quite excellent sagerdude, everything with your laptop and battery seem to be fine in my opinion. Losing 30 minutes of battery life in 1 year is good. You can install NHC and see the actualy % lost in wear. Also check with HP and see if you can get a new battery, i'm sure you wouldn't mind having 4 hours of battery life again.

As for my V1JP, here's what I did recently. I replaced my main batter after hitting 92% wear. I know for a fact if the battery hits 100% wear, windows will put a red "X" on the battery and state it has 100% charge, but no battery life. (located on the Power Meter in System Tray).

Asus paid for the Fedex shipment, a guy came to my house picked up the battery and in 4 days i got a new battery from Asus.

My multi-bay battery has 1% of wear, and I use it a lot, about 5 months of on and off usage. As for my new Main battery, well I have just ran some tests to see my battery life, and it matches my old previous battery life. No wear on it yet, but once school starts we will see how things go.

The odd thing is monitoring my discharge rate with these batteries, it really doesn't make much sense anymore.

Setting: Windows XP Pro, 2/16 Brightness, Wifi On, No peripherals, Web browsing and typing documents with some idling.

Main Battery + Multi-bay = 27-31w discharge rate
Multi-bay alone = 24-25w discharge rate
Main Battery alone = 22-25w discharge rate

With my old battery this was never the case, the discharge rate was always between 22-26w. So something is quite odd, FYI i am still on stock drivers and BIOS. (maybe i should update :S )

Regardless with both batteries in, the battery miser states 4 hours of battery life on the dot. However, if you time it, the multi-bay battery would last roughly 1 hour and 35 minutes. Once the multi-bay battery is done, the main battery starts, but discharges at roughly 25w average, and the battery miser states 3 hours. (Same as my old battery)

Total time is 4 hours and 30 minutes with the above settings and tasks. I am going to test this some day soon, because the battery miser is wrong at this moment in calculating battery life with two batteries. Since for some reason it increases the discharge rate by 6watts for no reason, despite the fact that both batteries independently use 24 watts, but both together use 30 watts until the multi-bay battery finishes.

Um as for the V1S, I am not totally convinced yet that it suffers from this problem, some are experiencing it, and some are not, but right now it is too soon to tell. I started to get wear after 1-2 weeks of regular usage, and from there on, every time I discharged the main battery past 30%, I would incur a 5% battery wear penalty

So we would need approximately 1 month to be sure that the V1S suffers from this problem. Lets hope it doesn't truly suffer from this plague.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Agreed. I also posted a summary of my experience with the issue on the V1s batt thread, http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2387353#post2387353

 

I also am having battery problems... 53% wear according to NHC, I have had my V1JP since the beginning of April. I have not brought it in for service yet.

 

I suggest you exchange the battery from warranty now. Then exchange it again in March next year, and then take care of it according to my instructions.

To decrease the stress on the main battery (namely, avoid discharging past 40%) you can consider buying a bay battery, which is known not to suffer from the issue.

 

ok so i read thru this thread and i see that u have no solution for this problem.
what i m gonna try is , i ll go see asus this week sometime at their support center in markham , canada.

also i ll see if i can find that bay battery, will it help my laptop work 3 hours and more?
thnx

 

I sincerely wish you good luck, and I hope that you being there in person can help your case. I will say that in my more than 1 year of experience, Asus never fully acknowledged that there was a problem, and preferred to replace my laptop with a different one to finding a solution.

 

Same here. Only I didn't replace it because they had no suitable replacement option.

But good luck anyway

 

hi everyone,
great topic, I used it in my blog: http://asusbatteryproblem.blogspot.com/
I try to make it as a collection of possible solutions to the problem.. any contribution, comment is very much appreciated...
thank you

 

This is not a brand specific problem. I found it to happen *only* when I updated from my WinXP SP1 to SP2 (I don´t know about VISTA because I have no experiences with it on this laptop).

There is a metter on batteries that sometimes has to be calibrated *but* it may lead to complete discharge of a Li-ion battery and they don´t like that. The main problem is on batteries and HP calibrating software. My 4-year-old HP never had such problems and when I used HP´s calibrating software I got almost the inicial performance.

ACER also has that problem and I serious doubt of ACPI´s failure. I bet it´s due to the internal batteries´ electronics that with heat fail to measure right and probably with WinXP SP2.

Perhaps someone with dual boot could tell us if the same happens on Linux or Windows Vista (like seeing 0%, reboot and load VISTA / Linux to see if it says the correct value

 

I can confirm that Linux sees the exact same values as Windows.

Perhaps the HPs have a similar problem, but I really doubt the ASUS wear problem is related to the OS. I guess either ACPI, battery firmware, or a combination of the two.

 

Hi all

Caleb, the link to your site at googlepages gives 404. Is there any way to download your program to test my notebook?
I had the wear level under 10% (6 or 7, I don't remember exactly) and all of a sudden it increased to 36%. I bought my V1JP 3 months ago. It is mainly used as a desktop replacement but I like to wander with it at home from time to time so it starts to worry me

 

JosPL,

I took the site down (closed the account and the Google page). I no longer have the files on my computer, only an archive, which I don't have access to at the moment. I apologize.

 

What have you all been doing about your batteries? I use my V6J to take notes in class, but the wear level is now at 96%. I disabled the windows alarms but it still goes in to hibernate after a while (maybe 40 minutes?). My warranty is already up and I'd really like to be able to use my laptop for class and not just as a desktop, but that won't be possible if I can't even make it through one class on a charge. I may have to consider selling my laptop (if I can)...

 

I got mine replaced, however I was under warranty. New batteries, with proper treatment (don't discharge below 30%) or sell seem to be your options.

 

I agree with caleb.

If you really like the notebook get 2 batteries. Then don't discharge any of them past 40% (not 30% that doesn't always do it).

 

I've switched the two batteries that I have for my V6J yesterday evening (reminder: I'm doing battery rotation to minimize the effect of the wear issue). The battery that I shelved now was at 12% wear, the one I changed it with has 7% and hasn't been used from July.

I have discharged the battery to 50%, not 40%, because usually the problem kicks in just below 40% and the battery jumps down to 2-5% immediately. So I figured it's better to have a bit more charge than that in the battery.

1. Now, if the wear is fake in such a way that:
battery is max charged at M but reported at R < M (and consequently, the zero charge 0 is actually a fake Z > 0, i.e. the charge scale is compressed to the RIGHT END) then the reported 50% is actually somewhere around 60% true, physical charge. And then it would have been better if I discharged it to lower (to get to real 40% which is the ideal for LiIon storage).

2. On the other hand, if the wear is fake such that the battery no longer charges to M but only to R, and the zero is true (i.e., Z = 0 and the charge scale is compressed TO THE LEFT), then my choice was correct because 50% reported corresponds to lower than 50% true charge.

But to be on the safe side and considering the discontinuous jumps that the battery experiences below 40%, I have chosen the second option.

I posted this because it might be helpful to people storing batteries with this issue. And also to get any feedback (i.e., do you think my reasoning is correct or not).

 

Considering the article was written in February, does anyone know if the more recent Asus' battery issue has been resolved or at least is there a better solution?

 

I had the same problem with my S96J. I still got my warranty so I exchanged it to the new one (same model). Everything seems good now.

 

The battery issue has not been solved on the models that had it.

V1S, the successor of V1J(p) suffers from a milder main battery wear issue. Wear can be reset in a certain fashion on that notebook. Check the dedicated thread on the ASUS forum for more info.

V1S suffers from a more severe problem in that the modular battery kills the main battery (renders it unusable).

There are also other BIOS bugs related to battery on the G1S.

Yeah, I know, ASUS firmware programmers are computer-science dropouts. Or maybe they just use trained monkeys, or something.

 

HAHA where are all the Asus groupies now?

 

ASUS "fans" still like their notebooks despite all the problems.

Of course, being a fan doesn't mean one may not think. So many ASUS fans will possibly move on to other brands, unless ASUS improves their machines until they need to upgrade.

 

I had a phone discussion with Asus Nordic today, about me wanting to get my battery replaced. The wear percent is not "too bad", only 46%. Under normal use I got 40 minutes (I got around 2 hours 30 minutes with the same usage when I bought it, 10 months ago).

According to the guy I talked to, this is normal. No matter what I said, he kept saying that they cannot replace it, because it is normal for a 10 month old battery to do this. I told him my previous ASUS notebook is 3 years old and performs better. He did not care.

This is my 3rd ASUS notebook. Probably the last one too

 

That is of course bulls_it.

You can quote the manual which states that if fully discharged each day a battery should last about a year. This means AT MOST 100/365 = 0.27% of wear per full discharge. Then estimate your frequency of discharges per month, multiply by 10 months, to get the number of discharges. Multiply that by 0.27% and if you get a number smaller than 46%, then you have proof that your battery is faulty, according to its characteristics as guaranteed in the ASUS manual. (providing the ASUS support trusts your honesty in estimating the # of discharges that you make)


If this doesn't work I would try to get over the guy's head. Even as far as ASUS headquarters. Writing a few emails doesn't hurt much.

 

Moreover, most of the batteries with the wear problem, behave at this stage in the following way. If you leave your battery drop to 30% it will DISCONTINUOUSLY jump to 2-5% and then shutdown the computer in a matter of minutes.

If you have this: This is clear, reproducible, faulty behavior. Ergo, you should be given a new battery.

Another way to prove your point is to discharge the battery to hibernation repeatedly. Record using MobileMeter or RMClock the designed max charge versus the current max charge. (DMC - CMC)/CMC is the wear level. If this evolves at a rate of more than .27% per full discharge, then your battery is again faulty according to the characteristics as defined in the manual.

 

I actually do have this behaviour, but mine jumps to 2-5% at around 40-50%. Thus I beleive I have a lot of "wear" queued ... I guess I will be charging-discharging the notebook all weekend, see what happens

 

You need not.

If you have this behavior, then you already have strong reasons to claim warranty replacement of the battery.

A well-functioning battery may not do such things. Write a RMA form containing this defect and only this one (no mention about wear), and send it to ASUS service. There is no reason for which they can refuse to service your notebook then.

 

Well, after a not so friendly email from me and showing them my invoice they finally issued the RMA number. They do want the entire notebook though, not just the battery ... well .. whatever. I guess they will just send it back with a new battery?

 

Probably so. Maybe they will throw in a new motherboard too -- it's all a complete waste of time and resources of course, because the problem is in the firmware, has never been fixed, and no amount of hardware replacements will solve it.

Better than you having to pay for a new battery, though.

 

so is there a software answer to this problem and if there is how do i find and use it?
thanks
asaler (asus r1f tablet 2ghz)

 

No answer currently. No hope of an answer anytime soon.

Please edit the quote such that it is only one or two paragraphs, you're going to wear out the scroll wheels of many people

 

Now it came back. They replaced a part they call: V1S-4A/VX2S-2B3D. I wonder what that is? Probably the battery? They call it V1S, so it probably is the same that goes with the V1S, I guess.

Battery was partly charged, and wear percent was 1%. I am currently charging it up. Hope it gets to 100%

The form also said the problem was: Battery cannot be charged.

Strange way of putting it, but I guess it is just that.

 

That's I think one of the options they have in a dropdown list, that's what it always said on my V6J forms as well.

Probably it's the V1S battery. Let's hope that it only has the lighter wear problem where you can reset the wear by letting the battery discharge fully!! That's what the V1S has.

If so, your problem is as close to solved as possible, I think.

 

I have same problem in my V1Jp or worst. Full capasity has overflowed and now it seems charge to limit voltage 16.8V (4.2v/cell). Show 9% battery charge level.

Was it hard to get warranty RMA and was it trought UPS or DHL?

Laptop was bought at 28.3.2007 so there is litle time left.

Are there still this wear problem after you got it back?