Refreshing battery on Samsung's?

Hi,

I want to know if there is some way of refreshing the battery on these laptops? My 770z5E is rather lacking on the battery run time, but this is to be expected as it's a second hand machine. I've messed with all the settings and I'm wondering if there's a way of cleaning out the battery and refreshing it, so it runs longer than it currently does. I'm only getting around 3 - 4 hours, regardless if I'm doing artwork, or just surfing without intense youtube clips.

 

There should be a battery calibration option in the BIOS.

The procedure to do the calibration is:

(i) Run a battery utility such as BatteryInfoView and take a copy of the details so you know your baseline values
(ii) Make sure that the Battery Life Extender option (if your model has it) is off
(iii) Fully charge the battery
(iv) Fully drain the battery. You can use the computer while the battery is running down and then, when Windows says the battery is getting empty, shut down Windows, go into the BIOS and find the battery calibration function which will run the computer until the battery is completely empty.
(v) Recharge the battery
(vi) Run BatteryInfoView again to see whether the capacity has increased. If it has not then it's time to look for a new battery.

It's possible that the previous owner gave the battery a hard time with daily heavy usage.

John

 

My life went down considerably when I did the calibration, YMMV.

 

I ran a battery calibration last week. Battery Wear had jumped to 9.1% after the previous calibration over a year ago (heck, may be close to two years, the laptop is over three years old).

Surprisingly, Battery Wear remains at 9.1% after this last calibration!

I have Battery Life Extender enabled most of the time, I only disable it when I know I'll need more than 3 hours on battery. I guess it works

 

I hope you meant the "battery" life!

Thanks for the replies! I noticed that I've been using my computer with battery extender and I have taken that off.
I will see how it performs with full charge before attempting battery calibration function.

 

Just be aware, that the whole purpose of BLE is to spare the battery from spending much time at or near full charge. Near empty and near full charge are what hurts its longevity. So use it only when you need it.

 

When I saw the battery life lost I think some of mine was as well.....

 

Have switched it back on!

Not too sure what to do after reading Dannemand and TANWare's experiences....

 

When Li-Ion or Li-Po battery dies - it dies. And there's nothing to do with that because chemical degradation of these batteries is irreversible.

As for the calibration, sometimes this helps a bit. Also, some BIOSes doesn't have built-in calibration function, but you still have the way. You must first fully charge the battery, reboot into BIOS, then pull out the power cable and let it fully discharge in this state. Then fully charge the battery, after that turn it on and look what is battery wear now.

This is completely the same as if you were using built in battery calibration function. In a few words, this way you let the battery controller learn two endpoints - fully charged battery state and fully discharged.

 

Batteries do wear out.

Has the capacity reported by BatteryInfoView increased or decreased? I think there's a good chance it will have increased because, with Battery Life Extender enabled, the battery controller's idea of full may have gradually drifted away from the truth.

John

 

^ Precisely!

Li-Ion and Li-Pol batteries don't have the Memory Effect problem that older NiCad and NiMh batteries did, which required periodic reconditioning.

The purpose of Battery Calibration is purely to keep the battery readings accurate, as described by John and @TotalRe. In other words, the battery's actual capacity may have been slowly deteriorating (as is unavoidable) but the battery readings are no longer accurate (including Battery Wear).

While the calibration itself does hurt the battery a little bit (by charging it fully and, in particular, by discharging it fully) it shouldn't normally cause a big increase in Battery Wear. If it still does, it is more likely a result of the Battery Wear now accurately reflecting the battery's capacity.

What you don't want, is to run Battery Calibration frequently, since those repeated full charge/discharge cycles will wear it.

 

This is the current info without calibration.

So am I right in saying that the calibration will only give correct readings for the capacity, but is unlikely to help the battery improve?
There's also battery wear level but I'm unsure if the 87% means that it's gone from 100%(good) down to 87% (bad), or it means it's gone from 0%(good) to 87%.(bad)

 

The wear is expressed incorrectly: It should be (100 - the value calculated), ie 12.4%. This is quite good if the battery is 2 years old.

Running the calibration will help because it resets the voltage - capacity curve and will give you a more accurate value for the remaining capacity, for better or worse. The wear caused by running the calibration every six months (my normal target) is negligible compared to the benefits unless the battery is already dying (a couple of years ago I deliberated kept rerunning the calibration on what I knew was a sick NP900X3B battery so that the wear was sufficient that Samsung couldn't dispute replacing the battery under warranty).

It is likely that some of the current calibration error is with the definition of empty. Sometimes I have had the calibration run for several minutes reporting zero charge remaining before the computer has switched off which means that the battery had more charge remaining than it expected. And if the battery is starting to die then the sooner you know then the sooner you can look out for a replacement at a nice price. I have noticed that the price of genuine Samsung replacment batteries has dropped as stock is being cleared while third party batteries have started to appear.

John