News Microsoft denies Win 7 battery bug

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/02/10/microsoft-denies-win-7-battery-bug/1

Microsoft's Windows Group president Steven Sinofsky has commented on reports of Windows 7 killing certain laptop batteries, and claims that it's doing nothing of the sort.

 

*waves hand*

These are not the bugs you're looking for.

 

Considering Win7 has been on this laptop, which was brand spangly new about eight months ago, for all of its life, and its battery is still chugging along like a trooper, I'm quite happy to believe Sinofsky.

 

"even in new laptops" - just what I expected. It's not first time I've seen problems like this solved by BIOS update to support specific battery models. I don't think there's issue with Win7...

 

[tap head] Genius!! [/tap head]

 

one thing people often forget is that the more you use or recharge batteries (especially laptop batteries) the quicker they weaken
if you think about it when they compare the time these will last a lot of them say that if you use it for 2hours (or less in a day) where on somedays i have my pc on for 14+ hours straight it this was a laptop it wouldnt last long at all

(of you break open a battery a lot of them have loads of cells/batteries in side them usually on 8-12)

 

Sounds pretty reasonable actually. I doubt an os could "Break" a battery

 

probably a lot of the people complaining leave the battery in the laptop when they run it off the mains. The first thing i did with my other half's was to take the battery out of it cos i knew she's always have it plugged in... she's clumsy though "i just pulled the cable out again!"

 

I feel sorry for MS on this one. In their latest OS they try to be helpful by reading the status of the battery and passing it on to the end user, so when the user finds out their battery was screwed, it's suddenly all Win7's fault.

In my personal experience, a jump to Win7 from XP on a laptop yielded at least equal performance all round; a jump from Vista to Win7 yielded a definite improvement.

 

this is scary

just as i noticed my battery had for some reason dropped 5% in 3minutes, I saw this thread...

damnit i dont want my battery to die! (even if its already 3 and a half years old)

 

Yeah sure!

I have HP Pavilion dv5 and it had vista on it. Always wanted to get rid of it and at the launch of win 7 i changed my OS. After a week of use my laptop died in the middle of the work. Recharged it and after the incident my laptop's battery could last twice less than it used to.. Now it lasts ca 15 min.

STOP TALKING BS AND START FIXING THE PROBLEM, YOU ARROGANT MS

I tell everyone not to come here and say "Omg it's your battery.. bla bla". IT'S NOT!
Hate companies hiding their problems. If i knew it was going to happen i would have gone for the Snow Leopard.

 

there are a few things i want cleared up before i side for or against Microsoft.

A. is it really reading the design capacity field? if it is this is not Microsoft's fault, as the manufacturer did not adhere to specifications. are there other fields that win7 uses that may be misreporting due to manufacturer laziness? could these be what is leading to possible battery damage?

B. is there really a marked difference, on a single machine, between win 7 and win vista or win xp? has testing been done switching back and forth? if there is a marked difference how much is due to win 7 requiring more horsepower to run?

C. how is the battery management actually supposed to work in windows 7 when it confronts an aging battery? is it overly cautious by design?



there are also a lot of misconceptions about batteries that people have that could be exacerbating the issue.

1. li-ion batteries have a limited shelf life, weather you use them or not. in older batteries that can be as short as 2 years, and for many newer batteries it can be as long as 6. over this time they continually lose capacity.

2. li-ion love to be topped up, and topping them up regularly can actually prolong battery life. there is no real penalty for more recharge cycles. however, leaving a li-ion batter dead for long periods of time can significantly reduce their life span. store them charged, and remove them from storage and charge them on a regular basis.

 

Sounds like BS from MS to me...

First, to the people who say unplug your battery, that really isn't necessary. Most chargers, and in fact *all* chargers in computers, will simply switch off the charging circuit and run off mains power once the battery is full. Removing the battery is unnecessary and an idea based on pure paranoia.

@shanky - recharging lithium-ion batteries often doesn't really cause any problems. In fact, it's better to charge them often than to completely discharge and completely charge them; lithium-ion doesn't suffer from memory like other types of battery. For more info on this see http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-14A.htm

The problems people are having relate to capacitance - it's a case of the battery not being charged correctly. From the sounds of things, MS decided to use a new method for measuring batteries which not all manufacturers conformed to, but whether or not this is down to the manufacturers not conforming to standard design specifications or MS using a field that wasn't widely accepted I don't know. The reason it hasn't affected new laptops is likely down to MS telling manufacturers how their system would work, and them making sure the battery would conform to their specification.

@LucusLoC - As I understand it, the peope who have had this problem were running other versions of Windows, upgraded to Win7 and then after that their battery was ruined. Changing back to another OS, be it Windows or Linux or whatever, didn't do anything to fix the problem. Also, I think it's better to leave a Li-ion battery partially charged for storage rather than fully charged, but I could be wrong.

Thinking about it, for my girlfriend's Eee PC there was a BIOS update for Windows 7. It's possible that this updated the ACPI information about the battery, so that Windows 7 could correctly charge it. If that's the case, then so long as the laptop manufacturers have provided a BIOS update within a reasonable timeframe of Win7's release the blame might lie with the end user. MS could argue it's their responsibility to ensure any software installed is compatible and won't break the computer.

Still, I don't like the way MS have come out with this press release. It's obvious if you listen to peoples' complaints that there *is* a problem and it's not just down to battery degredation with age. At the end of the day, whether or not the fault really lies on MS' shoulders they're not going to admit it. The ramifications if they did would be immense, and they would likely have to compensate everyone who had their battery ruined.

 

Does no one remember one of Microsoft's oldest mottos?

"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

In all honesty though, MS was trying to implement something useful, why they went this route who knows, it's Ms we are talking about. As LucusLoC said, how many more things are reported wrong. More than likely, a lot. I have seen many times over the years where a manufacturer just didn't bother to fix their problem and just created a patch. Of course Ms got the blame then too.

All in all, I think they did well on Win7.

 

True anytime its a manufacture issue or a different software companies or other companies driver, either way the blame always goes back to MS with out anyone doing any real thinking. Sure this could and could not be a MS problem, All I know is my systems with Win 7 havent had any issues relating to its battery.

 

Battery's working just fine over here.

 

I thought that was apple... and what does that first sentence say?

+1 Half of Vistas supposed problems were third party hardware/software companies too lazy to make new driversor software that works with vista.

 

it's not an ms problem, its a battery problem, my laptop, an old acer travelmate 2355wlmi has had winxp, win vista, and now windows 7.

my battery has always lasted about 1.5 hours from new, with win xp on it. i always have the backlight on 2/3rds brightness, wether on battery or mains, so thats only to be expected.

i have upgraded various parts of my laptop, including processor, memory, dvd rewriter, and wireless n card.

and i dont have any issues with the battery

 

As far as i know the battery charging is all hardware operated and has nothing to do with the os other than showing the status of the battery. When you turn windows off with the batter at 40% and put it on charge then it starts charging correct? the os isnt telling the battery to charge its doing it all automatically. Thats my theory at least.

 

I understand the idea behind improved battery management, but how do I reconcile this with my HP 2710p tablet's behaviour - battery charges fine, but when you unplugh the AC adapter, after a few minutes the system hibernates. Turn the laptop on, and it restores, and the battery (despite a small red 'x' on the icon) lasts two and a half hours. Surely something is wrong with the algorithm Win 7 is using to diagnose health? HP Battery Check thinks the battery is 'GOOD'.

When I first installed Win7 Beta, the secondary battery (clips on the base of the laptop, cobined 5 hours plus endurance) stopped working. I installed the MAPS Win7 Ultimate Release Candidate, and when I tried the secondary battery, both batteries started working normally. About a month ago (still with MAPS RC), the battery behaviour described above began, and the secondary battery (I have two, one newer than the other, both now behave the same way) shows Replace in HP Battery Check, and Win7 doesn't notice that it is there.

I bought a second Primary battery when the behaviour changed (direct from the Far East over the internet - if it's a fake, it is very, very good), and this behaves the same way.

Where to from here?