My Laptop Battery lasts a Grand Total of Four Minutes

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bagelred

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My laptop simply does not work on battery power anymore. Is the battery simply dead or is something else wrong with my system? Is the system not recognizing the battery?

The battery will show as 100% charged, with "Consider replacing your battery" note on the icon. When I plug the electric out, it goes down from 100% to about 88% in 4 minutes, then shuts itself off completely. Nothing. Have to plug back in and restart. Right now, it's recharging as we speak. It's at 9% and slowly climbing.

Background....it's a laptop I've owned about 18 months, but don't use very often. I believe battery lasted two hours at its peak when first bought it. It's a laptop I've left on sleep/hibernate for even weeks on end, and I wonder if that killed the battery completely. I'm not even sure if battery slowly degraded over time or if this happened all of a sudden. It certaintly was never this extreme to last this short.....4 minutes.

But I've also read that Windows 7 has trouble recognizing batteries sometimes? It seems unusual a battery would last just 4 minutes....as if its not working at all.

Can someone help me isolate if its battery itself or something else?

FYI, it's an Acer Aspire 6530, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core QL-62 (2.0 GHZ), 3 GB DDR2, 250 GB HDD, Windows 7 Preminum upgraded from Vista Premium. Laptop is about 18 months old and generally, no other major problems.

If need more info, let me know. Thanks for help.

NOTE: When it was recharging, all of a sudden, it went to 100% capacity. Even though it was only 11% just a short time ago. ?????????
 
Well, try disabling the shutdown options under your power configuration when the battery reaches a critical level. But chances are the battery is just bad. Could have been caused from serious heat, or just a manufacturing defect.
 
Well, try disabling the shutdown options under your power configuration when the battery reaches a critical level. But chances are the battery is just bad. Could have been caused from serious heat, or just a manufacturing defect.

OK how do I do that in Windows 7? Under my power settings, I see "Critical Battery Action", but doesn't give me a "Do Nothing" option - it's either hibernate, sleep, or shut down. For "Low Battery Action", its already on "Do Nothing."
 
Hmm, I am unsure, you should have the option to literally, do nothing.....

EDIT:

This may help you in seeing if its the battery, or your OS not properly detecting the actual power level.

With the ongoing troubles of ACPI incorrectly reporting battery life on many notebooks, many users wish to gain access to the hidden energy supply by disabling the battery alarms. For whatever reason, Windows Vista does not allow the 'Critical battery action->On battery' option to be set to 'Do Nothing' using the Power Options GUI--it is simply not in the drop-down list.

After digging through the registry and attempting to change the key values manually with regedit.exe to no avail (unable to change the value due to write permissions), I found out about a command line version of power options included with Windows Vista.

The tool is powercfg.exe

To change the 'Battery->Critical battery action->'On battery' setting to "Do nothing" using powercfg.exe

activate the power scheme you want to modify.
open an elevated command console (windows key, type 'cmd' in start menu, press "ctrl+shift+enter", click 'continue')
execute "powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0"
your current power scheme will show "Battery->Critical battery action->On battery: Do nothing" despite the option being unavailable in the drop box.


If you want to change the value of a non-active power scheme, you can execute 'powercfg -L' and replace SCHEME_CURRENT with the GUID of your choice.
To see all the options, run 'powercfg /?'

SOURCE: http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...-battery-action-do-nothing-windows-vista.html
 
That worked. I'll test battery again and post results.

EDIT: Just tested. Same results. Got four and a half minutes. Then off. Dead as a doornail.

It's time for a new battery.
How old is the laptop?
18 months seems a little short for a laptop battery to die, they tend to favor 2-3 years in my experience with my friend's laptops.
 
IF you have a multimeter you can check your battey by doing the following:

Charge to 100% or closest you can.
Pop the battery from the computer and read voltage across terminals.
Let it sit for 30 minutes
Read voltage same terminals -

If the battery is good the voltage should remain the same. If you have bad cells the voltage will drop 1.5 volts or there abouts for every bad cell. Inexpensive Nicad batteries do not last much longer than a year or so before starting to lose thier cells.
 
IF you have a multimeter you can check your battey by doing the following:

Charge to 100% or closest you can.
Pop the battery from the computer and read voltage across terminals.
Let it sit for 30 minutes
Read voltage same terminals -

If the battery is good the voltage should remain the same. If you have bad cells the voltage will drop 1.5 volts or there abouts for every bad cell. Inexpensive Nicad batteries do not last much longer than a year or so before starting to lose thier cells.

OK I'll do that now.....do you means volts or watts? I'll record both.
 
I have the same problem with my HP G60-126ca laptop, though luckily it happened under the warranty period, so the manufacturer (HP) sent a new battery after I shipped the original back to them. Hopefully Acer support is just as friendly but who knows?
 
I have the same problem with my HP G60-126ca laptop, though luckily it happened under the warranty period, so the manufacturer (HP) sent a new battery after I shipped the original back to them. Hopefully Acer support is just as friendly but who knows?

Unforanately, mine isn't anymore. I don't think Acer will help me.

As for the volts/watts, seemed almost the same no matter with/without battery. No real difference.
 
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