Laptop Battery Analyzer

[gratefuljan]

Hi - I work for a school district and am in charge of 60 laptops in carts for student use. We have about 80 batteries of various ages. I am trying to locate a battery analyzer to tell me how much useful life is left in the batteries. Since we have about 80 batteries for two different notebook models, it's not practical to pop them into notebooks and see how much life is left. I need something easy and portable to be able and test the suspicious batteries. We have Compaq notebooks - both the EVO N115 and EVO1015V. Any recommendations or suggestions? I am having the hardest time finding something like this !
Thanks!
Jan

 

[uzi9mm]

I looked for an analyzer but found nothing. I was thinking that you could use a multimeter to check but then remembered that even if a battery is old they should have the same output. It looks like you need to set all of the computers up somewhere like a gymnasium or cafetiera, with full charged batteries, and they are all turned on. You need like 2 or 3 people to watch them and document the results on how long it takes to die out. This in so un-practical but the only way to tell. Also buy 1 new battery as a reference (so you can see the difference between a new battery, a used but still good, and a really bad battery.)

 

[gratefuljan]

Thanks

Thanks for your input. I'm amazed that there doesn't seem to be an easy solution for something like this.

I'm hoping by bumping this up that someone has another solution.

 

[mortified]

I've spoke to some colleagues as well....

and each of us have dealt with specialized equipment from specific vendors for this, but never a software. It's my educated assumption that laptops are so proprietary to each manufacturer and model that it would be almost impossible to create a program with all the hardware hooks to do this for all laptop batteries. It's only been in the recent years that a lot of MB manufacturers for PC's (not even laptops) started providing various programs that allowed you to get more information from your PC such as voltages, timings, etc. You may want to check support from the manufacturer and see if they have a battery diagnostic for each specific model.

Best of luck to you!!

 

[uzi9mm]

Did you ever think about contacting the vednor (compaq) about your problem and ask them what they can do. Like ie: have a local rep come by and bring an analyzer to test. To me I would think that Compaq has got one for there own batteries.