Microsoft denies Win 7 battery bug
The urgent warning to replace one's battery is a fair and accurate assessment - and not a bug - according to Microsoft's Sinofsky.
Despite numerous reports of battery life suddenly diminishing following the installation of Windows 7, coupled with a warning to "consider replacing your battery," Microsoft has concluded that the issue is nothing to do with Windows 7 or its ACPI management.
In a post to the Windows 7 Engineering Blog - via Digital Trends - Windows Group president Steven Sinofsky states that "to the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state," and confirms that "in every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement."
Sinofsky points to the fact that no reports of battery failure thus far have been on new hardware, instead all being from users who have upgraded older devices to Windows 7. The simple reason why Windows 7 appears to have been to blame: the "consider replacing your battery" message, which appears when the last full charge is less than 40 percent of the recorded design charge for the battery, is a new feature which was not present in previous versions of Windows. By announcing the pre -existing battery degradation after an upgrade, Microsoft appears to have mislead users into believing that Windows 7 was the cause - rather than just the age of the laptop.
Having communicated with OEMs regarding the issue, Sinofsky states categorically that "we are seeing nothing more than the normal course of battery degradation over time," and that those wishing to upgrade to Windows 7 should do so without fear for their batteries.
Despite these reassurances, comments are still being made that there genuinely is an issue to be addressed here: one user claims that Microsoft is ignoring the true issue, which is "a marked difference between relative battery life when running Windows 7 vs. any other recent variety of Windows." Others claim that the problem stems from Windows 7 using the Design Capacity field rather than the Total Capacity field for calculating the health of a battery, with user DanLee81 stating that "design capacity with all the problematic batteries is an unpopulated field," reading 0 in affected batteries - even in new laptops including the "Samsung Q320 and Toshiba Satellite T110."
For now, Sinofsky has promised to "continue to monitor the situation" and to continue to "have focused communication with our OEM partners as they monitor their customers and PCs over time."
Do you believe that Microsoft has messed up with Windows 7's treatment of batteries, or is Sinofsky right and the issue is purely caused by ageing, dying batteries? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyThese are not the bugs you're looking for.
:D
[tap head] Genius!! [/tap head]
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I thought that was apple... and what does that first sentence say?
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
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?