Laptop Battery Life

milltown

My HP Omnibook is 10 months old and in that time the battery life has gone from about three hours to under one hour. I had some bad habits such as leaving the battery in and charging while working on the mains, recharging a half full battery etc. All of which I only realised were bad habits after a few months of notebook ownership. I realise my sins have cost me some battery life but I think 60-70% is excessive.
It is a Lithium Ion battery so the memory effect should not be the major factor. The battery never completely runs out, rather windows xp sees it is down to 5% and goes into hibernation. I have full admin rights and have set the power props to never hibernate,shut down, sleep, blow up etc. but it still goes into hibernation through windows, there are no power options in the BIOS.
I have a DOS utility that is supposed to run the battery right down and so recalibrate the windows power meter but with XP onboard I cannot get a dos prompt without starting windows first.
Or can I?
This is where you guys come in. All suggestions will win a pint at www.pub.azerbaijan

Pimp Ninja

My computer

Right Click on Floppy drive (with blank disk in drive)

Select format

Tick the "Create an MS-DOS startup disk"

Click Start.

Then stick the rest of the files onto the disk.

Restart your machine with the disk in the drive.

XDA

We have several omnibook 900s here and all have the same issues you describe, and replacement batteries are about €250 each.

There is a built in feature in the BIOS for recalibrating the battery on the Omnibook 900, not sure about other models.

Plug in the charger, hold down F6 while the machine is booting and the battery calibration screen should appear after a few seconds.

Takes about 6 hours to run on my machine. Running it 3 or 4 times in a row, has increased my battery life by about 20 mins, so I am now getting about 1 hour 5 mins instead of the 45 mins I used to get.

The only real cure is to buy a new battery, and don't leave it in the machine all the time. When you are going to be sitting at your desk on mains power for a few hours, swap in the old knackered battery instead.

Hope this helps.

XDA

sceptre

Laptops usually come with a 1 year warranty on the battery when you first get it.

Call HP and tell them your battery is dead/deadish. A conniving person would tell you to go through whatever battery utility they get you go run and still swear blind it didn't make any difference. Then send the battery back and get a new one in the post. Cost to you: zip.

I've replaced four batteries for people in this way (two Compaq, one Dell, one IBM). All were actually dead(ish) so I wasn't lying. Your battery is giving you trouble @ 10 months so I'd do the same if I were you. Be happy it didn't happen @ 13 months.

Gerry

bearing in mind that its normally the users fault for messing up the battery life...

Anyway I have an omnibook 4150b, bought it second hand and the battery was fairly shot. About an hour under any intensive use. I've run the recalibration utility a few times and seems to have gone up to about 90 minutes battery life.

Btw if anyone knows where I can get an omnibook ac adapter ( they all seem to be 19volts, 3.16A ) cheaply in Ireland, let me know.

milltown

I've tried the HP calibration several times and all it seems to do is deny you the use of your notebook for about 6 hours.
I recently bought a new HP battery on Ebay for $90 but obviously I don't want to do this every 10 months.
I think I'll try sending the dud back to HP. The reason I chose this particular notebook was the reviews praising the 3 hour + battery life, and the DVD drive. I looked forward to being able to watch movies wherever I went. As it is I can't even watch a full movie on MPG or AVI which should (I'd imagine) be a heap easier on the battery.
Thanks for the DOS disk tip Pimp I'll give that a go.

Gerry

Divx will actually be just as stressful as dvd playback on the cpu, if not moreso because of its higher compression ratio. However I suppose the dvd drive won't be spinning so its all much of a muchness.

hamster

Actually, I got a new Dell Laptop there recently (a P4 1.8Ghz with 385Mb, 30Gb, DVD/CDR) and I'm trilled to bits with it. I'm wondering about the battery though. Should I plug this out when I'm not using it? Most of the time I use the laptop plugged into the wall on AC. ie, I think I will be rarely using the battery anyway.

Should I plug the battery out to protect the battery? ie would the battery have a better "shelf-life" outside the laptop when not used?

I reckon this would be good for reducing the internal heat somewhat... as well as reducing the weight of the beast? ie, it's 3.6 Kg.

Any thoughts really appreciated.

Gerry

In the manual for my laptop ( li-ion battery also ) they recommend using the battery once a week ( full charge and discharge I guess ) if you are running on ac power all the time.

hamster

Oh no, so you are more or less better off leaving the battery in the laptop? I would have thought that take out the battery and leaving it in a cool room temperature enviornment would ensure it would last longer and remove some heat and stress off the laptop (for AC use)....

Is your's a DELL? I might look up more about it.

hamster

Forgot to mention the battery is an 8-cell "smart" lithium ion (59 WHr).

Some info on batteries.. but not yet on Li-ion.
Cycle you battery
If you have a laptop with either NiCD or NiMH batteries fitted, allow them to go completely flat before recharging them. If you are going to use your laptop for extended periods of time on mains power remove your battery altogether and store it in a discharged state. These do not apply Li-ion batteries as they are unaffected.

I'll see if I can some further info on this.