Lately I had been wondering if my battery was perhaps going south. When I first got the notebook, I was able to squeeze 90-110 minutes out of the laptop on battery. In the last few weeks, Windows has given me only about 50 minutes. Concerned about losing my work, I consistantly shut it off when it told me the battery was low to avoid losing my work. I decided to run some tests last night and find out what the story was.

Well, I sat down last night and surfed the web for about 55 minutes until Windows said I had, "0 min, 1% remaining." Well, from here I decided to go and launch UT2004 Map Editor and basically just force it to keep rendering maps for about 20 minutes. At this point, it STILL had not shut off. Next up was to continue rendering maps and add in WMPlayer 10 running and Adaware. All in all, it took about 25 minutes to kill it.

Following this, I plugged in the AC adapter and restarted the machine right away. I basically let the machine fully recharge on AC while it was on. It hung at 99% for a good half hour and then said it was finished charging. Took it off the battery and it showed about 95 minutes of battery again.

Nice to have accurate guaging of battery life again. The power was always there, I just wasn't willing to risk losing my work before if it wasn't there.

It's called conditioning....

Actually, it's called I've had my laptop for 7 months and Windows wasn't reading the charge accurately anymore because I never fully discharge the battery.

your's is longer i like conditioning better

Hmmm. How about "Recalibrating" instead. Conditioning implies the battery is improving - what's really happening is that the battery is just reporting a false value for time remaining - a full discharge/recharge recalibrates this.

-Peter

even better

Is it OK to always leave the ac plugged in all the time, when the laptop is on, almost never letting the battery discharge? Will it decrease the life of the battery?

They say (whoever "they" is) that to optimize battery life, it should be taken out and stored when not in use, preferably with about half charge. The problem is that when you do this, you lose the ability for the battery to act as a mini UPS, letting your laptop run when there are power spikes or temporary black outs - that alone has saved my butt a few times.

Another take - if you are using an external battery pack (like from Electrovaya or some such), you should take out your internal battery since part of the power supplied for the external battery will go to keeping your internal battery charged - which is really a waste. The power going into recharging a battery is always greater than the power that battery will eventually give out, so you're really wasting energy there. A friend noticed this - his external pack which should give his laptop between 4-6 hours was only giving him between 2 and 3 hours when his internal battery was in.

-Peter

same issue even occur on cell phones if ya know what i mean mate!