Microsoft denies Windows 7 battery problems

[nsane.forums]

Replacement warning functioning normally, claims software giant

Microsoft has denied recent claims that Windows 7 may be affecting battery performance in laptop computers, maintaining that any problems lie with the batteries themselves.

The company explained in a blog post yesterday why the operating system is recommending a battery change for some laptop users, and describing the reasons behind the alerts.

Many people have reported a notification in Windows 7 that allies itself with the battery meter icon, and informs users if the system senses that the battery needs replacing.

Some users have suggested that this is the fault of Windows 7, or is an error caused by the new operating system, but Microsoft has denied these assertions.

"Several press articles this past week have drawn attention to blog and forum postings by users claiming that Windows 7 is warning them to 'consider replacing your battery' in systems which appeared to be operating satisfactorily before upgrading to Windows 7," wrote Windows president Steven Sinofsky on the Windows engineering blog.

He stressed that the failing batteries are not the fault of Windows, and that the warning correctly identifies the need for a new battery.

"To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning that batteries 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," he added.

"In every case we have been able to identify that the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement."

Sinofsky explained that PC batteries degrade over time, and lose their ability to hold a charge.

"A quick check of mainstream laptops will show that batteries usually have a warranty of 12 months, which is about the length of time when statistically we expect to see noticeable degradation (meaning that you start to notice the need to charge more frequently)," he said.

Microsoft estimates that by the time a laptop is a year old it will hold its charge for just two hours, as opposed to the five hours it would have provided when new.

Windows 7 has a threshold of 60 per cent battery degradation, so any laptops performing at 40 per cent of designed capacity will cause the message to appear.

Sinofsky claimed that an internal Microsoft investigation had proved that the messages were not false positives, and were not incorrectly warning about perfectly healthy batteries.

View: Original Article

[jalaffa]

My laptop would not function on batteries with Windows 7 installed - (10 minutes and shut-down).

I did fancy this response:

I believe a more careful reading of blogosphere presence will very quickly show that there is one very clear behavior being reported, and one supposition: Microsoft's responses to date have chosen to focus on the supposition rather than the actual behavior being reported.

The *behavior* - which I assure you is easily reproduced - has nothing to do with the "new" or "not new" status of the battery. Rather, it has to do with a marked difference between relative battery life when running Windows 7 vs. any other recent variety of Windows (XP or Vista). Specifically, one's battery - regardless of how "healthy" or "unhealthy" Windows 7 deems it to be - goes from providing, for example, 1 hour of off-AC computing power, to some drastically reduced amount of time - say 20 minutes, all within a few weeks of installing the new OS. Further, this behavior is repeatable using a newly purchased battery. In other words, at some point, Microsoft and its OEM partners are going to have to conclude that a random sampling of consumers are somehow experiencing the extraordinary bad luck of constantly purchasing faulty batteries or, more likely, that there is an issue. I think it's simply a matter of time until the latter is uncovered, as the majority of impacted consumers are just now coming around to working through battery warranty issues, purchasing new batteries, returning new batteries assumed to be faulty, etc. only to discover that second and third newly purchased batteries do not rectify the problem. As you acknowledged in your message, the majority of these cases are handled through OEM support, or simply through people assuming the OS is correct and the battery is faulty, and therefore purchasing new equipment. Again, in time, the problem will become more and more self-evident to everyone, including Microsoft.

Finally, the *supposition* which Microsoft is choosing to focus its public responses on is that the OS is somehow physically destroying batteries. I would suggest ignoring this supposition until the nature of the supposed problem is identified. To that end, I can provide Microsoft with an excellent and reliable way to verify the issue: Find several HP Pavilion dv9000t notebooks, with Intel processors, and purchase new batteries for each. Install and run Windows XP 32-bit on all of the notebooks, and install new identical batteries in each. Run each notebook/battery combination through the factory recommended charge/discharge cycles. Next, clean-install Windows 7 64-bit on half of the machines, and continue running Windows XP 32-bit on the other half. Use all of the notebooks in typical charge/discharge conditions for identical tasks for a month or so under the "Performance" power setting. I assure you that the problem will make itself evident very quickly, and that all of the Windows 7 batteries will exhibit marked wear and lower on-battery time vs. the XP machines.

[Night Owl]

Knock on wood. I don't have any trouble running my Windows 7 laptop on battery power.