Laptop battery

[ad astra]

Hi there,
I have a new Hp laptop running Windows Vista home premium - it seems great except for a few minor glitches...
However, when I turn the machine off and leave it even overnight the battery drops to 80 something % of it's maximum potential. If I leave it for a few days it can be below half of full capacity. I always turn it off properly (ie I don't use sleep or hibernate). Is this sort of battery drop normal or might there be a problem? Thanks.

[All Ahead Full]

I would get the battery replaced, batteries can suffer this sort of drop in charge if 2-3 years old, but certainly not a new one. One other thign you could try is to leave it on charge overnight, and then leave the laptop on, off chrage overnight, but failing that, I'd get a new battery.
all the best,

AAF

[Hyph]

The situation you describe is not normal.

A friend of mine had a similar problem with his HP laptop (I don't remember the model, sorry, but it's <3 months old). HP had already replaced his battery once but the problems (rapid discharge) remained.

Turned out that the battery just wasn't quite seated correctly. Everything looked ok, but there was some electrical connection that wasn't making good contact.

Take your battery out, clean the contacts with a soft dry cloth and then carefully re-seat the battery. See if that works for you.

If not... call HP, get a new battery. If that doesn't fix it, they will probably need to look at your laptop.

[dazdaz]

To get the best performance from new, Ni-MH batteries no matter what device they power, they must be charged/allowed to go flat about three times before they go optimum. Give it a go.

Daz

[MacBoero]

I'd be surprised if a "new" HP laptop had Ni-MH batteries. All HP laptops I've come across recently have had Li-Ion batteries, which you can charge any time you like.:)

[dazdaz]

Well spotted, just seeing who's paying attention:uhoh:

[MacBoero]

Just my penny’s worth...

If the laptop is still under warranty and you are unhappy with it in any way, take it to the retailer and get it looked at. If you bought it online, then find out how a replacement battery can be arranged. You've nothing to lose by asking.

Secondly are you sure you're shutting it down. Don't think I'm being condescending, but my wife bought an HP, and thought she was shutting it down. It was going into some sort of hibernation mode, which still used battery power to maintain the RAM.

[The Flying Pram]

This thread got me wondering since my NEC laptop does exactly the same thing. So I had a look in the "Power Options" settings and found it was set to "Always On". I've changed it to "Portable-Laptop" and will see if this makes a difference.

[PyroTek]

tried to completely discharge the battery and then tried to charge it to max again?

[ad astra]

Thanks for all the prompt replies; I think I'll have a go at cycling the battery a couple of times just to make sure it isn't that, but ultimately it looks as though I need a new one.
Thanks again for the replies.

[whiz]

Not wishing to hijack the thread but I've just taken delivery of a Dell Inspiron. There are 5 what look like light or LED's on the battery pack. What exactly are they for ? Do they light or show as the battery uses its life ?

[MacBoero]

There will be a button near those lights that you can press. The number of lights that illuminate when you do this, will indicate its state of charge. Five lights is fully charged. Li-Ion batteries are intelligent devices nowadays, as in they have a microprocessor inside that monitors them. This is how the battery can talk to the PC; for example, the device manager will be able to tell you things like the battery's serial number, etc. The processor also learns your usage patterns, which is used to make the "time remaining" guestimate more and more accurate.

[Wader2]

I always turn it off properly (ie I don't use sleep or hibernate).

Chalk and cheese.

Sleep stores the system image and uses power.

Hibernate writes the system image to disk and then shuts the system down. It doesn't use power.