6 cell battery with readings larger than expected

HI there

I just received a 6 cell battery (5200 mAh) for my A110 (XP, 8 GB SSD) which so far has been working fine, but with a minor glitch. Windows says at first it has power for 4-5 hours then it grows up to 9 hours or so. Last time I used it it has around 60% power and it said it had power remaining for around 3-4 extra hours. In short it says it will last much longer than it should.

I've been told this misreading may be caused by the battery drivers not being able to discern the 6 cells from the standard 3, but the only drivers I've found from Acer are already installed.

Anyone else has experienced this problem?

Regards!

 

I just received my 6 cell bttery (4800 mAh) yesterday from Dealextremes. I am in the process of doing my own real time bench mark. This should give me an idea of what I can expect from it at max settings. I plan on running the test at least 2-3 times over the coarse of 2 days. Each time I will be manually logging the start and end time of the charging and the discharging.

Cost of the battery was $40 US and included free postage. Ordered Dec 31/09 and recieved Jan 13/10. From Hong Kong to Ottawa, Canada. Not bad considering the time of year. (For those of you interested)

My settings for each run is as follows and will remain the same.

AAO1 - D250, 2 gigs ram, 160 gig HDD, Screen Brightness set to highest backlighting.
Wifi turned on but Zonealarm set to stop all in/out activity.
Viewing a movie from internal HDD. Headphones connected and Vol set half way. Noting start time and will loop the movie until the Battery dies. (Power management set to "Always on" and Never for HDD and Display). Timing is strickly manual therefore there will be an error factor of several minutes. I will be keeping the unit within monitoring sight so as to be able to log the results each time.

I will post my findings here after my little bench mark.

In my opinion one of the reasons for the bouncing reading of the Battery level is the real time load that constantly fluxtuates, Progams pause or stop, Virus scans start, user stops interacting with the unit, Power Management turns off components, etc. The reading which is generated by the OS is constantly being adjusted to reflect the fluidity of the load. The only true way of finding out your worst case up time is to test it out - and set power management to "Always ON" so that it doesn't influence the up time. I don't want to measure the amount of time that the unit can sit in stand-bye mode. I want to see how much time I can expect from it if I was a student taking notes on it at school etc. By looping a running movie and having the backlight settings set to high I believe it should give me a ruff idea of it's "Usable Battey time". Of course this would probably go down if I started powering external devices via the USB-2 ports. Advertised battery up times are always inflated and usually are never experienced by the owner unless he leaves the thing powered up and alone.

Once your testing is over do not forget to adjust the lighting of the screen and return the Power Management to a relavent setting , and may I also suggest setting the screen saver to "Blank" screen instead of that kool active battery sucking Fireplace or Fishtank etc. Those are okay for when you are plugged in but if battery life is a concern these don't help.

 

Aha, but I'd like to get more accurate readings of what XP thinks the power will last, which is not the case. Fully charged, it says it will last around 9 hours, and after a while that time doesn't go down as fast as it used to with my 3 cell battery (and I'm pretty sure the charge won't last 9 hours)

 

My 5200mah battery gets about 4-6 hours at full charge. That's on a D-250 with a mobile phone constantly tethered for 3G internet. I also have a mechanical drive, which I believe drains more power than an SSD.

So in theory, seeing as you have an SSD your battery time is about accurate... to me that is.

Also note: Windows 7 seems to have major problems when it comes to battery readings. For example, whilst using BIOS 1.25 on my AAO D250 it would give varying readings (99%-1% in a few seconds, or the dreaded "Dead Battery"). BIOS 1.26 seems to have fixed this.