Battery capacity on 3cell reporting as 357,865mWh

The batterybar screen grab

The battery will only charge to 5.2% and windows 7 won't let me lower the critical level past 5% so I get about 6-7minutes before windows shuts the machine down

It charges to 18,504mWh, battery wear reports the capacity as 24,420mWh which I guess is the real capacity so the wear level is really 100-(18504/24420*100)=24.2% wear

Any ideas on either how get the battery to report it's capacity correctly or stop win7 setting the critical level at 5%?

 

Try updating your BIOS. The D250 for example requires BIOS v1.25 before CPU and battery reporting functioned correctly under Windows 7.

 

I'm on 3310 which is the latest for ZG5/A0A 150

 

When I read your first post, I decided I'd download and try BatteryBar. I can guarantee you it is definately not the most accurate battery monitoring software out there.

I ran it all day yesterday with all low and critical power options disabled. As in my D250 ran Windows 7 and my open programs at the time, until the battery went completely dry and the machine wouldn't run or turn on anymore. BatteryBar reported it as being dead flat for about 30 minutes before the system folded. So don't rely on BatteryBar too much.

Is it a new machine, with a new battery? or at least a new battery? Just wondering because if its an old battery it could be worn out.

You could try the followin command to change your critical battery action to "do nothing" so your machine won't shut down at what it thinks is low power.
Click Start then Run (or hold the Windows key on our keyboard press R, then release both keys), clear the box and enter the following:

Code:

powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0

Then click OK or press enter, now in your advanced power settings, you should see the critical battery action is "do nothing", as for the "low battery" action you should be able to set that to "do nothing" manually.

Now your machine should stay on until the battery is completely flat, which will help Windows 7 calibrate itself to the battery, hopefully batterybar would do the same thing, however on my D250 it hasn't calibrated at all.

 

The computer is about 14 months old.

Testing the critical level thing as soon as open office finishes installing...

BatteryBar is meant to learn... never had a machine stay on long enuff for it learn anything...

Now reports as 100% charged at 343,667 mW

 

Just browsing on win7 with backlight on full. Full charge then wait for it to drop dead... taking a lot longer to charge than discharge

BatteryBar reports charge rate as about 3000mW discharge rate of 8500-13000mW

1st cycle
Discharge = 7mins 55secs :shock:

 

More charge cycles I run the closer the capacity gets to actually... now reporting as 292,518 mWh, battery is now running about 13-18mins using the balanced power plan with critical set to no action.

 

Yeah I've been getting mixed messages like that from battery bar since I installed it, although it has settled down some. My battery's 2 or so years old now, it's a larger 5700 mAh battery, which is considerably worn. So I typically run it down completelely on every other day. Battery bar has reported as low as 85% wear and as high as 89.5% but having used BatteryBarr since your OP, it's levelled out at about 88.8% wear. On average I get about an hour's use. I'll be buying a replacement next week hopefully. Glad to hear yours is normalising though.