Battery Lifetime Discrepancy with Win7

Hey everyone, I've had an Acer Aspire one for almost a year now. It came with Windows XP on it however I just re-formatted and upgraded to Windows 7.

When I bought this laptop, it came with the extended battery which gave me easily 5+ hours (sometimes 6+ lol) of battery life when fully charged. However, now that I've upgraded to Win7, it shows my max battery life as being 3 hours 18 minutes (right after I unplug at max charge).

I have let the battery run down and die completely, and have recharged it several times. But still no difference

I'm really not sure what to do here. The realist in me is pretty sure that software should not really have an effect on the actual hardware used on a particular machine, i.e. the battery capacity! But... somehow I'm wrong on that?! :|

Has this happened to anyone else? Is there any way I can fix this? I've downloaded the most recent version of BatteryBar, a really good battery life indicator with many extra details but it shows the same thing. Any suggestions or tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!

-Hannah

 

I've been using Windows 7 for almost a year now, having had my Aspire One for nearly 2 years, and yes Windows 7 seems to have a massive impact on battery life. I only had a regular 3-cell battery which gave me 3 hours use under Linux. After a year's battery wear and installing Win 7 the battery life dropped to 1 hour 15 mins...

My 'solution' was to buy a 9-cell from Ebay (£25 inc. shipping from Hong Kong). That now gives me roughly 6 hours under Win 7. I'm currently thinking of buying a 12-cell, just for the hell of it - makes the netbook much heavier to carry tho'! After plenty of Google searches I still have no idea why Win 7 affects batteries the way it does.

It could be that battery life is being incorrectly reported somehow. And that Windows thinks power levels are lower than they are. You could try stopping Windows from automaticaly shutting down when the battery life becomes critical - and see if the netbook keeps running or not... I always meant to try but never got round to it!

 

Battery lifetime on a decent number of laptops is indeed a known issue with Windows 7. My D250 has a larger battery that used to last about 6 hours. Given that it's two years old now, it's lifetime has dropped substantially, Windows 7 is also incorrectly reporting the lifetime. After using the following command, I am able to continue using the battery long after Windows would normally hibernate or sleep. Be warned though, you will have to keep an eye on the battery indicator of your netbook (mine is a flashing orange light) and make sure that when it gets low, you don't have too many programs running or accessing the hard drive. The netbook can and will turn itself off when the battery has completely run dry.

Click Start, then Run (or Windows Key + R if you don't have the run command) and enter the following and press enter:

Code:

powercfg -setdcvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_BATTERY BATACTIONCRIT 0

 

Theres a couple different factors playing into this situation. The first one is that Windows is not very good at determining remaining battery time. It measures the remaining power in the battery, and weighs that against how "busy" the system has been over the last while. If you play around with it, you can make the battery time jump up and down by running CPU/GPU intensive apps then exiting them. So, the wholesale comparison of "time remaining" between XP and 7 doesn't really hold water. You would need to run the system through a complete battery discharge on both OS's, doing the same tasks, and recording the actual up-time on a stopwatch.

The second factor (and the more relevant one) is that Windows 7 is a newer operating system that is designed to improve the user experience by taking advantage of newer (faster) hardware. Windows 7 has a lot more going on than XP did, and the Aero interface is a great example of that. You are running a 3D graphical interface all the time, which is going to eat up more cycles. 7 does housekeeping tasks, runs indexers, pre-loads applications, etc.; all making the system crank up a bit even when you aren't doing anything interactively. This does result in lower overall battery life, but it provides for a lot of the things people like about Windows 7.

The best solution here is to first lean out your Win 7 installation. There are lots of sites/threads out there that will run you through disabling services, uninstalling certain components, etc,; that will lessen the overall cycle usage on the OS. Try to minimize the number of applications you have open at any one time, and don't have a ton of browser tabs open that you don't need (they all draw CPU time even if you aren't looking at them). Then, determine how much battery life you actually need on an average day, and see if you can get by on that. If you're just keeping score of the battery remaining time because you want it to be better, it isn't worth the effort.

 

Wow, thank you for all the fantastic suggestions! When I have the time I will attempt to run through your directions.

On a related note, does anyone here use Tiny7 on their AAO? I wonder if that would allow for a longer battery life...

Anyway, thanks again!

 

Personally I wouldn't worry too much about 'leaning out' your system. That can be quite a tedious job, involving lots of forum searching and semi-techy stuff that gives variable results from one person's system to the next - and can end up giving you the sensation that you're running a compromised version of the OS. When the little AOA is plenty capable at handling Win7.

Disabling unneccessary services can help improve system performance but I have no idea if it would have any appreciable impact on battery life. I've disabled stuff like defrag and superfetch but principally because I'm running an SSD. Disabling unneccessary hardware could help - e.g. bluetooth (which I've never had a use for!), cellular modem (if you have one embedded) and/or the Wi-Fi modem when not using the web wirelessly. Plus reducing screen brightness and changing both your Windows power option and your Intel GMA driver to more efficient settings could help too.

I would encourage you to use your AOA to run whatever software you like and simply enjoy using it. After 2 years of daily use I'm still continually impressed at how capable this little computer is! The only software that I've found that impacts the battery life heavily has been FPS games like Unreal Tournament 2003. And that's when running them using GMA Booster to reclock the graphics chipset from the factory 166MHz setting to its full 400MHz potential!

FYI my 9-cell is giving me 6 hours use with my Windows power option set to High Performance, plus with power saving disabled on my Intel GMA driver and with Wi-Fi turned on - not too shabby!

 

As I've said before, this is a known issue under Windows 7, but the computers it effects are random.You can have 5 of the exact same laptops and maybe only one of them will exhibit the symptoms.

My D250 first encountered the issue several months ago, a BIOS update (to version 1.26) fixed it, but now it's back. The battery is indeed lasting nowhere near the amount of time it used to, but it's old and has been thru 2 different AAO's. It's a larger battery but still outlasts the stock battery which was tiny (both physically and electronically).

As far as I know Microsoft has not yet fixed the issue.

Checkout this technet link for more information