AOA-150 Battery Issue and Separate Heat Issue

Greetings,

I've had my Aspire One AOA-150 for about 10 months now and have been happy with it until just recently after upgrading to Windows 7.

First, and I believe this isn't due to Windows 7, my battery has been behaving strangely. From a 100% charge it will go down to 19-20% and then suddenly drop to exactly 5% and force the computer into hibernation without any warning. I thought it might be the windows battery meter so I downloaded BatteryBar v3.3.1. According to that, my battery has 6.3% wear and currently has a 54,079 mWh capacity. Strangely enough, if I charge it up to 20% and then remove the AC Adapter, it will then discharge normally all the way to 5%. Is this an issue with my monitoring software or with the battery?

Second, and this occurred shortly after installing Windows7, my AOA-150 has been running abnormally hot even without the AC Adapter plugged in. I have booted it from scratch and watched, with AA1FanControl, as the temperature goes from 35C to 60C where my fan then kicks on. Prior to Windows7, the idle temperature would stay around 45C - 50C as long as I was only using a word processor or something. Now seems to go up like the vents are blocked even if I have it sitting on a flat table. Opening Windows Task Manager doesn't seem to show any obvious culprits and the CPU Usage never goes above 16%, most of which is from the System Idle Process. My next plan is to disable all startup applications and see if that fixes it, then turn them on one at a time until I possibly find a culprit.

If it matters, I'm running BIOS v.3309. I tried upgrading to v.3310 but I'm not very experienced at such things and eventually gave up.

Any help or suggestions is appreciated. Thanks.

 

Hmm, spyware running on your netbook? Vents blocked by dust?

 

I fixed the excessive heat by setting all my startup and boot settings back to default. I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the number of processors selected at boot, not entirely sure, but it did fix the problem.

The battery issue seems to be due to the poor battery meter in Windows 7. When I booted Ubuntu Remix from a USB drive the battery length was still the same but the meter ran down more accurately rather than jumping ahead.

As a result I've given up on Windows 7 on my AOA-150 for now. I imagine in a year or less it'll work a bit better but until then I'm using Ubuntu as my primary OS with the factory set XP Home Edition as a backup for certain tasks. I miss 7's functionality but getting it to work with the AO was proving too much of a hassle. Even after updating every driver and slimming down everything I could, I still kept getting random freezes every 2 hours or so. Switching OS's fixed the problem and I'm much more content now.

 

I'm having heat issues right now actually...

Started overheating and the fan is making tons of noise.. was never this noisy before...