Consider replacing your battery

Hi,

I've got Windows 7 Ultimate installed on my Aspire One 1GB/120GB. Recently, I've got a message on my battery icon saying "Consider replacing your battery". Anyone else see this?

Searching Google it seems quite a common issue with netbooks.

On a different subject, how much time do you get on a full battery when Firefoxing with Windows 7? I get about 45 minutes with power saving mode enabled.

 

Don´t be too amazed on this. I got the same message both on Ubuntu and Win7. My battery has 45% left out of 100% of life so I just went and bougth a 9 cell battery from ebay.

 

Wow, how long have you been using your Aspire One?

I get around 2-2.5 hours of surfing time with my AOA110 on the original battery, and about 4-5 hours with my 6-cell battery from ebay (it costed $30).

There's a couple months of use on both batteries, so they're pretty much almost brand new.

 

I've had it over 12 months, but it's not been used that much.

I disabled the "critical" battery action in Windows 7. When the battery reached 0% charge, it kept running for another 50 minutes!!!

It's like Windows 7 is seriously mis-reading the battery for a lower capacity battery (if anything lower than a 3 cell battery is possible )

 

BTW - after reading about your 6 cell battery life, I'm tempted to upgrade mine. What's the biggest recommended battery?

Someone is selling a 12 cell battery on ebay!...

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/12-cell-BATTE...ItemQQptZLaptop_Batteries?hash=item3efa7ed6c3

I know there's lots of laptop batteries being recalled over the past few years, so is it safe to buy these cheap "unbranded" ones? Don't want to burn my house down by charging it overnight.

 

What you said about the netbook running for 50 mins after it reads 0% is a pretty common problem. It's not Windows 7's fault, but rather the internal chip of the battery that's misreporting the charge level.

That 12-cell battery you posted sounds cool, but consider its weight. It's nearly 700 grams. An AOA110 with a 3-cell battery weighs just under 1000 grams. So you'd be nearly doubling your weight, not to mention the bulkiness (the battery will be huge).

Personally, I'm happy with my 300 gram 6-cell battery. This one is the one I got. I doubt I could tolerate anything bigger/heavier.

 

I'd been using Win7 for about a week on my AAO-D250 2Gb/120Gb with a 5200mah/60Wh battery before this bug appeared. (clean install after using Vista Ultimate) After googling a considerable amout I've found that this is indeed a bug between the chipset drivers and Windows 7. From the reports I've read, and my experience, this bug is not at all apparent in Vista. Some evidence of the fault being a Win7 bug appeared when I recently updated the chipset drivers (thru Windows update). Win7, upon initial installation, installed all drivers by default except my LAN (woohoo go Win7 working str8 off the mark!), the updated drivers are version 8.15.10.1912 released on 11/09/2009 (American date?). Anyhoo, after installing the updated drivers and rebooting, Win7 started reporting "no battery detected", even though the AAO was running comfortably on full charge (unplugged). Upon the next reboot it began detecting the battery again, however, once again, with irratic readings.

The big hoo-haa for me was that even though I'd set all power saving levels/notifications/actions to absolute minimum/off, the faulty readings from the battery were going from 100% to 0% and back again, up and down up and down, which in turn caused Win7 to go "okay, i'm going into sleep mode now". This sucked, the general work-around to fix this bug is as follows: (at least until M$ fix the bug)

* Open Device Manager
* Under "Batteries", locate and DISABLE the "Micro$oft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery"

NOTE: this takes away any battery monitoring, which means you'll have to keep an eye on the battery indication light on your AAO, but better that than to be thrown into sleep/hibernate at random.