Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries 272
VindictivePantz sends word that the Windows 7 team has posted a new blog entry discussing their conclusions about the reported Windows 7 battery failures. "To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state. In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement. ...every single indication we have regarding the reports we've seen are simply Windows 7 reporting the state of the battery using this new feature and we're simply seeing batteries that are not performing above the designated threshold. ... We are as certain as we can be that we have addressed the root cause and concerns of this report, but we will continue to monitor the situation."
Sheesh. (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, If you know that your battery has plenty of juice left, there's a fix available. Sort of. The #5 item in Fixing Five Common Windows 7 Annoyances [itexpertvoice.com] is "the undead battery." One way to know if it's necessary:
Re:It would have been a story if... (Score:4, Informative)
The warning systems are glitchy, or that manufacturers have been shipping substandard batteries and/or power subsystems. Either would come as no surprise.
And what if Windows 7 is the cause? (Score:2, Informative)
Okay, I saw this in the news when it came. I thought "Okay, some laptops seems to have problems." But I do not think so anymore. Why?
a) I have three laptops.
1. 4 years old (2006), Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1645 (windows 7, Linux 2.6.31)
2. 1.5 years old (2008) Acer Aspire 1520 (Windows 7, Linux 2.6.31)
3. 3 months old (2009) Asus EeePC 1008HA (Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux 2.6.31, latest stable FreeBSD)
(Okay, they are not all mine, only the newest)
b) I now run dual- or quadboot on every one of them with Windows 7, Windows XP, + Linux 2.6.33 (Distro = Mandriva 2010.0) (+FreeBSD = latest FreeBSD stable)
c) I needed to install Windows 7 just on last sunday (family pack)
Here is estimation of battery state in hourhs when WWW surfing, coding and compiling stuff (usually the 2. and 3.)
1. 1h 15min.
2. 1h
3. 5-6 hours
These are on FreeBSD and Linux and Windows XP.
Windows 7 gives these.
1. about 30-35 minutes.
2. None..... NONE!
3. 1.5-2 hours!!!
Okay.... is Microsoft now really saying that my 3 MONTHS OLD BATTERY (6-cells) is DYING? And that 1h battery what has worked fine with Linux OS from last 2.6.28-2.6.31 releases is ALREADY DEAD?
Why does Windows 7 eat the battery but when I boot to other software system I get just normal times?????
I have only one thing to say. Sorry about bad language (and typos!): Microsoft, GO TO YOURSELF!!! And I cant not even RETURN THE "#!"#! Family Pack!
Re:Surprise (Score:4, Informative)
Ah, I hate sticking up for MS, but it's true. Ubuntu 9.04 introduced this feature, too, I think -- I remember seeing a box pop up for it after installing on my 7-year-old laptop and going "wait a sec..." ...and then realizing that, as far as the software was concerned, my 7-year-old battery with its 5-min lifespan probably has "failed" as a battery. :P
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Informative)
...which will source the frenzied blogosphere shrieking conspiracy and propagating each others' blind speculation. And of course nobody will pay attention to the only source that can possibly know what they're talking about: the engineers that designed the system..
We need more honestly dumb software. (Score:5, Informative)
Windows Seven's problem is not that it's doing the wrong thing, it's because it's trying to be too smart about it. It's not smart. It's stupid. A laptop computer (running ANY OS) isn't as smart as a lizard.
But its user's smart. If your software is stupid (and all software is stupid), and the user is smart (and all users are smarter than their computer, even when they're stupid) then you're better off admitting it than trying to fake it.
Instead of popping up a "your battery might be about to fail", give us a gas gauge. "Your battery has only [====> 40% ---] of original capacity". Show that for *all* batteries. Let people pop that up even if there's no problem. Let people be smart about it. Or even... let people be dumb about it.
You might find that people are more willing to replace batteries when they get down to 20%. You might think that's stupid. And it may be stupid. But it's still smarter than stupid software trying to be smart.
Re:In other news, Republicans report .... (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Surprise (Score:4, Informative)
XP reported SMART status. It was in the Disk Management administrative tool. (Same place it is in Vista and Windows 7, actually.) Pretty sure Windows 2000 had it also.
To answer your question: Yes, Windows 7 reports SMART status.
Seems sensible (Score:3, Informative)
The new OS has features which the old one didn't and now does more to inform the user about the computers state in an understandable manner.
Apple did something similar (I think it was with OS X Leopard) where suddenly lots of people got a "this battery needs servicing" type message. This was only due to Apple realizing the need for this feature to give real recommendations. Who knows at what health percentage a battery should be replaced?
Sounds like the windows team realized the same thing and decided to support the user in his decision making. That's great. No conspiracy needed.
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives (Score:2, Informative)
maybe this is a GOOD thing? (Score:3, Informative)
It's possible that Windows is just getting better at reporting battery condition and catching failing batteries, and so the problem that has already existed for awhile is just now becoming more noticeable? Windows PC grade hardware can be any level of quality, just because Windows is identifying your battery has crapped out before it should doesn't make it MS's fault. Maybe you just bought crap or need a new battery?
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Look for yourself;
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa939594(WinEmbedded.5).aspx [microsoft.com]
Both are used. I suspect the Microsoft controller is managing both battery charge and drain from the computer being in use.
Re:Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries? (Score:3, Informative)
There are a countable infinity [wikipedia.org] of integers. There are an uncountable infinity [wikipedia.org] of reals. It's a math joke.
Re:Surprise (Score:3, Informative)
No, it doesn't report SMART status messages to the user, but it does keep logs that may be manually looked up.
See how easy that was?
I apologize that you didn't say what you fucking mean,
He said what he meant. What he meant what he said. And when he corrected you that your interpretation of his statement, which wasn't unambiguous, so misunderstanding wasn't difficult, you turned into an ass. What are you doing now, arguing that he doesn't know what he meant? Or are you arguing that a log file that has to be manually opened is "reporting on" a status? For Windows, reporting on something means 4,000 popups with "click ok to continue" on them. It's understandable that there are misunderstandings, with no inflection, regional word choice, the large number of people who don't speak English as their first language, but to be an as about it when someone corrects you doesn't mean you are right and he is wrong or whatever you are arguing about. After his clarification, it is obvious what he was asking, and that your answer is the opposite of the correct answer to the question he was asking.
Re:Surprise (Score:5, Informative)
I think Brian is trying to say that he designed the system and is a bit upset that we're bagging it out without asking him for an explanation first.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bngordon [linkedin.com]
Brian Gordon
Group Manager at Microsoft
Greater Seattle Area
Ah. I see now. No offense intended. I didn't know that it was personal.
I will certainly give your team (or peers, whatever) the benefit of the doubt on this, but I don't buy for a second that they're the only ones who can know what their talking about. They may be the only ones who do know what they're talking about, though. (important difference)
Re:It would have been a story if... (Score:3, Informative)
Lithiums will last a *long* time though on very little maintenance current, or even no maintenance current. The thing that usually kills lithiums is the *cycle* life, and cells in a warehouse aren't getting cycled.
Re:Must be the newest OS fad (Score:2, Informative)
Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives (Score:3, Informative)
"Bingo. If there's any story here, it's that Microsoft's reputation is so bad that people won't believe them even when they're right."
Or just that FOSS trolls like to make a non-story into a big story, because to the trolls of the community, pratting around with shit like that is apparently more important than actually providing better software, like, you know, versions of Open Office that are actually better than MS Office, versions of Eclipse that are actually better than Visual Studio and so on.
Really, if you think people would react any differently to the same errors popping up on Linux, or Mac OSX then you're delusional. People don't care until it finally stops working and really does actually effect them. I used to work in IT support some years back for schools, and we'd always tell teachers to keep a backup of any work they do on their laptop and none of them listened, but they all came crying when their laptop failed, was run over by a car, was dropped by a kid and so forth.
Windows really doesn't give alert after alert unless there's actually something wrong. If it's chucking up an error, then there is an error, it's really not hard to read the popup and see if it's an error you care about - sure you may choose to ignore "This computer has no anti-virus software installed on it, click here for help installing some" but then don't cry when you get a virus. Similarly, if it comes up and says "Windows delayed write failed" then yeah it's not easy for the average Joe to understand, but it's still good reason for them to figure that something isn't right, whether it's that they pulled out a USB pen drive in the middle of writing to it, or whether their hard drive is outright failing, the fact is, something went wrong, ignore it and accept the consequences. I've certainly never seen a popup in the tray that I "don't believe", because they've always alerted me to the facts, I'm not aware of any circumstances where Windows makes up errors for the sake of it.
Read the article knuckleheads. (Score:2, Informative)
Since I know none of you will read the article, because it might get in the way of your circle jerk windows bashing:
"PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or BIOS). There is a detailed specification for the firmware interface (ACPI), but at the most basic level, the hardware platform and firmware provide a number of read-only fields that describe the battery and its status. The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity. The last two pieces of information--design capacity and last full charge capacity--are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. This information is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set or configure battery status information. In fact all of the battery actions of charging and discharging are completely controlled by the battery hardware. Windows only reports the battery information it reads from the system firmware. Some reports erroneously claimed Windows was modifying this information, which is definitely not possible."