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Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries 272

Posted by kdawson
from the epidemic-of-noticing dept.
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."
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Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries More

Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries

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  • Not news - just like last time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vcgodinich (1172985) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:28PM (#31078236)
    What's news here? Microsoft gets vague claims than win7 is killing batteries, with no hard data, no common variable, not even vaguely reproducable.

    This isn't MS covering something up, there was never anything to cover up here.

  • Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Naturalis Philosopho (1160697) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:37PM (#31078406)
    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. That and that people aren't very technically minded. I once told my father to us a piece of software to monitor the SMART status on his HDD since it was "making a lot of noise". He just told me that he'd been doing it. About a year later he said that his laptop would barely run so I visited and noticed that the SMART was telling him that the HDD had irrecoverable errors and should be backed up and replaced immediately. When I asked how long it had been saying that, he replied that it had always said that (or something like it) since he first checked (at my encouragement). He just didn't think that it could be a real problem since the computer still ran at that time. Let's face it here, if a person is running Windows, they aren't going to believe that there's a problem until they can't work 'cause Windows gives alert after alert after alert and how can you know which ones to believe unless you're a "techie"? Sure if, you're reading here, you'll know, but 98% of people just don't.

  • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:38PM (#31078420)

    I can't tell if you are joking or not. I mean if a hard drive sector gets corrupt where a set of critical files are and on boot it can't recover them or load them from cache because that is corrupt as well, is that Microsoft's fault if the OS starts crashing? If memory is failing causing a BSOD is that Microsoft's fault? If the video card's VRAM is faulty and is causing the system to crash is that MS's fault?
    The laptop flies off the top of someone's car roof after they left it there before driving off....yep Its MS's fault once again.
    Seriously. There is a crap load MS can be blamed for over the years. But hardware? cut them a bit of slack on a few things.

  • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lgw (121541) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:40PM (#31078442) Journal

    Windows is not at fault. Hardware or 3rd party software always is

    I have a lot of sympathy for the Windows team on this one - I don't think they're blame-shifting here.

    It's been my experience that the software that reports a problem will get blamed for causing the problem. Maybe "shoot the messenger" is just human nature, but I've often been amazed at how users will blame software that repors a hardware problem that the software couldn't not possibly have caused. "Disk I/O error detected" results in calls of "why are you causing my disks to fail" - after all it must be you, since the other software isn't complaining (failing, mind you, but not complaining).

    And now apparantly "battery failure detected" results in calls of "why are you causing my battery to fail" - after all it must be you, since the prvious version didn't complain.
     

  • Re:It would have been a story if... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zocalo (252965) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:46PM (#31078528) Homepage
    I think that is what Microsoft is implying, without directly pointing a finger and risking a potential law suit.

    Chances are that a lot of cells that are only now ending up in laptop batteries have spent quite some time sat on a warehouse shelf somewhere waiting out the financial downturn. Now that there are signs of recovery and people are buying laptops again, the production chain is starting up and those cells are finally going into laptop batteries. However, since the battery as a whole was only assembled last week, say, despite the fact that the component cells were manufactured last year, care to guess which date gets to go on the "Date of manufacture" sticker?

  • Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:54PM (#31078640)
    I'm wasting mod points to respond, but I just had to jump in here with some evidence to the contrary... For years and years few people believed that Toyota cars had problems with their acceleration, nor their brakes. Toyota was a company with a good reputation (although some of us noticed a substantial amount of hubris on their part in the last decade, which made people like me stop buying them.) IIRC, a lot of people here on slashdot thought it was all the fault of the floor mat or driver error and didn't believe that the manufacturer was at fault. Lo and behold, there is a real problem and it's now come out that not only did Toyota have serious problems, their CEOs knowingly downplayed the importance of it rather than investigate it. To top it off, it's now coming to light that there is a problem with the sensors in the Prius brakes too.

    The point here is that companies DO sometimes lie or act incompetantly, and the general populace DOES ACT hysterically sometimes. You just can't make a blanket statement saying X is guilty or Y isn't without investigating. Reputation only goes so far.

  • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kadaki (31556) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:56PM (#31078670)

    Yes, most of them probably just didn't notice the reduced battery life until this warning brought it to their attention. When I upgraded my notebook's Windows partition to Windows 7 I started getting this message, but I started seeing the warning over a year before, whenever I booted Ubuntu.

  • Lamest blog ever (Score:1, Insightful)

    by SirGarlon (845873) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @05:58PM (#31078708)
    Is it just me, or does the Windows 7 engineering blog post strike you as a bit ... defensive?

    As we have talked about many times, we have a relentless focus on the quality of Windows 7 and we take seriously any reports we receive that indicate a potential problem that could result in a significant failure of the OS.

    Talked about many times? Maybe in meetings at Microsoft HQ, but not on that blog (whose previous update was August 2009). Which is a pity, because blogging about how to achieve quality in a product as complex as Windows 7 could be downright interesting. This really seems like a missed opportunity to improve Microsoft's image with the technically literate audience.

  • Re:Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)

    by omnichad (1198475) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @06:00PM (#31078728) Homepage

    That reminds me. Does Windows 7 finally report on hard drive SMART status? Glaring missing feature from XP.

  • Re:Must be the newest OS fad (Score:4, Insightful)

    by e2d2 (115622) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @06:05PM (#31078802)

    More likely is that batteries are having their very limited lifetimes exposed to the user via the OS. Most people think a laptop battery is supposed to last indefinitely and charge the same every single time. The reality is you'll probably be replacing the battery before you replace the laptop.

  • Re:Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gd2shoe (747932) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @06:09PM (#31078858) Journal

    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..

    That was sarcasm, no?

    (Nothing about this particular problem, but we've seen denials before...)

  • Re:Sheesh. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Esther Schindler (16185) <esther@bitranch.com> on Tuesday February 09 2010, @06:11PM (#31078890) Homepage
    Let's just say that I don't think the end of the tale has been reached yet.

  • Of course it's not (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kurt555gs (309278) <kurt555gs@oAUDENvi.com minus poet> on Tuesday February 09 2010, @06:33PM (#31079172) Homepage

    Microsoft would prolly claims that Windows 7 isn't killing kittens or puppies either, but we know the truth!

  • Oh really...? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by YankDownUnder (872956) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @06:47PM (#31079398) Homepage
    Strange that. I just have hardware issues, then. Because if on my Compaq C731TU running Windows 7, I get SQUAT for battery life, however, when I swap out the HD for my Fedora drive (oh yeah, exact same drive, too) and work with that, I have this amazingly long battery life (nearly three hours). So something MUST be wrong with my hardware. Possibly if I read all the tripe that Microsoft will publish on this particular issue, I'll be able to convince myself that they're right, and reality is wrong. OH wait, they do that anyway! Far out. Glad to know I'm wrong, my hardware is wrong, my OS is wrong, and well, Microsoft is right. Gee, thanks Steve Ballmer! You've shown me the light, yet again!

  • Re:And what if Windows 7 is the cause? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KarmaMB84 (743001) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @07:14PM (#31079718)
    You upgraded a pair of netbooks and a 4 year old laptop to Windows 7 and you're shocked it doesn't work well (or at all)?

  • Re:Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Blakey Rat (99501) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @07:15PM (#31079724)

    Dude.

    You said XP was missing a feature to report on hard drive SMART status. Here's a quote:

    That reminds me. Does Windows 7 finally report on hard drive SMART status? Glaring missing feature from XP.

    XP has that feature. So you simultaneously make yourself look like an idiot by claiming XP doesn't have a feature it actually does have, but you also waste my time trying to correct your retarded wrongness.

    I apologize that you didn't say what you fucking mean, but I'm not going to apologize for replying to the post you *typed* and not the post you *meant*. I don't have the psychic abilities to know what you meant.

    What any of this has to do with me not keeping track of the topic of conversation is a mystery. But since we've already established that you don't say what you fucking mean, I'm just going to assume you actually meant "wow, Blakey Rat is an awesome guy" and move on with my life.

  • The software isn't trying to be smart. It's telling you exactly what your manufacturer did.

    Is it? The manufacturer only provides one bit of information?

    You don't wait until your tires are at 2psi to fix them, you fix them THEN.

    When I stick a tire gauge in my tire, it doesn't say "bad" (without telling me whether "bad" means "2PSI" or "20PSI"), it tells me "2PSI" or "20PSI" or "30PSI" or "32PSI" or "35PSI".

    I also have a cap on my tire that goes red when it goes below 30PSI. When I see that, I pump them up. When I check and it says "32PSI" I pump them up. If I'm having to pump them up a couple of times a week, I go down to Sears.

    I don't have to depend on an idiot light that came on at 20PSI (which is definitely low enough to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT), with no indication whether it was 20PSI or 2PSI. Because I *also* have a gauge.

    I'm not asking Microsoft to get rid if the warning, I'm asking them to let me know what my tire pressure is.

    It doesn't *matter* if it's not linear. My gas tank isn't linear. So long as I *know* it's not linear I can deal with it.

  • Re:Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jlintern (1169449) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @07:53PM (#31080114)

    I wouldn't let Microsoft off the hook just yet. Lithium ion batteries need to be slow charged the last 10-15% of their charge cycle or they will be damaged. There are already known unfixed issues with the Vista/7 battery controller, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear some lithium ion batteries are failing through mismanaged charge cycles.

    If the operating system (or any software) were in charge of regulating the battery charge cycle, how would the battery charge safely while the system was powered off? There should be hardware in the charge circuit to prevent this kind of damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_controller [wikipedia.org]

  • Re:Surprise (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PIBM (588930) on Tuesday February 09 2010, @10:21PM (#31081350) Homepage

    If a graphic card can be fried with simple directx calls, they are certainly not well built and as such we can't be blaming microsoft.

  • Re:And what if Windows 7 is the cause? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by godefroi (52421) on Wednesday February 10 2010, @09:45AM (#31084822)

    XP was painful with 512MB. You're not going to convince me that 7 runs well with that amount of memory, not ever.

    Keep in mind that I really like 7 (though I didn't hate Vista either... I always ran it on high-spec machines).

I'm rated PG-34!!