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Bug Microsoft Power Hardware

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."
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Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries

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  • Surprise (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:21PM (#31078116)

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

    • Re:Surprise (Score:4, Funny)

      by socceroos ( 1374367 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:31PM (#31078276)
      ...news at 11.
      • Re: (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..

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by gd2shoe ( 747932 )

          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: (Score:3, Informative)

            by socceroos ( 1374367 )
            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.
            • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Informative)

              by gd2shoe ( 747932 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @09:49PM (#31081128) Journal

              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:Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ozmanjusri ( 601766 ) <aussie_bob&hotmail,com> on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @07:09PM (#31079662) Journal
          the engineers that designed the system. Are they the same engineers that designed Vista?

          That's the OS which shipped with the "Microsoft ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery" device that frequently refused to charge batteries even when plugged in, in case you're wondering.

          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.

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          Microsoft has also been known to blame hardware for failing to comply to often unwritten, industry spec deviating, irrational requirements in order to function properly. If the hardware does not magically conform to their software's expectations in this regard, it is therefore to blame. I've played this game with them several times, at this point anything they say sounds like total bullshit, even if this once, it's possible they're correct.

    • Wow, you don't expect to find people with Premier Ultimate support contacts on an FOSS geared site.
    • 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: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by omnichad ( 1198475 )

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

        • Re:Surprise (Score:4, Informative)

          by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:11PM (#31078876)

          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.

          • Re:Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)

            by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:16PM (#31078930) Homepage

            No, not in a tool. I mean - pop-up warning "Hey, your hard drive is failing" without your intervention. Like the battery warning.

            • by DaHat ( 247651 )

              I don't know if it's done with SMART... but a month or two ago I had my Media Center PC in the livingroom give me a couple of warnings (via a dialog box) about the impending death of it's HD.

              Not having much time (but having spare parts) I put in a fresh drive and put the suspect one on the shelf to look at later.

            • Just as an FYI, I don't read minds so you have to actually type what you mean.

            • Yes, it does. Someone I know got such a warning with one of their old hard disks.
      • The price of success. My operating system has never been criticized, but of course no one has ever seen it. BTW, it doesn't do much either.
      • If the video card's VRAM is faulty and is causing the system to crash is that MS's fault?

        How could that possibly cause a system crash instead of just corrupted graphics? Does Windows kernel use compute shaders?

        And, frankly, after the fight against Windows 7 to get my CRT display working on the modes I want, with the refresh rate I want, I admit that "Microsoft's fault" is the first thought that comes to my mind whenever there's a problem with any PC with any Microsoft software in it.

      • The operating system performance does have some impact on battery performance and battery life. There are circumstances where the same core running the same speed on the same hardware will consume more power on a Windows OS than another OS...

        So, to be clear. I'm not blaming Microsoft, but I'm not ready to let them off the hook.

        And... even if their claims that the OS is just reporting the actual state of the battery, that doesn't mean that Microsoft's OS (current or previous) didn't preciptate the situa

        • by murdocj ( 543661 )

          One of the comments in the blog is that the PC vendors they've been in contact with are NOT seeing increased levels of reports of battery failures. If Win 7 was killing batteries the vendors would have seen an uptick. The MS blog has a pretty clear and convincing explanation as to what they looked at, what the evidence is, and why this is just a case of MS getting crap for doing a better job than they used. Which is certainly the classic "no-win" situation.

    • 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:Surprise (Score:4, Informative)

        by mdm-adph ( 1030332 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:50PM (#31078572)

        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: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.

        • My mother had an Acer laptop with XP. Battery life was about 2 hours. Several months later it started dropping. Within another couple months, it was 3 minutes. Now it's approximately 90 seconds.

          I'm inclined to agree with you.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Chris_Mir ( 679740 )
        Pretty similar to multi-tier software development, where business logic is developed separately from the user interface. I'm doing the latter and guess who gets all the bug reports?
      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Conchobair ( 1648793 )
        I have to agree after 3 years working ISP tech support and hearing numerous customers blaming the ISP for giving them viruses.
      • It's been my experience that the software that reports a problem will get blamed for causing the problem

        I've seen that quite a bit. I work at a small anti-virus/anti-spyware company.

        If our software finds a problem that McAfee or Symantec misses, out come the accusations that we have a deliberate false positive to scare the user into buying the product, or even worse, the accusations that we actually put the virus on the system.

        On the other hand, if we fail to find a problem that McAfee or Symantec reports (even if it is a false positive), out come the accusations that our product does a poor job of detecting

    • It's not far from the truth.

      Lenovo has had bad batches of batteries in both their R60 and R61 line that were not subject to the explosion recalls. The R60's would go bad spontaneously and without warning, and the battery indicator would blink orange fast as well as Lenovo's battery manager would report a battery malfunction until you did a warranty replacement. Since they only warranty batteries for only 1 year, we had to buy tons more until we got rid of them at end of lease, then the first sets of R61's s

    • Re:Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)

      by westlake ( 615356 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:03PM (#31078780)

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

      That's generally a fair assumption with any OS.

      Win 7 has about eight to ten percent of the global market. OS Platform Statistics [w3schools.com]

      That translates into a hell of a lot of laptops and a good many batteries that were well past there past their prime before Win 7 was installed. But there have been only a few hundred complaints.

    • Re:Surprise (Score:5, Funny)

      by Idbar ( 1034346 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:36PM (#31079228)
      Microsoft Says Windows 7 Not Killing Batteries
      My guess is that batteries are killing themselves as soon as they know they are powering a Windows machine. They have become quite intelligent now.

      Kidding, kidding!
  • by maxwell demon ( 590494 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:24PM (#31078174) Journal

    So what does it tell them? "Hey, you seem to be failing. Do you need me to help you?"

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:25PM (#31078204)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:28PM (#31078236)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by FranTaylor ( 164577 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:28PM (#31078240)

    Fedora recently added a feature named palimpsest that checks your hard drive. I did an upgrade and all of a sudden I am getting complaints about my hard drive being close to failure. I think "no way, this is a pretty new drive". But I dig deeper and sure enough the drive really is bad.

    • 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.
      • Give him a car analogy, like he's driving with his "Check Engine" or oil light on.

      • by bertok ( 226922 )

        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.

        However, the habit of just clicking "OK" to everything is at least partially Microsoft's fault. Their software systematically trains people to accept that popup warnings are going to occur over and over for perfectly innocuous reasons.

        "This website is safely encrypted for YOUR PROTECTION! Click OK to accept your increased safety!"

        "You may be.. omg.. submitting... INFORMATION to a web site! Panic now! Or just click OK!"

        "You are changing the critical system setting 'background color'. Are you sure? ARE YOU? T

      • Ummm, you realize that the software was giving a replacement warning for a YEAR. In other words, there was not a significant problem. A warning should not be given "all the time" unless death of the device is imminent and certain. Warn once, twice, or thrice and let it be until a more critical threshold is met. A good model is the battery monitor (not battery health but battery charge). It will warn once at 10% or whatever that you had better save or face a shutdown on low battery. It will then take a more
      • by flatrock ( 79357 )

        It's nothing new. Windows has long gotten the blame for the consequences of buggy software and device drivers developed by others. They have come a long way toward reducing what mistakes made by others can crash the OS, but any kernel mode device driver can crash Windows, or any other operating system for that matter.

        I've unfortunately released some drivers with bugs myself that I've had to fix at the insistance of justifiably irate customers.

        What's different about this is they are getting blameed for mes

      • by Wumpus ( 9548 )

        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.

        Maybe they don't believe them because they can't understand them. Maybe it has something to do with Microsoft somehow thinking that sentences like "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" mean something.

        Microsoft has gotten really bad at communicating in plain English in recent years. It's been a wh

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Xest ( 935314 )

        "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, i

  • Sheesh. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Esther Schindler ( 16185 ) <esther@bitranch.com> on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:30PM (#31078264) Homepage

    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:

    To see if your battery problems are likely to come from this conflict between Windows 7 and your hardware run the powercfg -energy command from a command prompt. If the result is that Windows was unable to determine the battery’s capacity, sooner or later you will see the misleading error messages or have the laptop shutdown prematurely.

  • First Apple had laptop battery issues with OS 10.6 (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2139186&tstart=0) and now it's Microsoft with Windows 7. Two completely different OS's both suffering from the same style of issue in their newest product. Are they both using a shared driver code in their newest OS that is causing this? Did they only implemented in these changes in these new OS's or did they get patched in their older OS's too?
    • 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.

    • by vlm ( 69642 )

      Two completely different OS's both suffering from the same style of issue in their newest product.

      The problem is as old as laptops themselves. Look at all the entertainment linux laptop users have had for decades now.

      Here is the problem:

      1) Laptop mfgr only make the ACPI stuff work just barely well enough on a good day to sometimes work on the version of windows the laptop shipped with.

      2) Laptop mfgr has no motivation to patch, if anything they'd tell you to buy a new one.

      3) Even for vertically integrated companies (Apple) its entirely possible they don't have a stable of every combination of hardware a

  • Umbrella Corp says that its virus is not causing people to turn into zombies. However, we were unable to get more information from their spokesman, as he was killed by zombie dogs.

    • by Cryacin ( 657549 )
      Those dogs wouldn't have gotten much nutrition out of him. Once you get past all the crap, he's just a pair of lips and a briefcase!
  • Wha?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Itninja ( 937614 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:32PM (#31078308) Homepage
    "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."

    Can a brother get some restrictive clauses and pronouns up in here?
  • Not dead (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lost Penguin ( 636359 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @05:39PM (#31078434)
    Microsoft: Oh yes, the, uh, the Battery...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
              Laptop owner: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
              Microsoft: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
              Laptop owner: Look, matey, I know a dead battery when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
              Microsoft: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkably charged, the Battery, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
              Laptop owner: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
              Microsoft: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
    • Re:Not dead (Score:5, Funny)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:18PM (#31078972) Homepage
      Microsoft: Bring out your dead batteries.
      Microsoft: Here's one.
      Customer: It's not dead.
      Microsoft: Yes it is.
      Customer: But it still holds a little charge.
      Microsoft: Not really. It's as good as dead.
      Customer: Look! It plays YouTube for over 2 minutes.
      Microsoft: It's dead. Do we need to come back later?
      Customer: But it's still good. It's happy!
      Microsoft: *THWACK*
      Microsoft: There. Now it's dead.
      Customer: You killed my battery!
      Microsoft: No we didn't. It was already dead.
    • Microsoft: No, 'e's just pining for the fjords of Redmond!

  • Before anyone gets too excited Ubuntu does this too. It told me on my old IBM T40 that the battery only had 50% capacity every time I switched it on - yes it was a very older battery with very little capacity.

  • 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

    • So leave the laptop running and measure how long it takes for it to die, then you'll know if 7 is giving you bullshit, or is the proverbial Cassandra.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by KarmaMB84 ( 743001 )
      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)?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:00PM (#31078736)

    Windows 7 doesn't kill batteries, people kill batteries.

  • 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.

    • by vlm ( 69642 )

      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.

      A car analogy? On slashdot? Unpossible. Anyways:

      Well, more like the accelerator pedal is sticking, and corporate HQ says there's no problem here please move along, and eventually too many pedals are sticking, and then the govt (whom owns their main competitor) starts squawking, then everyone whom was playing World of Warcraft while driving and had an accident gets the bright idea of blaming the gas pedal instead, next thing you know...

    • by arikol ( 728226 )

      Yes, the user is smart and the OS and computer are both stupid.

      HOWEVER, the user may be a very smart doctor (brick layer, astronaut, deep sea diver etc.) which does not necessarily make the user comfortable with computers or an OS.
      The OS should assist the user by giving him all the information he needs in real human language.
      If the assistance means showing a warning symbol on the battery and a popup (on hover) sayin "this battery will need replacing soon" or "this battery REEEEALLLLYYY needs replacing now"

      • by argent ( 18001 )

        If the assistance means showing a warning symbol on the battery and a popup (on hover) sayin "this battery will need replacing soon" or "this battery REEEEALLLLYYY needs replacing now" then that is what is required.

        That's fine. But TELL THE USER WHY as well. Because some of those doctors are pretty tech savvy after all.

    • by MBCook ( 132727 )

      40% implies the battery is still useful. Unlike a gas tank which the 2nd to last gallon is as good as the first, once a battery hits 60% or so it gets useless. Worse, the drop is exponential, so you can't say "60% = 0%" and scale things out. And since the time left depends on the current draw, 60% for a typist compared to a YouTube addict.

      I'd say the real problem is this technology has been around for years but users haven't seen it until now. Their battery has been dying for years, their computer knew it,

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by argent ( 18001 )

        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. W

    • by Cryacin ( 657549 )
      The smart treating the stupid as stupid and the smart as smart, rather than the stupid as smart and the smart as stupid!

      GENIUS!!!
    • by flatrock ( 79357 )

      You're assuming that Windows gets such information from the BIOS. How does Windows even know what the original capacity is? It appears the BIOS is indicating that the battery is no longer working within specifications. Windows doesn't even know what those specifications are unless that's something it can read from the hardware.

  • Seems sensible (Score:3, Informative)

    by arikol ( 728226 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:18PM (#31078968) Journal

    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.

  • by yoshi_mon ( 172895 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:33PM (#31079166)

    Over the years as my number of rechargeable battery items have gone way up I'd like to think I'm somewhat familiar with the tech behind them. At the very least enough to use them well and do some basic troubleshooting when problems arise with them. And one of the main things I've observed lately is that sometimes it's the battery chargers that are ultimately the issue when problems start to become reoccurring.

    I've had a 3 set cordless phone setup for about 5 years now and when they started to act up I got them all new batteries. Given that they had still been using the originals I figured ok problem solved. However not too long after using them with their new batteries they started to act up again. And it was a bit harder because the pattern was very hard to see.

    While I'm sure that the original batteries were due for replacement the satellite chargers had stopped working properly. While the phones normally would stay in their normal charger that was not always the case which what threw me off at 1st. But I noticed that as long as I charged a phone in the main station it would work fine.

    However the damage had been done and even my new batteries are not nearly as good as they should be. Extend what happened in my story to say a laptop where it's built in battery charging system has stopped working properly. Not only is the battery not getting a good charge it's likely being damaged in the process. Leading to Win7 telling people so even thou they think, "But I just got this thing a new battery!"

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

    by kurt555gs ( 309278 ) <kurt555gs@ov[ ]om ['i.c' in gap]> 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!

  • by v1 ( 525388 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:40PM (#31079300) Homepage Journal

    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?

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

    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, t
  • The more certain you are that your Windows 7 laptop battery is in need of replacement, the less certain Microsoft can be about Windows 7 being the cause.
  • Verification? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hmmdar ( 1130219 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @07:22PM (#31079808)
    Is there any other trusted third party software that can be used to verify what Microsoft is saying?
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