As a laptop user, I’ve had my fair share of problems under Windows Vista and then under Windows 7 once I upgraded, though most of them were resolvable issues. The one major thing I’ve had issues with with Windows 7, however, is it’s support for laptop batteries. As I found out on my previous post on laptop batteries, there are several problems under Windows 7. And shortly after that post, I ran into another. You see, I’m one of those that takes his laptop pretty much anywhere he can get away with it, even though it’s not an ultra-portable. I’ve got a Gateway M-6750, so I can’t speak much for other laptops in this problem which is as follows: using the laptop on the battery until you get down to the point that it forces a hibernation on you. Once plugged in, Windows 7 reports that your battery is broken and must be/should be replaced. If you tried the previous trick and found out it didn’t work, I did the same thing and didn’t work here either. But I’ve officially got my laptop working perfectly with the battery now, and with more charge then before too.
My first thought was to check and see if it was only Windows suffering from this issue. Ever since I found Salix, I’ve installed it to a dualboot with my Windows 7 OS on my laptop, so it was just a quick reboot away. Once in Salix, I added the battery monitor to my taskbar, only to find out that it was broken under Linux as well. I then checked to see how much a new battery was for my laptop, to find out that it would have cost me about $100 for a brand new, six cell battery. As much as I love technology, I’m afraid even for me, that was a bit too pricey for my liking. I debated about opening a support thread in the forum but I decided against it when I checked the BIOS for a different issue. This is because in my BIOS, it had the option to enable what it called a Battery Auto Learning Mode.
It was basically a controlled charge, controlled discharge, then another controlled charge. When I ran it to see if I could get more then two hours worth of battery life (which I find extremely short myself), I not only solved my problem of having to replace the battery but have also bumped the time up to a highly impressive 2 hours from 1 hour, 45 minutes. Your results might vary because of the fact that every laptop’s BIOS is different, and there is no one guide on how to do this. But if you’re using a computer, there is always a way to show the BIOS, the most common being a command to hit a key like F2, Delete, or F10. From there, look for an option along the lines of ‘Battery Auto Learning Mode’ or something along those lines like I showed here. It will take some time, and I did it while I was sleeping, so I can’t say how much or how little time it will take, but it should be able to repair the problem you’re facing, which would be Windows 7 reporting you have to replace the battery.
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