Microsoft: Windows 7 Isn't Killing Batteries

I am with microsoft on that. I have seen that in XP Vista etc.. Battery shows 100% and drops to 10% and then shuts down sometimes. This is battery issue not OS.

There's always something with windows

I call Shinanagins on this one. Here is the thing I had a sony Viao running xp and replaced the battery about a month before I installed the rc of windows 7. On the rc everything was fine. Got good battery life the whole time. Wipe install windows 7 home premium, reboot, computer tells me the battery needs replaced. I put the old dead battery in, it lasts about 40 minutes, but no warning saying I need to replace that one. (which is way less than 60% battery life). I bet every battery they tested needs replaced. Cause widows 7 destroys them. Tried the new battery in another Viao. It wont last 15minutes now.
I chalked it up to a bad battery until I read that its happening to a lot of users besides just me.

Sounds like another pebcak error.

This seems to be the key point

Nice feature. I would say that users complaining about Windows 7 battery life after upgrading have a battery that is likely over a year old. It is not unusual for a battery to start showing signs of degradation after that time period. Their may be other factors as well though as some manufactures include their own power schemes that are no longer present after the upgrade.

Want to explain to me how this software is destroying a power supply?

Sound like if you buy a new computer, the battery could be under 40% because the battery sleep in the box for 1 year. Win7 do right but he should perhaps give the option "ignore battery degradation" (perhaps not the manufacturer will just check this setting by default).

Bad settings in the battery or damn old NEW battery, laptop manufactures have one more setting to check before sell you a NEW LAPTOP with a crappy a OLD NEW battery...

(I call Shinanagins on this one. Here is the thing I had a sony Viao running xp and replaced the battery about a month before I installed the rc of windows 7. On the rc everything was fine. Got good battery life the whole time. Wipe install windows 7 home premium, reboot, computer tells me the battery needs replaced. I put the old dead battery in, it lasts about 40 minutes, but no warning saying I need to replace that one. (which is way less than 60% battery life). I bet every battery they tested needs replaced. Cause widows 7 destroys them. Tried the new battery in another Viao. It wont last 15minutes now.
I chalked it up to a bad battery until I read that its happening to a lot of users besides just me.)

or maybe the battery you bought was bad to begin with and u didn't notice on xp

clean installed windows 7 home premium 64 over a 32-bit vista home premium on an HP dv6700t. no problems with the battery. been using it since october. then again i've always taken good care of the battery with regular charge-drain cycles.

My sister's HP w/ XP on it just had the battery bite the dust too, it gets about 30% capacity at full charge. So MS has been killing batteries for years, it's not just Win 7!

Confirmation, should it be needed, would be if you decided to upgrade to 7 but were worried, you should ignore what XP or Vista say the battery life is and time it with CLOCK.

If XP or Vista says 6 hours battery but in realtime you only get 4 hours, install 7, then it tells you 4 hours as well, then MS totally vindicated.

If in doubt, TEST.

Personally I don't run Windows, but I have found that leaving your battery in your laptop while using AC power with the battery at full charge will in fact shorten the life of the battery. I remove the battery when I'm plugged in for prolonged periods. Also I try to run the battery down to at least 20% before fully recharging it. Batteries are rated for x amount of cycles (Charge/discharge) each time you charge your battery counts as 1 cycle, if you charge 1% or 100%. So if you leave your battery in all the time you are in effect killing your battery prematurely.

well there always has been the issue of the laptops using more and not having an accurate battery meter. maybe this is just the iteration of that battery meter actually showing how long your 4cell li ion battery will last. when you had a full charge before in xp it may have said 6 hours but you never got 6 hours out of it at full use.

I have to say I agree with Microsoft on this one. I've done numerous re-installations of windows 7 on desktop, notebooks, and netbooks. And I have yet to see my battery deteriorate due to windows 7.

Oh and yes I have been using windows 7 since the early public beta release.

I guess nobody got my sarcasm.

As I said I thought it was just a bad battery at first. Also this has nothing to do with a powersupply so I dont even know what to say to that. I am sorry thought I cant believe that I had a perfectly good battery that would stay charged, change from RC to home premium reboot and only have 20minutes of life. I could believe it if it was just my computer, but its not its a ton of systems affected.
Microsoft just knows that they cant fix it through a software patch, so they are just denying its a problem.
Whats funny is if it was an apple problem your opinions would be different.

i guess theres confusion because people dont understand XP and VISTA doesnt report battery capacity performance. I know my battery was bad I had it replaced it was an HP problem I had it replaced under warranty and that battery was defective to(they didnt fix the issue) so now this battery holds 16000mWh(

One thing no one mentions: Linux has had this capability for a long time. You dont hear the linux crowd screaming about that killing their batteries! Just dumb users who cant fathom that their precious laptop battery thats plugged in 24/7 is dying.

i guess theres confusion because people dont understand XP and VISTA doesnt report battery capacity performance. I know my battery was bad I had it replaced it was an HP problem I had it replaced under warranty and that battery was defective to(they didnt fix the issue) so now this battery holds 16000mWh(less than 40 mins) vs. 88000mWh. Vista should of reported battery failure at 40% even Ubuntu does this. They could of at least included it in an update.

No offense intended, but it's rather hard to pick out the difference between a sarcastic response and a genuinely idiotic one when there's pretty much a 50/50 split between them in most comment sections.

Anyone saying that when they upgraded to 7, their battery life decreased should downgrade back to XP and see what happens.

If I remember correctly.. The OS does not control battery power but the schemes of course.. If Windows ruined a battery, that means it must somehow control the amps/volts and allow the power brick to give more than it can handle.. Transistors, and all that good crap control the power to the battery along with the charge rate.. Not an OS.. At least never from what I heard of. Just like others said also, rechargeable batteries don't last forever. After 1 - 2 years, they degrade. 100% with Microsoft on this one. The only way I see it killing the battery more is if Aero is active and have a lot of programs running. Anything that uses resources.

From my personal experience, I have installed Windows 7 on quite a few laptops, including an older dell with a brand new 6-cell. After installation, the battery had no problems at all and lasted well over 3 hours. Maybe about 3 1/2 - 4 max.

Seriously, the battery charging issue is entirely hardware related. The batteries are equipped with controls that determine the proper charge rate, battery life, etc. based on the battery manufacturers' specifications. The charger brick is merely an AC to DC transformer that is very simple in operation. There is no way, whatsoever, that an OS can unnaturally change this process. Obviously, as MS has disclosed, there has been a change in the way it's REPORTED.

Now, the conspiracy theory shouldn't be, "Win7 is killing my battery." It should be, "Win7 is telling me my battery needs replacement so much earlier than prior versions. Are they helping sell high-margin accessories for OEMs?"

Li-Ion batteries start dying the day they're made.
Treat them right you'll get about 5 years. The average is 3 and people that abuse them gets 1 or less.
OS has nothing to do with it.
Store them at 50% and don't fully discharge it if you can help it.

I get optimal battery time with Ubuntu.

Make the switch, save your battery!

Ummm like so many others have said. Windows 7 is not "killing" your battery people. It is either falsely reporting battery degradation or it isn't. Seeing how batteries are manufactured, and the standards that are enforced these days, lead me to believe that the vast majority of batteries may be of a poor quality. It's interesting that the first major OS to offer a service that notifies you of battery degradation is all the sudden finding plenty of rotten apples.... It would be interesting if people would begin to report on the actual brand being used and break that down by percentages of those reporting a problem at all. I bet we would see a pattern.

Is the software not controlling how the battery is utilized? I am not saying this is the issue, but it bears some consideration that poor utilization can in fact diminish the life of a bettery. We have all seen this on cordless phones and cell phones. Why cant an operating system screw up charge and use cycles like a user can?

I am not saying that the battery is bad, all I am saying is that windows wont allow my computer to stay on with that almost new battery. It shuts it off 20mins after its on battery power. It could very well be a reporting problem. But it is a windows issue. The reason its a Windows issue is because it auto shuts down because its reporting a bad battery. Its not a bad battery. The only thing that I can think of is maybe its reporting a different voltage than what Windows likes. Either way my laptop wont stay very long on an almost new battery.

Or you bought a cheap NiCad battery as replacement (rather than Li-ion) and didn't follow the proper procedures to get max usage out of the battery. NiCad's are notorious for charge memory. The first few cycles, you have to completely deplete the charge then fully charge it or you risk the battery having a memory (the point at which you recharged it is where the life of the battery now ends)

Its Li-ion. Not NiCad, or NiMH. I know how NiCad, NiMH, Li-ion, and Li-polymer batterys work. I used to sell cellular phones. Did it for years. I know how to condition the NiCad, NiMH batteries. But most importantly, I know not to buy them. Also I know that Li-ion are only good for so many cycles, and degrade with heat and cold. I'm not saying the battery is bad, But the auto off feature when windows 7 falsly detects it needs replaced and shuts down the pc could be wrong.