May not be battery-specific flaw

There's several sites that have reported that Win7 uses more power than Vista and XP on the same hardware, based on additional features intended to maximize the user experience. If there's not a batter-specific reason, people should be aware of the difference in draw.

Having used 7 for the past 6 months and Vista for the two years before that, it sure seems to that 7 took a step backward in power management. Even the time required to sleep seems exceesive, compared to Vista on the same hardware (laptop and desktop).

Guess this means MS, IBM, HP, Dell, Sony, etc. are all in cahoots to sell more batteries.

Bang!

Bing Bang goes the eco-credentials?

Bing Bing goes returns on battery maker shares?

Dud batteries?

Maybe part of the problem is also people buying dodgy "new" batteries from Chinese suppliers? It could very well be that their "official" battery is a cheap knockoff that really is putting out less than 60% of its claimed capacity and this new monitor is essentially tipping people off to the swindle.

thegeek

Running "powercfg energy" from an elevated command prompt will give you, among other things, the battery's design (new) and current capacity.

Perhaps....

"The OS then calculates how much this figure has decreased from the capacity provided by the battery's original design specs"

Could it be that the information on the original design specs is faulty/corrupted? If the original design specs data that Windows 7 accesses indicates a battery life to be twice what it should be then Windows 7 will report a failing battery even if said battery is brand new.

Anyone know where Windows actually gets the information on the original design specs? if it's held in an internal database then it's possible the information is wrong or has been corrupted somehow.

Check your processes

Everyone who has this problem I recommend downloading Process Explorer here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

look out for constant low level CPU activity of 3 processes - dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager), SearchProtocolHost.exe, SearchFilterHost.exe. Also keep an eye out for dllhost.exe when browsing folders in Windows Explorer- it seems there may be a bug in W7 that can cause the search and thumbnail to indexes to constantly delete and refresh themselves, which is obviously going to be bad for battery life......

Weird speculation here..

What people are missing is that this is not anything to do with bad batteries, or increased power draw of windows 7 or processes. The issue is that windows 7 corrupts the information stored on the batteries. My laptop ran fine with windows vista, the battery died within a week of a clean windows 7 install. This was a healthy battery, low cycles.

Got a replacement battery, installed vista and had no issues. We Ran windows 7 on it but only without being plugged in, then recharged by booting a ubuntu live cd. This arrangement worked and the battery was fine after 3 weeks. We then started letting windows 7 charge the battery and the battery was dead within a few days. Read the technet and you can see this duplicated over and over again.

Now, at work we did a transplant of the cells from the second battery to a third and guess what.. It works fine! We're working to start logging windows 7 interaction with the battery to collect evidence for a class action atm.

You wonder why microsoft is trying to downplay this? Imagine the recalls..

Luddite justified!

I've always thought that laptops were a compromise too far, and along comes another vindication of this opinion.

Don't get me started on netbooks...

The hardware is junk

I've not upgraded to Win7, but have to say that the quality of laptop batteries seems to have been in general decline for a long time. My <1yr old HP lap now holds a charge for about 10 mins (no kidding). Compare that to my 5 year old HP machine which still manages about 2hrs40.

I see bubbles....

Something look a little fishy? People do notice before-and-after differences in things. Give it some months and I think the truth will begin to show what is really going on here.

They lie

I understand that Win7 may draw more power to do the same things as Vista. But if I switch off all the fancy stuff in Win7 and plug in so my battery gets 100% charge, the charge vanishes in minutes, I get the Consider replacing yoru battery pop up and then the laptop shuts off.

If I reinstall Vista again the battery lasts for hours, how can simple things in Win7, like just running the OS and a Web Browser draw the battery to empty in minutes? How are netbooks coping that have smaller batteries?

C'mon Now, This Is Windows

Since when was MS really expected to release an OS that did not usurp more resources than predecessors? It's not a flaw it's a design feature. Surely your whole computing world revolves around buying new hardware to run Windows, and run windows as much as possible so damn the expense you need a new battery, then a new PC, because you can't buy too many windows licenses.

If it was "previously running fine"

then I'd suggest that their warning is, at best, scare-mongering.

"We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 'causing' the change in performance"

So there is a perceptible change in performance then, which happens just around the time you install Windows 7? What a coincidence.

Windows 7 does a lot of irritating things (it's a shame, because it's otherwise a very stable OS). It refuses to work with most DVI KVM switches, because it's doing something that previous OSs didn't do. Microsoft's fix? Spend another $200 on a new KVM. Gee Bill, thanks.

I thought those who said they'd wait for the first service pack were silly - now I agree with them.

@Monteeth

Thanks for the pointer. It's good to see someone offering some constructive help. Your comments suggest that Windows 7 is a *monster* battery hog and the battery app is just reporting the fact.

The help file is rubbish.

The problem is user education

I regularly see people who complain that their battery is fritzed. The vast majority have never ever run a calibration process, or even run the battery all the way down. And most run their laptops on their desk, permanently plugged in to the mains. So they have no concept of how long a charge actually lasts, and they are frying the battery as well.

Paris knows how long her batteries last.....

After 6 months I think Win7 is horrible.

Microsoft help isn't helpful. MS Access still has blank entries for some of it's errors, and has done since 2003. Either they haven't considered the problem or their search facilities are lacking, knowing 'bing' I think the latter. Excel and word are barely able to find basic help files, so complex coding in Excel has little chance without google and some useful MVP out there with a blog.

Microsoft answers don't help. I have yet to be told why my speakers and headphones don't work at the same time, but do for XP, Vista and Ubuntu. A nice lady in India has gone quiet.

And Win7 is horrible for all kinds of reasons, like my usb keyboard that takes a minute after reaching the password screen before the base unit gives it power enough to actually type in the password. (It works fine for BIOS, and works fine in the other OS I have used. So win7 removes the power to the USB and then gives it back during boot)

And why does it still take 19 hours ( I kid not ) to copy 200MB from HDD to flash pen. And take five minutes to work out the 19 hours. Some things from Vista still carry over.

And now every time sleep mode comes on, the machine crashes because I use SLI. Hardware support my rear end.

How anyone can put that laggy bunch of rubbish onto a small form factor netbook and get it to work is beyond me. I have never used it's "battery useage" tools, but all the whistles and badly put together bells don't hold out confidence in a limited resource platform.

Choose a penguin, ubuntu 9.10 works fine on my asus eee 1000, and the MAC OS-X works nicely so I have seen.

You mean....

...Windows' battery meter actually WORKS now?

(In every laptop I have had, the XP/Vista battery meter would jump around worse than the times in the file copy dialog.)

Two Acer Laptops...

... one 3 years old - still has the same 1.5 hour battery life under 7 it had under Vista.

The other 1 year old oddly has an extra 30 mins life under 7 compared to Vista... considering this is the 8930G 18.4" beast that never had more than 2.5 hours when brand spanking new I'm naturally far happier under 7 than Vista from that point alone :p

I love it

The Lin-tards all uppity about Windows' battery consumption. So... how come it took so long for Linux to make it on to a mobile phone??? It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that it just sucked the battery dry? Check out the battery life on an N900.

7 year old laptop, Athlon64 3200+ on its 3 battery.

Hi, be thankful Windows 7 is reporting battery life problem. Generally a battery under 70% charge capacity should be replaced in critical equipment like medical equipment. Microsoft is recommending it at 60% which is fine for laptops. Or would you rather your battery fail in the middle of a important presentation, etc? Most people can ignore the warning like I do, until it won't turn on in battery mode...

new possiblity

Looking into it, I have seen it suggested that, for example the 88.8Wh reported for my laptop is the capacity of a larger battery;is it possible that as the information has never been used up to now, that manufacturers have simply been using one set of firmware for all of the different capacity batteries? And just changing the amount of cells? I must admit at first I was also quick to blame MS, but it does seem a very likely scenario if they were trying to reduce manufacturing costs. Cant say that that makes me happy though.