Over the last few days, I’ve been putting my aging battery in my ASUS M51SN (now some 2.5+ years old) through some torture of plugin / plugout for watching vids/podcasts that incidentally almost drain the battery whilst I clean the house. I also use it briefly on the way to work or in my lunch hour (10-30 min stints)
After coming out of hibernation this evening at home, after having a day of sporadic use that started with a couple of 10 min runs in the morning followed by a 10 min run in the afternoon, the battery Icon had a cross advising me that my battery was at 10% and that I should consider replacing my battery.
I came across the following forum
Windows 7 and the battery error “consider replacing your battery”
and whilst it is easy to see a lot of people complaining that there is something wrong with Windows, I can pretty much tell based on the change in behaviour & my previous experience with laptop batteries is that this could be the last legs of the laptop battery.
Nevertheless, the forum did teach me a windows command powercfg -energy to get the used maH and a whole lot of other useful diagnostics about where the battery power is going. Something I used to rely on third party tools to tell me. One trick others seemed to try which I hope will work for me is a full discharge and recharge. Repeating this cycle a few times seems to improve the level that the battery charges up to. I’ll update this blog with news if that works
An update, I left the battery discharge and work its way down to zip. After rebooting the cross has gone away. Seems I’ve dodged the bullet for now.