Microsoft Looking Into Windows 7 Battery Issues

I had the "Consider replacing your battery" problem with my wife's laptop, a firmware upgrade from HP fixed the issue.

So is this only an issue for those who did an upgrade from Vista, as opposed to a clean install?

I did a clean install several ways on my laptop and started getting this message. Being that the battery was a mere week past it's guarentee, I figured it was a battery issue (isn't that always how it happens?). The first time it happened, I was in Win7RC, loaded from a VHD on a Vista partition...interestingly, I'm pretty sure that the few times I booted back into Vista, the message was still there...made sense at the time, but now I confess it confuses me a little, if this was supposed to be a false reading from the software... The other thing was, the message isn't up all the time...just sometimes. BTW, if my experience was close to typical for those with this problem, when this message was visible (and only a few other times), "battery life dwindl[ing] significantly" meant about 3 minutes of life on a fully-charged battery. When that happened in fact, it sucked power so quickly when it initiated the low-power shutdown, there wasn't enough juice to get through the process and it ended up just dying. I haven't worked without a power cord in several months, you can imagine. Anyway, I'll be quite interested in what they find regarding this problem. Glad I didn't fork over the bucks for a new battery yet.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by thurrott: Microsoft Looking Into Windows 7 Battery Issues: I just received an email about this battery issue but had never e... http://bit.ly/cCaoVY

Wae has got to be correct or this would be close to a universal problem with all Win 7 laptops. It's got to be the battery and/or hardware makers. Dig deeper in they would probably find specific mobo's or batteries. BTW spivonious, a five year battery life is fantastic. None of my three Dell laptop's came close to that lifespan. They all died within 3 yrs, but I only cycled one properly...but I practically never used them on battery any way [hence, the lack of cycling those older batteries]. Newer batteries don't need cycled I guess or almost never.

Hey rrode, I guess that's why they need removable batteries ;)

@rrode: How's that PCI Express video bus speed on your iMac going?

I think this goes to show why Apple does not allow Flash on the ipod/iphone/ipad. It sounds like this battery issue is a BIOS or firmware problem, yet people are blaming Windows 7 and Microsoft when it may not be their fault. This is what Apple wants to avoid with Flash.

@DRWAM I dont think your $400 Vista laptop needs any justification, sounds like its been going gangbusters.

@yoshi: Apple doesn't want to address the problem by working with vendors, which is what frequently happens. They would rather just dismiss them entirely like a snotty child rather than establish a good rapport with them and work to resolve their issues. BTW: HTML5 is not a suitable replacement until the W3C quits sitting on their hands and picks a standard for the video tag. Apple and Google want H.264, which is a proprietary, licensed technology, just like Flash. Apple just wants to get their choice in technologies to become the standard on the web. If it were Microsoft pushing for H.264 (or their own VC-1) as the standard for web video, you'd have verbally castrated them long ago for pushing proprietary technologies onto something that should be open (the HTML spec). Instead, Microsoft is sitting and watching how it works out before committing to anything. They want to support VC-1, but they only do that from within the Silverlight wrapper. HTML5 isn't widely accepted, and there are too many loose ends to tie up before it becomes ratified to call it "complete", so Silverlight is a good interim web app development platform, just like Flash. Even still, there are much more advanced features in both that HTML scripting can't even touch and probably won't ever. FWIW: I'd rather see XHTML become more widely accepted, and allow developers to create their own XML transforms. Also FYI: The reason Google and Apple are pushing for HTML5 is because the editors of the standard come from both companies. Don't you see a conflict of interest in respect to H.264 support and HTML5 as a supposed "open" standard? I wonder where Steve's little hissy fit about Google comes into play when Google is using Apple for development resources.

I'm kinda sitting on the fence about the quality of HP products. Sure, they look nice and they have good specs for the money, not to mention that HP at least gives you choices with AMD mainstream systems with good graphics in the sub-$1000 market spaces, but quality is another issue. After seeing numerous systems from only a couple years ago with the notorious bugginess from the DV2000, 6000, and 9000 series HP notebooks, I'd be hesitant about buying one myself. FWIW: the problem with those systems are as follows: On an AMD (usually Turion) system, the wireless card will just go dead one day. You can't enable it or replace the card because it's not the card that's the problem - it's something on the motherboard. On Intel Centrino versions, the problems are worse. The temperature controls fail to spin the fan at the proper RPM, so the processor, northbridge, and/or discrete video card will overheat, causing heat damage to the board, and will eventually lead to a complete system malfunction (won't power on). HP says the problem with both of these is with the BIOS/firmware. Whatever. It's a major problem though. HP had once offered extended out-of-warranty service for free to rectify the problem, but they pulled that offer quite a while ago. Now they just say that the systems are out of warranty and they'll happily try to sell you a new one over the phone. I know of MANY people that had AMD systems from the same product family (DV6000 15" usually) that had this exact problem, but HP would only fix certain exact models within that product family, and they wouldn't fix any others that were on this "recall" list. Tablet PC's were also affected, but none were on the repair list. It was a disaster for HP QA and one that many people didn't hear about, but I certainly saw my fair share of systems that were affected that came in for service. Luckily I wasn't selling them at the time (and I still don't sell HP systems now). I would say this problem is certainly worse than any battery recall, because I personally saw probably a couple dozen of these systems owned by pissed consumers where I couldn't and HP wouldn't fix the problem without it costing a lot of money. The thing is, I SAW this problem. A LOT! I never once saw or heard of anybody around here having exploding batteries. I think I'd like to play wait-and-see when it comes to the HP Slate. Pegatron is the new Asus ODM spinoff company, so it's possible it may be flooding the channel. A slate PC might seem like a good idea, but if it's anything like the current crop of Pine Trail netbooks, count me out. Pine Trail certainly wasn't worth the wait. Ion 2, maybe. I'd rather tell someone to spend a bit more money and get a better Athlon Neo X2 processor system with the AMD Vision platform. I've seen some Pine Trail netbooks and I'm really not impressed by them at all. Note to Intel: Where is the dual-core netbook processor you promised with the release of Pine Trail? Note to others: The Atom 330 is a netTOP processor with a higher TDP. The ASUS netbook with the Atom 330 and Ion isn't great on battery power, and performance is still lacking compared to the Athlon Neo.

@DRWAM: Short answer: nope Long answer: NOOOOOOoooooooOOOOO!

h.264 is open source. HTML 5 will win. Here is good example of why... http://jilion.com/sublime/video Fast forward in that video. Does it rail your CPU?

I upgraded my Windows Vista notebook to Windows 7 and was fortunate not to suffer any issues. However, unlike Apple it's nice to see Microsoft step up and say, "YES we have identified an issue and YES we're working on it." Apple refuses to acknowledge to the public issues such as the 21 & 27" faulty iMac LCD screens. Don't believe me? Ars Technica is on top of it. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-internally-acknowledges-... You pay all that money and you aren't getting more quality. Infact, a lot of LCD companies have avoided this issue. That is just one of many issues that has to change with Apple before people will accept them in the mainstream. If you get a problem, do some research, acknowledge the problem and publish that your working on a fix. How hard is that? And don't look at me like I'm some kind of Windows fanboy, because many Mac users have address the same frustration & desire for this to change. For me, this is a common sense solution to be more open and transparent. I railed against several times Microsoft wasn't as open on specific issues, but at least we more often times than not get a pretty good repertoire from the guys at Redmond. rrode74, H.264 IS a proprietary codec standard. You have to pay royalties to use that codec standard. The x264 you linked to is a codec, it's just an encoder that can't decode video. If you need to read up on H.264, I've got two sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC I'd recommend scrolling down to part 8 which covers patent licensing. http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/standards/mpeg-4/mpeg-4.htm This covers the entire MPEG4 standard in which H.264 is apart of. It does cover reasonable licensing.