[USMarine]

I have recently gone from Vista to Win 7 on my Dell Inspiron 1525.
Recently, my battery meter displays a little red circle next to it, with a cross within it.
When plugged in, it just has a giant cross on the meter. When clicked on, it says "Consider Replacing your Battery" and below it says "There's a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly."

I've read many other post's and threads on forum sites where people are experiencing the same thing. What I don't know, however, if it's effecting their battery life. My battery drops 10% of charge every 2-3 minutes of not being charged. If it is a Win 7 error, should this happen, or is it actually my battery. And if there's a tool which diagnoses battery life, compatible with Win7, I would appreciate it if you could direct me to it. I ran the battery life tool in the Command Prompt, and I got the following:

13 Errors
17 Warnings
16 Informational

What do I do from here? (Updating BIOS and Drivers did not solve my issue)

So, is it a Win 7 error that my battery only lives for 10-15 min, or is it time to change. I don't want to buy a new one, only to find out that I'm having the same problem.

Thanks, Sempers.

[GTReventon]

Its not a problem with your Battery (But can also be the problem). This is a common problem about Windows 7 and probably Windows Vista. I also saw some forums having this kind of problem. Does this happen when you first install Windows 7?

Here is a statement from a TechNet Subscriber:

Spoiler! Show Spoiler

It's a Windows 7 Problem
Submitted by Technet Subscriber on February 3, 2010 - 7:47 P.M.

Batteries have an EEPROM in them storing values like the battery's total capacity, what it's last charge capacity was, voltage, etc. The chip monitors all the characteristics/voltage of the battery. Basically it keeps statistics of the battery to make sure that the voltage is the same and the battery is charging properly. Once it detects that the battery is bad it stops the laptop from charging it. OEMs do not have ACPI drivers. Windows has always issued the ACPI, battery control drivers in their operating system. My observation is, Windows 7 is writing corrupt values into the battery's EEPROM causing the battery to think that something is wrong when it really is not. Once that is compromised, the battery will refuse to charge properly. There is no way to salvage a battery with a corrupted EEPROM without paying more than the battery is worth.

And here is what Microsoft said regarding the issues people talking about:

Spoiler! Show Spoiler

Last week, Microsoft said it was investigating issues in Windows 7 that affect batteries on certain notebooks after hundreds of users reported they thought the OS was to blame. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division, has posted a lengthy response on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. "At this time we have no reason to believe there is any issue related to Windows 7 in this context," Sinofsky writes. Here's his explanation:

Several press articles this past week have drawn attention to blog and forum postings by users claiming Windows 7 is warning them to "consider replacing your battery" in systems which appeared to be operating satisfactorily before upgrading to Windows 7. These articles described posts in the support forums indicating that Windows 7 is not just warning users of failing batteries - as we designed Windows 7 to do this - but also implying Windows 7 is falsely reporting this situation or even worse, causing these batteries to fail. To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state. In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement.

Sinofsky goes on to explain that PC batteries inherently degrade in their ability to hold a charge and provide power, and ultimately batteries must be replaced to restore an acceptable battery life (batteries usually have a warranty of 12 months). Windows 7 taps into a feature of modern laptop batteries which have circuitry and firmware that can report the overall health of the battery in Watt-hours power capacity. Windows 7 then calculates the percentage of degradation from the original design capacity; the threshold is set at 60 percent degradation, so if the battery is performing at 40 percent of its designed capacity then users will see Windows 7 report that it might be time to change the battery.

Further, he notes that Windows 7's new "Consider replacing your battery" message does not exist in Windows XP and Windows Vista, so many users would probably not have been aware of their batteries degrading. This would also explain why some users were seeing the battery indicator in Windows 7 builds prior to the RTM release while others only saw it in the RTM.

Finally, Sinofsky asks users who believe they are receiving this error because their battery is new or in great shape to contact Microsoft via the TechNet forum, the Microsoft Answers forum, or to visit support.microsoft.com to find how to contact Microsoft assisted support in their region.

I don't much know if there is a way to fix this but you should take this from where you bought your laptop. But before that ask Wraith first. He might now how to get around this.


Hope this helps!

[USMarine]

Thanks Proton. I'm just gonna replace my battery. It's 2 years old, so maybe it's time after all.

[GTReventon]

Your welcome. Yeah I checked your Lappy and it was released back in 2008. Also the statement from the TechNet Subscriber is what the PSP hackers used. They overwrite the EEPROM of the PSP Battery to make it pandora. Well JUst to let you know.