re: HP Labtop battery

[Dufresne]

I have an HP labtop, the dv6449us that I got August 2007.

This past summer I used the 1 year warranty to replace a bad battery. The previous battery had stopped charging up, so I had Circuit City Replace it.


Well it seems the new battery has now failed on me as well. Recently I noticed the battery was at 0% charge, so I went to charge it up and it would't charge. I tried restting some stuff and removing/ reinserting the battery, but no good. I ran the HP health check and it says to replace the battery.


Common problems I have noticed:

It seems with both batteries that letting the charge drop to 0% is a bad idea. With the first battery it was after letting it drop to 0% charge a 2nd time that it stopped working and refused to charge. I could let the charge run down to like 5% or lower, but once the charge hit 0 it seemd to have trouble charging.


Do I have bad luck, or is the battery design faulty?

No warranty left, so I will have to either pay for a new battery or go without. I have a desktop as well, so I ma not totaly screwed.

Getting a new battery is not cheap and I don't want to buy a new one if its just going to stop working simply because I let the charge hit 0.

[abouldabab__]

hey dufresne...
i have an HP dv6000 laptop, same happened with me, first battery wouldnt charge and was always zero, and since that happened during the warranty, the HP company gave me another battery, after like 8 months, the 2nd battery wouldnt charge, so i removed it, let it aside for like 1 month, put it back in, and it worked, now it is working fine, but i am sure that the same thing will happen to this battery as the first..
so i think that either we are treating the battery wrong, or something wrong with the designs ...
hope that helped!
abouldabab

[jaketo]

With rechargeable batteries in general they should be fully charged, fully discharged, fully charged, fully discharged etc. to get the best out of them and to keep them in good shape. This cycle of fully discharging a battery and then fully recharging it is known as 'conditioning'.

However in reality with modern lifestyles as they are, devices that contain rechargeable batteries tend to be used a bit, charged a bit, used a bit, charged a bit etc which is not a healthy way to treat a rechargeable battery and will reduce the life span and potentially cause problems.

To compromise, any rechargeable battery should be 'conditioned' occasionally on a regular basis, this will prolong its life and reduce the likelihood of failure.

I can't comment specifically on HP batteries but for me it's more likely to be batteries failing under normal operation rather than bad design which is frankly just bad luck. Leaving it for a month or so might allow it to recharge again but this is unlikely, worth a try though if you can as laptop batteries aren't cheap as you've discovered.

Good luck!

[Master_Platinum]

Is it true Windows Xp take's less battery on a laptop than Vista?

[emike55]

You were able to fully discharge your battery, yeah that is a terrible thing to do to a lithium-ion battery (assuming that it is indeed a lithium-ion, most laptops are)... One of the disadvantages to this kind of battery is that it cannot do deep discharges, usually that battery itself has an actual chip on it to prevent the battery from dropping below a certain voltage. Perhaps the manufacturer of your battery didn't put this chip on in hope to lower the cost? But anyway usually it doesn't matter with laptops, because often computers are set to shutdown once the battery power reaches 5%, but if you were able to deep drain your lithium-ion battery it does a good bit of damage to the battery. I would say it is likely that that could be the source of your problem. Set your laptop to shutdown if it drains to 5% or so and you should be fine for another battery, I would think.

And generally yes, MP. Vista uses a lot more resources just to run, on a standard setup, than XP, so I would assume that would have an affect on battery life. Granted with proper limitations it could easily run as long as an XP laptop. I'll give you an example, my laptop typically runs with no limitations at about 1 hour 10 minutes under Vista, under linux with no limitations my laptop typically runs at 1 hour and 30 minutes

[Master_Platinum]

On my laptop i can run it without power around, about 2hrs on vista.

If i watch vidéos or playing games, about 1hrs.

If i disconnect my power supply in only 15 minutes, i have 90% left on my battery on vista