We often see laptop batteries that are not performing well. After a few minutes of use the battery will suddenly drop to 0% or alternate between full charge low charge. You may also get a message on Windows or at PC start up that says that you should replace the battery or consider replacing the battery, however replacing the battery is not always necessary.
What is inside a laptop battery?
There are several cells, the cabling and a control board. If the cells are broken or shorted there is nothing you can do but replace them. If the control board is broken it also has to be replaced. Replacing cells and control board is very difficult and usually not cost effective, few companies offer that service. However there is a third case that can be fixed easily, read on.
How to fix a maladjusted control board
The control board stores the data of how long the battery lasts and it tries to estimate the state of charge. As we use the laptop it will little by little make more errors on the state of charge calculation as we seldom let it charge and discharge completely. To fix this problem you can follow the steps bellow:
1- Charge the laptop for a few ours, make sure it is 100% charged.
2- Unplug the charger.
2- Boot the the laptop and press ESC, F2 or F1 several times before windows loads. That should lead to the BIOS menu.
3- Leave the laptop on until it turns off by itself.
4- If necessary repeat the processes once more.
It is important to do this process without booting on Windows. For one thing windows will automatically turn off the PC when the control board thells it that the battery is low. However the control board may be wrong and we are trying to find out how long the battery really last so that the control board can get the right data. You can disable the automatic shutdown on Windows, however shutting down the computer unexpectedly may cause problems on Windows. So it is better the BIOS menu option.
Very often we can fix a battery this way and save our customers money and time on a new battery. However I do not recommend doing this often because lithium batteries do not like to be completely discharged (they work better with partial discharge). If you want to do preventive battery maintenance, once a year should be enough.
Please contact LoreaTec for more information about your laptop battery problem.