Microsoft off the hook over notebook battery problems?
A week after Microsoft began investigating a reported problem, it’s starting to appear unlikely that notebook battery performance is a major issue in Windows 7.
As we noted last week, a series of reports on Microsoft forums noted two main problems:
- Battery life genuinely being reduced, in some cases to as little as 10 minutes.
- Windows displaying a message warning people to consider replacing their battery as it may be suffering a problem, even though no such problem appears to exist.
On Friday Microsoft insisted it has received no direct complaints about the problem (not including indirect complaints on message boards and community forums). It also notes that the warning message is a new feature for Windows 7. It added, “In testing on this issue, the root cause appears to be actual battery performance or failure, which Windows 7 is reporting (via the notification), but not causing. So the notifications appear to be working as they were designed to do from what we’re seeing.”
In principle the Microsoft response makes logical sense: just by the sheer numbers of notebooks running Windows 7, there’ll be a tiny proportion which are genuinely having battery problems and the only difference is that users are getting the warning rather than the battery simply dying out of the blue.
It’s tough to tell whether the responses on Microsoft’s own forum really do represent a widespread problem, though you’d certainly expect that to have prompted some reports through its online and phone help system.
There are also some complaints on the forum which say that after installing Windows 7, the battery life is reduced even after switching back to Vista or XP, or even when running a Linux-based system. That Windows 7 would cause permanent hardware damage seems somewhat unlikely and the idea that it was just coincidence the batteries took a turn for the worse shortly after the new system’s installation makes more logical sense.
It’s certainly not impossible there is a genuine problem with Windows 7 and batteries, and Microsoft should examine it closely. But in most cases the most sensible-sounding explanation usually turns out to be true, and there’s yet to be a logical explanation of why and how Windows 7 would be causing these issues.
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February 10th, 2010
This is pure bull. Yeh, most of us aren’t going to call up microsoft at $49.99. So, the only way we are going to get through is emails and message boards. My 6 month old gateway battery which had 3 hours of life has no been reduced to 10 minutes!!!. This didn’t happen over night there is some sort of cycling issue going on. My batter meter will go from 97% to 1% in 10 minutes then shutdown. I can put the power plug in for 1 minute to boot up unplug it and it will run for 10 minutes at 0% power!!!! come on stop lying to us MSFT