The Undead Battery

I’ve posted before about how my battery sucks… Here’s evidence of what’s going on… Is it a Dell conspiracy? I can’t boot my laptop from a supposedly drained battery, yet if I power up via AC cord, then swap to battery mode, the laptop runs for approximately 40 seconds. Again, from a battery the laptop says is empty.

I’m wondering if it’s some Dell thing where it misreports the charge left on the battery after about a year of use, in order to get you to buy more batteries from them. Kind of crappy, if so.
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Published March 20, 2007 & Filed in general

Tags: battery, dell, inspiron, recondition, video, youtube

http://dell.com Neil
Jonathan:
I’m at Dell Headquarters in Austin, Texas and I just came across your posts about batteries. I can assure you there definitely isn’t a conspiracy to cause our customers to have to purchase more batteries than necessary but there are certain features in each type that are installed for safely maximizing their useful life. These are not unique to Dell batteries. NiMH batteries deteriorate as do any other type and there are mechanisms built into them to prevent people from accidentally overcharging them. A year old battery that will not hold nearly as much of a charge as it could when it was new is able to communicate that to the charger- if used as designed. Timers, counters, and temperature gauges are all utilized to ensure that a battery receives the proper charge and the procedure you describe as “reconditioning” is actually just bypassing it’s safety mechanisms. Laptop batteries are fairly costly and for those of us that run off battery power on a daily basis it is a significant expense but subverting the built-in safety mechanisms is not a recommended alternative. More reading on batteries and how they work can be found at batteryuniversity.com and if you have any questions feel free to contact me.
Neil
Dell, Inc.
neil@dell.com
http://fleshy.org.nz/yum/ brink
Thanks for the reply!
I wondered if I was running into a safety mechanism. I still think there’s an issue with the battery in that it’s too aggressive in being safe. The behavior I’m seeing indicates to me that it marks the battery as empty before it’s really empty — which becomes an issue because the battery soon learns that point as the new “empty” mark. Over time this effectively reduces the overall capacity.
I did do some research prior to that post and did see that, while NiMH batteries are better than lithium ion in terms of memory, there still is a memory aspect that comes into play.
Still, it’s good to hear from Dell that it’s not their intention to cost the customer money
Thanks!
http://dell.com Neil
Jonathan:
NiMH batteries will do that overtime so it’s quite possible that’s part of it. I believe you have the memory-effect thing backwards though. L-ion batteries do not suffer from it at all while NiMH do. Both are available for the laptop you have.
Neil
Dell, Inc.
neil@dell.com

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