For failing batteries

Feb 9, 2010 14:04 GMT  ·  By

Windows 7 customers that get the “Consider replacing your battery” message from the operating system, should in fact replace the battery, revealed Steven Sinofsky, president, Windows and Windows Live Division. Microsoft has been investigating reports of issues associated with the latest iteration of Windows reporting potential battery problems and found that Windows Vista’s successor is in no way responsible. The Redmond company dismissed any possibility that Windows 7 could produce false reports or causing batteries to actually 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 stated.

Microsoft has built Windows 7 so that the OS is capable of reading an interpreting the battery degradation compared the original design capacity by reading the firmware reports in terms of Watt-hours (W-hr) power capacity. In the eventuality that a battery performs at only 40% of its original capacity, the operating system notifies the end user that the hardware component needs to be replaced.

“PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or BIOS),” Sinofsky added. “The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity. The last two pieces of information—design capacity and last full charge capacity—are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. This information is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set or configure battery status information.”

The Redmond company has worked with its OEM partners, and together determined the source of the “Consider replacing your battery” warnings. In the few cases when the messages were delivered for new computers, the battery continued to be at fault. “Microsoft has received 12 customer service incidents in addition to pulling 8 additional incidents from various forums. To date (for a total of 20 incidents), none of these have shown anything other than degraded batteries,” Sinofsky stated. “During pre-release testing of Windows 7 we saw almost precisely this same experience with customers in terms of the display of the notification.”