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Saturday, March 17, 2012
[No luck with laptop batteries...]
I bought my first laptop about two and a half years ago. A Compaq CQ42. I cannot remember the sub-model number. It wasn't a top of the line laptop, I bought it more as a substitute for my desktop when I am not doing anything that required that much power (my desktop then, was a Core i7 beast).
The laptop was fine, with only one problem. The battery. For some reason, the battery did not last very long. About an hour and forty-minutes. And this was when it was new, with very little battery wear. That's really shit, by today's standards. I suspect that it had something to do with the display card. It was supposed to go into a less-power state when it wasn't doing anything too complex but I don't think this feature was working properly. As a result, the lower left corner of the laptop was always very warm.
Shortly after, I bought a HP G42 for my father. It is basically the same laptop, the exact same form factor and the components were very similar as well. The G42 did not have the same problem. The battery lasted well over three hours, even hitting the four hour mark once if I remember correctly. All this did not matter much for my father, as he never goes anywhere...The laptop is more like a desktop for him. I think the graphics card did what it was supposed to do in this one - no warm spots on the laptop at all. Which should be the case as all my father ever did was surf the Internet and looked at his photos.
Fast forward to this year. I bought a Dell XPS 15z in January. This purchase was made with a different intention. It was to be my desktop replacement. I chose the highest spec version (sans SSD) and it cost me $2,200. A mean price to pay for a laptop. But I am very satisfied with it, both design and spec-wise.
Just one problem. Once again, the battery. This came with an 8-cell battery and promises of longer battery life. However, there is an issue when it came to charging and discharging the battery. When charging, it would go from 88% to 100% in the blink of an eye. And when discharging, it goes from 100% to 88%.
What happened to the missing 12%? I did a check online and found that I was not the only one experiencing this problem. A number of other users have reported the exact same problem, and that replacing the battery did not work. The problem went away, but came back in days. That seems consistent with my experience, because initially I did not have this problem neither.
It is rather disappointing. I have had two laptops so far (the G42 doesn't count) and both of them have some sort of battery problem. I don't think I will do anything about this, since it looks like battery replacement doesn't help. Looks like it could have been a major batch of bad batteries, since the problem was reported as far back as early November 2011. If this laptop is still going strong after two years, I may get a replacement battery then, and hope that this problem has been resolved.
^^^ by Locksley @ 11:46 AM.
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