Question: “I am getting a dell vostro 1510 battery error message in a red cross X "There is a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly". . Battery charge upto 100% but its duration is very low and I have to recharge it again and again after 20 minutes.You upgraded your laptop from XP or Vista to Windows7. You know that the dell laptop battery is good. But now you are getting this error message. What do you do?
I know for a fact that the battery is good. It works fine in Vista, its only about 4 months old, it lasts 2 hours +, and even in Windows 7, it will last for the same time period as it did in Vista.

People have been saying (as well as microsoft) that it is the BIOS and it needs to be updated. Well, I did obtain the latest BIOS from LG, which is dated in 2009, and that didn’t change anything. I’m concluding that it is NOT the BIOS since vista reported the estimated time left of the vostro 1510 battery just fine, even before the bios update, and I have the latest BIOS.

I ran the powercfg -energy command and it says that windows was not able to determine the capacity of the battery, yet if I go and install the LG batery application, it will tell me all the information about the laptop battery.

I even went as far as to try my friend’s battery which is less than 3 weeks old, and it still gave the same error messages.

Please Microsoft, fix this issue, and if you can’t, then give the users an option to take off/disable/supress the blinking X that is on top of the power tray icon, and to remove both the "Consider replacing your battery" and "There is a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly" messages so we don’t have to see that every day, since the battery is in fact GOOD and works properly.”

Solution:“dell vostro 2510 Battery management in bios has the possibility to change for 3 values: charge to 50%, charge to 100%, charge maximum. I used the 50% value for testing purpose and could read exact 50% availabilty in the battery status. Then changed to maximum since 100% is bios default. None the better. Now I can read 100% available, and "you should change your battery" while mains is plugged in.
Unplugging the mains adapter gives me the blinking little red cross and the "consider replacing" message.

Since battery drivers are Windows system drivers I won’t find updated drivers on LG’s support site.

I looks like a bad calculation of lifetime/-cycle values of batteries.
By investigating this issue I came across 2 numbers (sorry, I don’t remember if it was Windows or a software tool). These two numbers differed by factor 10. One value was "designed for …" and the other "actual …". If these values are calculated for a lifetime expectation bei Windows 7, my dell vostro 1400 battery is bad indeed.

I believe this battery tray thing a little bit buggy. I will check with our Microsoft Technical Account Manager next time.”

About “Consider replacing your battery. There is a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly.”

The dell vostro 1500 battery life issue on Windows 7 actually dates back to June 2009, according to the forum thread. At the time, Windows 7 wasn’t yet released, but the issue was apparently in both the beta and Release Candidate builds. Apparently the problem wasn’t widespread enough for Microsoft’s quality control team to fix it in time for the RTM build compiled in July 2009, though some users say they’ve only started to notice the issue with the RTM build and that beta builds worked just fine.

Windows 7 was supposed to extend dell vostro 1500 laptop battery life on notebooks, and in almost every case it certainly has. Nevertheless, there are always a few users who have issues. Microsoft’s stance is that the root cause of the issue is related to specific system firmware, meaning it only affects machines with certain BIOS releases. Judging from the forum thread, however, customers disagree with Microsoft’s explanation since the problem appears to affect notebooks from more than just one OEM, and some claim their vendors have informed them that it’s a Microsoft problem. The phrase “class action lawsuit” is mentioned by three different posters so far; users are getting impatient with the software giant as it fails to give a timely official response. Microsoft has sold more than 60 million copies of Windows 7, and it’s not clear what fraction of those owners are having problems with dell vostro 1400 laptop battery life.

trackback:
http://www.diggingshop.com/blog/dell-vostro-1510-battery-iussue