Urgent Help Please with Laptop Battery Drain

patwa_2

Hello,

I would be grateful if anyone could help me with this.

I have an Acer Travelmate 6592 laptop which is nearly two years old. It originally shipped with Windows XP, however a little over a year ago I installed Windows Vista from scratch and the drivers for Vista from the Acer website. Today the laptop runs Vista SP2 and has had no problems for some time.

On Friday, I noticed that the battery suddenly seemed to be draining faster than usual, even with the power plan set to Power Saver. Now, it's reached the point where the laptop will run for barely two minutes before it's dead. This is in sharp contrast to the 90 minutes I was getting just a week ago.

I don't use the Acer power management software (Empowering Technology) but have set up the Vista Power Saver Scheme with reduced CPU, brightness, etc. I've also disabled the bluetooth, firewire, IrDA, etc from the device manager.

I'm now nearly at my wits end. I'm working on a project that's due in next month, and it requires me to travel around a lot. The sudden change in performance has me stumped as well.

Any help you can give would be very gratefully appreciated.

vaio

if you've changed nothing in the software in the last 10 days then my money is on a dead battery

Browntoa

2 years is good for a laptop battery, wonder if a cells just failed hence the sudden failure

BargainGalore

You can get new batteries for £40 cant vouch for the company but they can be quite expensive

http://www.sukshop.com/pdd.php/2675/TravelMate%206592%20Series/ACER-laptop-battery.html

PlutoinCapricorn

I have an ACER Aspire 1644 that is 3 years 8 months old. The battery life was never brilliant, but it has steadily decreased from, say, 2 1/4 hours to around 50 minutes. It certainly did not drop sharply, I am surprised that yours did that. Apparently the more you need to charge the battery the shorter the lifetime.

When I first bought the ACER, I considered getting a spare battery as standby but the price was around £200 then. I don't need a spare now as I have bought a little netbook that I can use on the move.

patwa_2

Hi,

Thanks everyone for your tips and advice. Apologies for taking a while to get back to you.

I'm going to hold off buying a new battery for the moment as I thin I can use it on mains power for the most part and rely on the external 2power battery when travelling. I haven't tried the internal battery again but will do so when I have a moment free just in case it decides it wants to play ball and work again.

ghale

when you boot it, check the BIOS, some Acer Laptops have a battery Calibration tool, which may rejuvinate your battery and at least give you more time before the battery dies each time

patwa_2

Hi, Thanks for the suggestion but I did not find any such option in the Acer bios and nothing came up when I did a Google search either.

ghale

thats a shame, it does depend on the Bios version and the Laptop model, sometimes you just hit lucky.