Notebook Battery Dies at 48%

I have a 3-4 year old Gigabyte Q2532N with a Sandy Bridge i5-2410M. The 8 cell battery inside it used to work extremely well. However, now i'm having reading issues in the OS. When ever the battery (according to the OS, which would be windows 7/8/8.1/10) reaches around 48% it will die.

Why is this happening, I've had this for the past year. Thanks,
 

blazorthon

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I don't know why it is reporting like that. I can say that it might help to check the BIOS. Many laptops have a setting to evaluate the battery and attempt to fix minor issues in it. It's called battery relearning or something like that.

I can tell you that virtually all batteries will degrade in capacity over time. Different usages can impact how greatly, but they all degrade.

EDIT: Can you tell me how long it usually takes to reach 48% or so in battery life when it dies if you start at 100% and use it normally?
 


Just used it now actually, just basic web browsing with all power savings on in windows 10 build 10166 and it took roughly an hour to reach that. It's still pretty fast too.

I knew that batteries degrade over time, so i'm not that much worried about the lower battery life, but I hate the fact that it's not telling me the right battery percentage.

Thx for the info, I've looked in the BIOS (latest from gigabyte) and there's nothing about battery.
 

blazorthon

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The incorrect reporting is odd and I don't know how to fix that, but about an hour isn't too bad for a laptop that's about four years old. This thread might be of use to you:
http://superuser.com/questions/180037/windows-reports-wrong-battery-charge

Charge it to full, keep it plugged in for a few hours, disable low battery warnings, and let it run down to zero. This may help to reestablish what is 100% and 0% for the battery.
 


Ok will try, how do you disable those low battery warnings?
 

blazorthon

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You'll find them in the power options section of the control panel.

Open up Windows Explorer (open a folder) and copy/paste this into the directory bar:

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options

From there, click change plan settings for the plan that you're using, then click advanced settings. This will open a small windows with the advanced power options and the battery options should be under a tab called Battery. You may need to scroll down to find them. Set the critical battery level, reserve battery level, and low battery level settings to 0%.
 
On the critical battery level I can't do it to 0%, so I'm trying it with 1% and seeing if that works.

So far I know the battery is acting strange, first it took what seems to be forever to get to 100% from 97%, then it took a while to get down from 100% to 97%, afterwards it went down normally, then jumped down from 75% I think to 65% in a few seconds. Then it went from 49% to 57% later.

Hasn't shut down yet, using a video to speed up the drain.

It's defiantly a charging issue, I've been running the video for a hour now. No problems.