Toshiba laptop drains battery life quickly but stops draining at about 5 %

[Albert Szeliga]

Basically the title. My Toshiba Laptop (the Satellite S50-D) will drain battery quickly on very light use (word processing, browsing pictures, etc.) down to about 10 % in an hour. Then, it will stick at 8 % and tell me I only have 1 minute left, but last for another hour or more.

I have made sure that there are no CPU-intensive programs running in the background via the Task Manager. Wireless communications are turned off, and the brightness is set to the lowest setting.

When I first bought it, it would hold 3 + hours on light use without a problem, this was about a year ago. I recently also calibrated the battery (discharged it and put it in sleep mode for a few hours, then charged it back up to full) and still this problem is occurring.

Is this a problem with the battery and I should consider replacing it, or is there a way to properly adjust it to correctly display the life left? Thanks for reading this.

 

[drapacioli]

There is a way to calibrate the batteries on a laptop, just keep in mind it involves fully draining and recharging the battery - this may actually be harmful to the battery if it has a weak cell, leading to a permanent decrease in capacity. Before you go that route, please download HWmonitor and screenshot the stats for the battery. It should show a wear level, designed capacity, current full capacity, and current capacity. If the wear level is above 50%, it's about time to buy a new battery anyway. If the levels are normal and Windows is just reporting it wrong, you could try to calibrate it.

 

[Albert Szeliga]

Sorry for a late response. I downloaded said program and my wear level looks to be at 85 %, looking good. Looks like it may indeed be an issue with Windows, thanks for the program!

 

[drapacioli]

A wear level of 85% means that your laptop battery is only operating at 15% of it's original capacity...higher is worse on the wear level, not better.

 

[Albert Szeliga]

Oh my mistake. Well then it seems I am in need of a new battery. Thank you for the program this solved my problem.