Laptop battery life testing

[southhamster]

Evening all.

Our 60 laptops are now around 3 years old and some have quite short battery life. Naturally no one ever tells us which ones.

I'm wondering if anyone's got some bright ideas for automating a test e.g. thrashing the HDU and sending an email at 25 percent dicharge to give a start and end time. Any thoughts?

[mrnoisy]

Is it Windows 7, do you just want to know if the batteries need replacing ?

[difinity]

Try this ? BatteryInfoView - View battery information on laptops / netbooks

The useful values are "current capacity value" compared to "designed capacity" which gives the "current capacity"

[mikeyd101]

I started to look into the same thing, but it quickly got back burnered.

 

I did find some information in WMI win32_battery, my plan was to create a list of laptops I wanted to monitor and ping this WMI every 5 minutes, and build up a graph of how quickly batteries dropped off.

 

Here is the remote output of my laptop from powershell:

 

PS H:\> get-wmiobject -Class win32_battery -computername jhhplaptech

 

 

 

 

__GENUS : 2

__CLASS : Win32_Battery

__SUPERCLASS : CIM_Battery

__DYNASTY : CIM_ManagedSystemElement

__RELPATH : Win32_Battery.DeviceID="50011 2011/02/07Hewlett-PackardPrimary"

__PROPERTY_COUNT : 33

__DERIVATION : {CIM_Battery, CIM_LogicalDevice, CIM_LogicalElement, CIM_ManagedSystemElement}

__SERVER : JHHPLAPTECH

__NAMESPACE : root\cimv2

__PATH : \\JHHPLAPTECH\root\cimv2:Win32_Battery.DeviceID="50011 2011/02/07Hewlett-PackardPrimary"

Availability : 2

BatteryRechargeTime :

BatteryStatus : 2

Caption : Internal Battery

Chemistry : 2

ConfigManagerErrorCode :

ConfigManagerUserConfig :

CreationClassName : Win32_Battery

Description : Internal Battery

DesignCapacity :

DesignVoltage : 12355

DeviceID : 50011 2011/02/07Hewlett-PackardPrimary

ErrorCleared :

ErrorDescription :

EstimatedChargeRemaining : 99

EstimatedRunTime : 71582788

ExpectedBatteryLife :

ExpectedLife :

FullChargeCapacity :

InstallDate :

LastErrorCode :

MaxRechargeTime :

Name : Primary

PNPDeviceID :

PowerManagementCapabilities : {1}

PowerManagementSupported : False

SmartBatteryVersion :

Status : OK

StatusInfo :

SystemCreationClassName : Win32_ComputerSystem

SystemName : JHHPLAPTECH

TimeOnBattery :

TimeToFullCharge :

PSComputerName : JHHPLAPTECH

[mrnoisy]

You can do the same from the command prompt in Windows 7

[southhamster]

Thanks all, that looks useful.

Just had another thought.

If I start them up and check the Unifi wifi logs history it shows how many minutes a machine connects for so could calculate it from that!

[NviGate_Systems]

If they are Windows 8 or higher the tools you need are built into Windows.

 

See: How to Generate a Battery Health Report on Windows 8 or Windows 10

[southhamster]

If they are Windows 8 or higher the tools you need are built into Windows.

 

See: How to Generate a Battery Health Report on Windows 8 or Windows 10

 

No, we are on Win 7 but playing with the wmi script and it looks promising, maybe get it working with psexec. to interrogate each laptop every 15 mins or so and append the log.

[southhamster]

Also reminds me there is a neat Learnpad feature in the portal which shows the current charge level of each tablet so you can see if any any are duff straightaway as soon as they turned on.

[rich_tech]

Some BIOS include battery tests, I think I recall seeing one on a few laptops over the years.

[difinity]

Some BIOS include battery tests, I think I recall seeing one on a few laptops over the years.

 

Dells all have this and some HPs.

[southhamster]

Dells all have this and some HPs.

 

Unfortunately these are RM NB320? (Clevo)

Been reasonably reliable and

All fixed with warranty. I think we've had 3 mobo fails 1 dead battery and a few keys picked off (non warranty). Biggest design fail is the rubbish loose battery catch that doesn't securely keep the battery in place (black tape is our bodge fix!)

[difinity]

Unfortunately these are RM NB320? (Clevo)

Been reasonably reliable and

All fixed with warranty. I think we've had 3 mobo fails 1 dead battery and a few keys picked off (non warranty). Biggest design fail is the rubbish loose battery catch that doesn't securely keep the battery in place (black tape is our bodge fix!)

 

That's not bad over three years.

It's a shame the batteries catches are a bit dodgy. You could have used the software i suggested and one laptop to quickly test the life of them all.

 

I've been fixing laptops for about 10 years now. My observations are that genuine batteries generally last 3 years. Non genuine last about a year although I've seen some fail much sooner. Check the warranty on any non genuines you buy.

Edited February 6, 2016 by difinity

[southhamster]

Get the staff to properly identify the troublesome devices, then bring into test once confirmed.

 

I would love this to happen but staff can't/won't. When they do bring laptops to us as "dead" often it's because they haven't actually been plugged in and recharged or someone's turned off the trolley. I also want to test for myself and only replace the worst say 5 first in batches as many are still fine.

[timbo343]

We've started installing Battery Bar which sits on the taskbar and when you hover over it it gives you information about the battery.