Battery issues only in Windows (Kernel-Power-Failure)

Ettmetal · 24 Oct 2018

I'm not sure where the best place for this is, so please mods move it to the right spot.

Hey, so for a while now I've believed that my battery is dying. It probably is, but today I noticed that it's probably not as bad as I thought.

So, I'll be happily using my laptop for a little while, from 100% charged and suddenly, power failure.

There is no specific battery level, but usually in the region of 70-80%. Sometimes after plugging in and rebooting, the battery level will read as very different from before the power failure. Booting after such a failure generally gets me as far as the login screen before sudden power failure again.

To all intents and purposes, this behaviour seems like a power failure (the battery level action to hibernate is not triggered). Today I learned that this only happens in Windows. I have a Linux partition on my drive but for reasons rarely use it without wall power.
My laptop battery just 'died' about ten minutes ago while I was using Windows, including 'dying' before I can type my password at login after trying to reboot. Yet here I am, sitting pretty from Linux.

This seems to me then that it's an OS (or driver - do batteries use drivers?) issue, but I've already explored all the common settings in Windows that I can find searching for laptop battery death while charged - namely:
badly configured low/critical battery levels and actions (verified to not be set too high)
ensuring that hiberfil.sys is large enough to hold the entire system RAM contents (currently set to 110% of system RAM)
verifying that the battery is not actually running out of charge (I mean, I'm still using it in another OS so, seems fine to me).

Any direction you could point me in to get Windows to accept that the battery does indeed have charge would be great.

Either that or the part of the Linux spec that shows how they get it to run on æther when the attached battery has no charge, because that seems like a technology the whole world could do with

philc43 · 24 Oct 2018

Hello and welcome to TenForums.

It may be the battery calibration setting in Windows is different to the battery calibration in Linux. You may be able to reset the calibration for Windows to avoid this problem. Sometimes there is a procedure given for laptops by the manufacturer, I would check this first and then if you can't find anything try a google search for methods you can use.

Also have a look at the critical battery settings using the following tutorial: Change Battery Notification, Level, and Action Settings in Windows

Make sure they are set correctly.

How old is your laptop?

Berton · 24 Oct 2018

Same issue over at Battery Issues (specifically) with Windows | Windows 10 Forums

Try3 · 24 Oct 2018

Ettmetal,

The first thing to check should be the computer maker's website to see if there are any hardware driver updates or BIOS updates [the BIOS is much more closely involved in managing hardware in Windows 10 than it was in previous Windows versions so BIOS updates are much more common].

Then see these suggestions - Calibrate a battery - RawInfpages There is also an example of driver uninstallation-replacement procedures in the post by nopivnick in laptop shutting down before battery is low - MSAForum

I think the symptoms you have described are more likely to be a driver or calibration issue than anything else.

But if you do look at PowerCfg energy/battery reports, as mentioned in the links above, then I think you might find the most useful info to be the comparison [within the Battery capacity history section] between Full charge capacity & Design capacity - in other words, how much energy the battery is able to store when it is "100%"** charged compared to the amount of energy it was designed to store. It might be possible to derive useful information from the various graphs and other entries but I have never managed to do so.

[** When Windows says a battery is "100%" charged, it means that it has reached 100% of whatever it happens to be capable off and has stopped drawing power to charge itself further. It does not mean, for example, that the battery has reached 100% of the charge it was able to take when it was brand new {its "Design capacity"}.]

Best of luck,
Denis