Battery FULL CHARGE CAPACITY Reset

Hi Yves,

For us to better understand the problem and provide you the best resolution, we will need to ask you a few questions:

1. Since when have you been experiencing this issue?
2. Can you possibly send us a screenshot?

You can also run Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter this will help you identify and resolve the issues on your hardware or device. Kindly follow these steps:

1. Open Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Configure a device.
2. The Hardware Troubleshooter will open. You can set it to fix the detected problems automatically or select and opt to fix only the one’s you want.
3. Click Next to run the Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter. Once the scan is completed, it will present you with a report.
4. Choose the ones you want to fix and click on Next.
5. The Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter will try to fix the problems for you.

Regards.  

Hi Rose.

Your reply is very generic and really does not answer any aspects of my question.

And while I was sure the Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter would not be useful, I have still tried it.

The result confirms that the Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter is not useful in this case since Windows does not see anything wrong on my laptop since Windows thinks the battery is charged at 100% (while it is really only charged at 11%).

No screenshot would be able to better describe the problem.

The numbers provided above from the battery report (from running "powercfg /batteryreport") are self-explanatory for anyone who understands how batteries and charging works on a laptop.

Yves,

"Full charge capacity" means the capacity that the battery is managing to achieve.  It is not a limit set by Windows or anything else; it is merely a reading of what the battery can actually do.  You can use the comparison of Full charge capacity with Design capacity to decide when to buy a replacement battery [I do the same regularly].

Full charge capacity will always decrease over time as the battery wears out.  This is a chemical phenomenon not a Windows-imposed characteristic.

Windows display of "Fully charged [100%]" means - the battery is currently at 100% of what it is able to achieve.  In other words, "Fully charged [100%]" is relative to Full charge capacity.

Sometimes, you can find that cycling through the battery three times** can improve the Full charge capacity a bit.  On at least one of my batteries, the maker recommends doing this every three months.  But doing so is using up even more of its remaining life so you can complete this procedure only to find that you are worse off afterwards.

** In other words, loop through this three times -

• remove the AC power
• use up the whole charge by using the computer
• recharge fully

Denis

Hi Denis.

Thanks for the reply.

I understand what you are saying but I guess I disagree with the concept.

Allowing Windows to say that your battery is 100% charged when it is stopping the charge at 11% of its capacity is certainly misleading.  From an end user perspective, I would state that Windows should diffuse the confusion and confirm that the battery capacity is 11% while also stating that the charge is complete.

Therefore formally confirming the battery is starting to have capacity issues.

That said, I guess neither you or I will rewrite Windows today...

I have also tried the technique you mention and it did not make a difference.

The bottom line is that we would need a definitive way of resetting the stored full charge capacity to allow the laptop motherboard to really try to recover some if not all of the lost battery capacity.

Battery web sites like Battery University do confirm that almost all laptop or cell phone Li-ion batteries can be restored to a higher capacity, given a particular process can be executed to reset the battery chip.

(see http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/low_voltage_cut_off)

Unfortunately, that reset battery wake-up process does not seem to have made its way into any hardware or operating system.

Hopefully, there is someone out there who knows how to talk to the battery and charger circuit hardware to reset the full charge capacity.

That is certainly a problem that is annoying thousands, if not millions of people in the world.

One would hope that laptop manufacturers and Microsoft would allow people to do the necessary battery hardware reset to not waste battery capacity and force people to uselessly throw away an otherwise still good battery pack.

Yves,

The link you provided is discussing a separate issue, that of in-built protection in the case of severely discharged batteries [that could otherwise initiate undesirable effects of their own].  

1. The linked discussion proposes that severely depleted batteries that trigger self-protection circuitry ought to have a facility for the defensive trigger to be undone when recharging is being attempted.  It does not claim to affect how much charge might be successfully induced afterwards [the batteries that were subsequently charged back to 80% would have been capable of recharging back to 80% before the self-protection circuit was triggered - they were restored to their current capability not improved beyond it]. 
2. This is not the same as restoring Full charge capacity to the Design charge level. 
3. Our defence against this situation is never to allow a battery to become severely depleted.  The minimum setting available for Power options, Critical battery action is often 3% or 5% so that might be how that limit has been decided upon.
4. I once left batteries for an old computer to discharge for a year or so before bringing the computer back into service.  I was able to recharge and use two of the batteries for a long time afterwards but another two had just given up the ghost during their unused period.

There is no method, either in your link or elsewhere, for completely undoing the chemical processes that cause a drop in charging ability.  The only method that has any restorative effect is the discharge-recharge cycling that you and I are already familiar with and which does not always have any beneficial effect at all.  I have seen it improve Full charge capacity by 10% on some batteries.

There was a lot of talk a couple of years ago about a new type of polymer battery that would last as long as the computer without any drop in Full charge capacity.  That has, it seems, not made its way into manufacturing.

I agree that showing users the comparison of Full charge capacity to Design charge would be useful.  The only in-built tools at the moment seem to be the warnings generated [by PC maker's utilities] that tell you it is about time to buy a new battery. 

Denis

While all the discussions in this thread are interesting, and no one expects a used battery to be reset to a brand new battery by doing some magic trick, the core question of this post has not been answered:

Can anyone provide a method to reset the hardware battery FULL CHARGE CAPACITY to its DESIGN CAPACITY so that the motherboard hardware charging subsystem and Windows can re-evaluate the true battery capacity, as when it was a brand new battery ?

That actually means that if we had a method to once in a while manually reset the battery chip FULL CHARGE CAPACITY value to its DESIGN CAPACITY, that would force the hardware charging subsystem to try to charge the battery over the currently known saved limit, and potentially restore some capacity to the battery.  Without that method, millions of people have no choice but to replace their batteries, without having any diagnostic tools to confirm the battery is really dying.

In summary, clearly, there is something missing in the current hardware and software designs to properly maximize the value of laptop batteries.  If someone else has some insights into how to do the reset, please share.

Once last question on this subject:

Windows tells me that my battery has a design capacity of 48 669 mWh.

However, the installed battery is a 11.1V 5200mAh battery.

Multiplying those 2 values gives 57 720 mWh.

I believe the original battery was a 4200mAh, or 46 620 mWh.

So why is it that the currently reported design capacity does not fit either the original battery capacity or the new installed battery capacity ?

Hopefully, someone in the world can answer some of these questions...

Thanks.

Dear Yves,

I just put a BRAND NEW battery into my laptop, and charged it fully, and I am draining the battery right now, per suggestions.

The problem is that my statistics say the new battery will only last 2 hours, while the original battery lasted over 5 hours. 

Clearly, the statistics are incorrect, and I would like to flush that history and start over.

I am willing to reinstall the OS, if that solves the problem.

Please let us know if there is a way to reset that history.

Also, I have been running the laptop for past 15 minutes, and it now says I have only one hour left, and 79% full.

Hi there.

What you are asking is exactly what I have been asking for a few months now, without anyone providing any real answer or method to do the battery hardware reset.

It looks like no one knows how this stuff works...

manufacturer and feedback hub
With all the information on this thread, the next step should be posting this on our Feedback Hub. This way, our engineers would be notified of this issue about Windows 10 not showing an accurate reading of the battery's capacity. Here's how you can post on Feedback Hub:

1. On a Windows 10 device, search for “Feedback Hub” in Cortana search, then launch the app.
2. Navigate to Feedback in the left menu, then press + Add new feedback.
3. Select the Problem, and share any details you think are relevant, and choose an appropriate category and subcategory.
4. Important: If possible, reproduce the problem(s) after clicking Begin monitoring (or Start capture) near the end of the form; Stop monitoring when you’re done.
5. Once you’ve completed the form and monitoring, click Submit.
6. Click Continue using Feedback Hub.
7. Click My feedback at the top, then find the item you submitted (it may take a while to appear).
8. Open the item you submitted, then click Share.
9. Click Copy link, then paste the link here in your response (it will look like https://aka.ms/link>).

We also recommend to let your device manufacturer be notified of this. They may have a possible workaround/fix for the issue.

Let us know if there's anything else you need.

Yves,

As I said before, you cannot undo the chemical changes that cause battery charging capacity to drop except, on some occasions & even then to a very limited extent, by repeated charge-discharge cycles.

Windows is fully charging the battery but the problem is that what the battery can charge to has dropped over time.

The only thing you can do is replace the chemicals and that is done by replacing the battery.

Why do you keep saying that your question has not been answered when it has?

Denis