laptop battery life

[Stead]

hi, was just wondering, is it possible to somehow calibrate the battery in windows? my girlfriends laptop which i'm using now, after a full charge says there are around 8 to 6 minutes left on the battery, until a couple of weeks ago we always assumed the battery was rubbish, however one day i forgot to plug it in and was playing san andreas for around an hour, to my surprise it stil lasted another half hour for normal use, even tho for the entire time (after playing gta) the battery life was on 1% with less than a minute remaining, after calibrating the battery in the bios the % seems to go down correctly now, ie, doesn't drop to 11% after a minute then stay there, howeverthe time still says 2 minutes all the time, its annoying because any of the power management features that act when the battery level gets low have tobe turned off otherwise it keeps going into standby all the time (and for some reason tehres a bug with the video drivers and the screen doesn't come back on after going into standby)

so anyways, anyone know if you can 'reset' the battery in windows? not sure if it cna be done, i've tried uninstalling the battery and letting windows put it back in,

[LLXX]

It might be the monitoring circuitry on the battery...

[flupke]

Mine stays at the end on 0% for 20 minutes. Try to monitor the voltage, if it goes below 12V the whole thing shuts down instantly. Voltage is the most reliable; %s and minutes are not acurate in Windows.

Do you have the latest video driver? I also had the resume-from-stand-by problem in the past.

[GrofLuigi]

hi, was just wondering, is it possible to somehow calibrate the battery in windows?

Try inside BIOS. Some laptops can calibrate from there (needs to be discharging for many hours).

And, games usually drain more cpu usage = more electricity = less batery time.

GL

[Stead]

hi, thanks for your answers!

i've calibrated the battery in the bios, the % in windows seems correct, takes around an hour to an hour and a half to discharge in windows, however the time shown in windows when below 40% is only 1 minute, and above that is 2 minutes until around %90 ware it is 8 minutes! thats what i find annoying!

if the windows thing can't be fixed its no big problem, its just an annoyance, and i'll have a look to check to see if theres newer drivers, its an old intel graphics chipset on a samsung v20

thanks