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Recently there have been a lot of complaints by Asus notebook owners finding that the battery life of their newly purchased notebooks was deteriorating rapidly. Battery life would drop 35% after just a couple of months of usage. I decided to provide as much real proof as possible in this review showing that the problem is not the battery per se, but rather a firmware coding issue with the notebook that causes it to grossly under estimate actual battery life left and shut down prematurely. In other words, the notebook thinks there is 0 � 5% battery life left when in actual fact there might be up to 30% � or an hour�s worth of life. This may also be a problem for other notebook users outside of the Asus brand and is therefore worth anyone reading to understand what causes a notebook to shut down when it thinks battery life has become critical.

I have owned the Asus V1JP for 2 months now; I have been watching my battery life deteriorate every week. I know such quick deterioration is not normal so I was going to replace my battery thinking it was the problem. However, many users have reported the very same problem, seeing a vast amount of wear percentage on their batteries in a small amount of time and thus causing much lower battery life.

I did not end up replacing my battery because I wanted to first further coordinate with some other members on the Asus forum to figure out what is causing this problem.

During the conversation in the very active thread discussing this topic, people suggested these as possible solutions for "fixing" the battery:

None of these worked, and the battery callibration was suggested by Asus service center staff as something that should be done every couple of months, but this did not help.

Let me try to explain why each of these solutions did not work and why.

Battery Calibration is a Bios tool in which it will charge and discharge your battery to calculate your current level of watts in your battery, basically your battery life (battery calibration tools vary by manufacturer, so refer to your user guide).

Before I ran the calibration, I read that many had found this tool causing more battery wear after being run (or at least more battery wear was indicated), up to 5% more wear than there was before. Despite knowing that, I attempted the calibration. I tried a regular calibration, compared to jsis method of calibration. This takes a long time and unfortunately it was not able to rectify my wear percentage problem.

My wear was 20% going into the calibration and after it was 25%. Then I attempted forum member jsis�elaborate method of calibration which requires you to remove the battery half way through the charging process. This also did not solve my problem, but it did work for jsis. Instead of helping, my wear had now gone up to 30%. With 30% wear, when I take my laptop to school and use it, I only get 2 hours and 15 minutes or so � very dissapointing. I used to get 3 hours.

Battery calibration DOES consider the ACPI (read about what the ACPI does for laptop power management at Wikipedia) when running this tool, meaning there is software involved in the process. The Bios is also a factor. If the calibration tool worked right, it should have reported my battery life as 3 hours now, but after running it says I have 2 hours of total life indicating 30% wear.

More about the ACPI will be explained later and how it turns out to be the offending factor in this whole battery life issue.

This is another solution some members suggested to try, and I did try it, since I currently have a 1 week break from university! It�s called "Reading Week".

I used the recovery discs provided by Asus, and then had a look at the Windows Battery Miser and it still stated only 2 hours and 15 minutes of battery life. I then decided to completely reformat the laptop and used my own Windows XP Pro CD and install all the drivers myself from the Asus V1 driver/utility CD. Everything went fine except now my Windows Battery Miser stated 2 hours of battery life � another 15 minute drop!

I then installed a program called Notebook Hardware Control and Everest Ultimate, 3rd party programs that also report battery life; my wear percentage was now up to a whopping 35% and battery life continuing to decrease.

A few members stated the third party programs like Notebook Hardware Control and Everest Ultimatecaused battery drain problems, making many members on the forum neurotic and crazed about this battery wear % and battery life problem.

However, third party programs helped me understand why this problem is occurring. To start things off, many follow Windows Battery Miser as a reliable source for battery charge level and battery life. That�s fine, I also use it myself.

Here�s the thing, compare your Notebook Hardware Control and Windows Battery Miser charge level and battery life. They are exactly the same, and do you wonder why? This is because the source of the data is coming from the same place. This is called the ACPI (read about what the ACPI does for laptop power management at Wikipedia), but can also be attributed to the BIOS as well. I will explain this further in the review.

In effect, these third party programs and Windows Battery Miser are gathering their data from the ACPI and displaying that result, but these are the wrong values. This also shows that the BIOS calibration tool is also using the same ACPI source for the test, and thus the calibration tool did not do anything for me to alleviate the issue. If the ACPI is wrong, calibration won�t do a thing.

This screenshot shows how CoolMon2 takes data from the ACPI, which further supports the fact that the ACPI is the problem.

After completing and testing all possible solutions, I looked to my own solution and conclusions. I had the following theories:

I have tested some of these aspects above, and so have others. I have tested my battery for being bad, it is not, I will explain why further in the review, because it leads the workaround to this problem.

There is bad coding, because I have tested it above, look what I have been through to solve this problem and it is still not rectified with those suggestions.

Many have already had their motherboards replaced to fix this problem but in most cases this did not solve the problem, some also attribute this to bad circuitry which is not the problem.

Could it be user abuse? Not really, because I have been here for such an extended period of time, just like many others, we know how to take care of our notebooks, so please don�t call this abuse on our end.

Now that the basics of what is going on in the background on the Asus forums, I just did a test showing what happens to your battery life and the workaround.

As many have already read my review on the Asus V1JP I�ve had for 2 months now, my battery life test showed I got 3 hours of battery life right when I first got my laptop. Every week I was losing roughly 3-5% battery wear and server a minutes of battery life over time. Once again I am using the same settings for this battery life test.

This is where I can also prove there is a direct correlation between wear % and battery life. For this let�s assume the critical alarm is turned on, just like everyone has it on.

This will differ from laptop to laptop, but this is the general settings for my V1JP.

Battery life = (((B x W) � B) / C)
BL = (((77 x 0) � 77) / 25)
BL = 77/25
BL = 3 hours

This shows if you have a 77whr battery, and if your consumption rate is on average 25whr, and your wear % is 0, then your battery life is 3 hours, this matches my original battery life test in my review.

Battery life = (((B x W) � B) / C)
BL = (((77 x 35%) � 77) / 25)
BL = ((27 � 77) / 25)
BL = (50/25)
BL = 2 hours

This shows if you have a 77whr battery, and your consumption rate is an average of 25whr, and you rwear is 35%, then your battery life is 2 hours, this also matches the results, and you can see it on the Up Time on CoolMon2.

This also shows how battery wear does affect your battery life. You can even calculate another interesting factor.

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