My eee 1000 is approx 6 months old, bought it second hand so unsure how it had been run prior' but I only connect to Mains to charge and always run off the battery.

The problem seems that when I fully charge the battery, the battery icon on the panel only says the battery is at 96% and I seem to be getting only approx 3 1/2 hours battery life. Is this normal ?. I have switched off the Bluetooth in an attempt to preserve the battery.
I was wondering is there any other tweaks I should be doing to try and extend battery life.

Is there a prob with my battery as I keep earing of people getting 5 hours out of a single charge.
(standard 6600 battery installed)

Are there any Battery Maintenance applications out there ?

(Lithium Ion) Batteries are perishable items, and will degrade when sitting without use. Now I don't have a 1000 but this is pretty much an issue on all laptops. The quoted battery life for the systems tend to stay that way for the first couple of months from the factory (whether you use it or not). They all degrade. After a year from the factory, they could lose 20% (or more if you're really bad with caring for it) capacity by then.

Not much can be done. Typical methods to extend battery life are: Keep it cool. Don't drain it to 0 every time you use it. And don't keep it fully charged.

While #2 may be easy to do, #1 and especially #3 are basically impossible on an always-ready battery system. Thus ... Yes, you'll be replacing batteries whether you like it or not...

3.5 hours is norm.

I've got a EeePC 1000. It's about 4 months old. I'm getting 4.5-5 hours on a charge.

There is a BIOS update 1003. One of the 'improvements' fixes a problem where the battery wasn't being charged completely.

Don't know if this will improve things any. Use at your own risk

Hi buddy It is also depends on company of your battery .There are many duplicate fake batteries are available in market which looks like original but they can not provide that much quality.I don't think there is any other solution would be there.I had same problem with my laptop before I had already purchased new one because I did not get any solution for that.

Of course, battery cycles diminish over time.
You can help it out by turning off all power management and letting it drain all the way to 0%. Then charge it for 18 hours. Drain all the way to 0%. Charge again for 18 hours. You may see a noticeable difference afterward.

The discharge/charge cycling is helpful only if you haven't discharged your battery until it can't run the laptop anymore for a long while; it doesn't really improve the health of the battery (it actually wears it further, unlike Nickel Cadmium batteries which it helps) -- but it does let the internal battery gage resynchronize with the true battery state and make it more reflect the true state of the battery.

I've read somewhere that after around the typical "500" cycles Li-Ion can handle in its lifetime, its storage capacity is diminished by at least 30-40% by then. Then again you don't need to use all those cycles, just letting it sit there without using can do the same especially when in a warm environment.

Self-discharge over time for a Li-ion is HIGHLY dependent on temperature. Store a Li-ion battery at 20 deg C and it will be at 95% after 1 year. Store it at 60 deg C (standard operating temp for eee's) and it will be at 60%.

Hoping the two aspects are not confused -

Self-Discharge - where the battery "uses up" its own power. Accelerated by temperature as heat speeds up chemical reactions. Also the battery gage eats up power. Age of the battery also influences self discharge. Self-discharge can be recharged.

Non-recoverable capacity loss - where the battery decays. Also accelerated by temperature, but time is the unavoidable enemy. Cannot be recovered as the name says. Old batteries just are not very happy -- it leaks charge faster and can't hold as much to begin with.

60C is quite warm (140F). I don't think my batteries nearly get that warm. However I tend to leave my eee suspended or off and the batteries stay cool that way, so the average temperature isn't as near the high end as it seems. Either way, temperature affects both self-discharge and non-recoverable capacity loss.

Hello.
I have dell Inspiron 15 laptop. Initially when I was charging it fully. the icon was showing 4:02 hours backup. But after 3 months it has started to show 3:25 hrs. Is it so that I have to still charge after icon shows 100% charged ? or life of battery has some what declined. Is it possible that in 2 to 3 months your battery cames to this stage ? Do you think that I should contact the dealer or it is o.k. Have you come to problem like this, then please inform me.

Sorry eccerr0r, you're correct. When I said self-discharge I actually meant non-recoverable capacity loss.

They do indeed self-discharge on a similar timescale, but that is recoverable.

There's a website called battery university that has a whole bunch of useful numbers and information: http://www.batteryuniversity.com/

How many (full) charge/discharge cycles have you done? If not many, make sure you do the battery calibration too; but if it's a *lot* then possibly that's what it is...

Have you been leaving your battery in a hot car? This is a killer.

True that 13% degradation is considerable but given circumstances, it could be expected.

Two questions...

1) Does calibrating need to be done for a brand new Li-ion battery? I just bought a new one and am unsure if I should calibrate it. It reports well now as is.

2) Does the CPU mode matter when calibrating?

Thanks,
siege

better late than never -

1. New batteries should not need to be calibrated, they should be calibrated from the factory unless you bought the battery from a disreputable source... If you bought a fresh battery from Asus, no need; if you bought a no-name from eBay that may have been sitting on the shelf for a bit, it might be worth it...

2. CPU mode doesn't matter. The idea behind calibration is to make sure the microcontroller on the battery thinks the battery is empty when it really is empty... Since battery capacity somewhat depends on how hard you drain it, it's best to actually use the computer as if you were normally using it. But for the most part, it's basically wasting time to calibrate so people just tell the computer to drain the battery as fast as it can and stick it at high speed... which is allright too.

Note calibration counts as a life cycle so life-- ...