Reduced Laptop Battery Life – How We Fixed It

Just recently I noticed my laptop battery life shrank from over 2 hours to less than 45 minutes regardless of how long I left the laptop battery charging .

Steps taken to resolve the laptop computer battery issue

I was told straight away by a pc repair shop that the battery was faulty and needed replacing.

Even though they never looked at it, they said it would cost the price of a new battery, so I was kindly told save your money and replace the battery, that’s all we would do.

I know that frequent laptop battery charging and discharging holds less and less charge during its life cycle, so I could accept this, but this problem literally started happening overnight, one day it was happily running for two hours on the battery, and the next day the running time on the battery was less than half of this.

As the laptop was an IBM ThinkPad T61 it came with a really great piece of software suite called Think Vantage, this had some battery testing software which reported the battery could still hold a full charge.

The software also gave the option to reset the battery, it basically provides a controlled/automated way of laptop battery charging and discharging, it takes about 3 hours, during this period you cannot use the laptop.

This particular laptop computer battery maintenance software should work for most IBM laptops and can be downloaded from their website.

If you have another make of laptop check with the manufacturers website most will have an equivalent type of software which will enable you to check the status of the battery and reset it if necessary.

After running this I checked the laptop battery life again, it now lasted for 50 minutes, a little better, but still less than half of the original battery time.

I thought it might be a problem with some of the computers components somehow drawing larger amounts of power from the laptop computer battery than normal.

The first thing to be checked was the processor, having downloaded one of the free processor temperature monitors it reported it was indeed running pretty hot, that's when I did notice that the laptop was getting a bit warm on the bottom of the case where the processor was situated.

Immediately I thought of some process taking up the processors time, which would result in reduced laptop battery life .

I checked via task manager with all applications closed down.

The processor reported next to no activity over either of the dual cores, this was confusing and annoying, really thought I was onto something.

I run an antimalware scan using 3 applications, Malwarebytes, Spybot search and destroy and spyware doctor, (all of which are free) just as a precaution.

This found the usual cookies, but nothing else, I’d thought maybe there was something, but maybe the scans simply did not detect it.

I then noticed no there was no warm or hot air coming from the exhaust vent on the laptops side, the processor was pretty hot so the fan should be on.

Having put my ear to the side of the laptop I could actually hear the fan, this could mean only one thing, an obstruction restricting the laptops air flow between the fan and the exhaust vent.

The holes in the exhaust vents were too small to visually see any obstructions, so I removed the laptops palm rest and keyboard (this turned out to be very easy as on the bottom of the laptop even showed which screws to remove, then the palm rest and cover popped off, then I could see what was restricting the airflow now, there was a big ball of dust; looked like a tumble weed) between the fan and exhaust port.

Once this was removed it fixed the problem totally not only did it give me 2 hours of laptop battery life, well actually 2 hours and 20 mins the processor was also running much cooler too.

If you find your laptop battery not holding a charge all of a sudden, it's worth checking other things, before replacing the laptop computer battery , otherwise you could end up with another laptop battery (which is not cheap) which will not fix the problem.

If you’re having laptop battery charging problems checkout our other article on laptop battery faults, you never know it could help breath a little more life into your current laptop battery yet.

If you want to increase laptop battery life in between laptop battery charging checkout our laptop computer battery power saving article where we discuss disabling unused hardware and changing Windows preferences.

One way to keep your laptop cooler is with a cooling pad, a cooler laptop means a faster more resilient computer.

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