What to do with poor laptop battery?

[bingbongbangbung]

Yesterday afternoon it suddenly got extremely stuffy in my room because it rained for a bit but then stopped (there was supposed to be a thunderstorm), so I get why my battery was performing poorly and my laptop was overheating. But today it finally did rain, so now it's much cooler and not stuffy, but my laptop seems to still have piss poor battery (it's not really overheating anymore at least). I could try restarting my laptop although that just makes the fans go crazy because I don't know wtf is wrong with Windows 10 or Acer. My laptop is Acer Nitro 5 AN515-54, specifically the 2019 version, and its specs are i5 9300H, UHD 630, GTX 1050, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, Windows 10, and 57XXXmWH battery. The battery itself according to HWInfo has been permanently depleted by about 32% and the total full capacity it can access is around 32XXXmWH. The battery tells me it can only be active for 1.5 hours, when usually it indicates it can be active for around 3-5 hours for typical use (6-8 if I'm just idling and/or barely doing anything).

[horatiohornblower]

Time for a new battery. 80% is generally when you want to replace it. You’re down to 68%. At that level the reading isn’t reliable. As one cell might be really low.

Heat means high CPU usage and draw. You want to improve battery life. Look for the processes which are draining the battery and kill them. Also run blockers to reduce ad scripts. Which waste power.

Also look into nVidia Control Panel. Make sure your web browser and other apps aren’t set to use the dedicated GPU.

[Astarlessnightsky]

My Laptop has a battery saving mode and driver.

It slows down cpu/gpu/display brightness as much as it can, meaning they don't consume as much power.

Also maybe look in the task manager, maybe you got lots of unnescessary programms running in the background draining the battery.

Otherwise the battery may simply be too old and need to be replaced, which may be as expensive as getting a new laptop.

[bingbongbangbung]

i just rebooted my laptop and the battery sort of improved, but it's still overheating; i have the battery plan in battery saving mode by default when not charging. yesterday it was like 27-29C when it got extremely stuffy; today it's dropped down to 26-27C and it's barely stuffy, but my laptop is still overheating to the point that the fans are spinning. at least now the fans are only spinning over 2000RPM instead of 4000RPM like it was the day before which was ridiculous. and i'm also having my laptop sit on my laptop cooling pad, which should further reduce the chances of this even happening, so that just makes it even worse.

[bingbongbangbung]

i've used this laptop since January 2020 and i do tend to keep the brightness as low as possible, unless it's very sunny or i'm at school. my battery plan itself i already set a long time ago to severely limit hardware utilization when my laptop isn't charging either. i am using version 22H2 of Windows 10 Home Edition, so that can't be the cause (some might claim i'm using an outdated version of the OS). i also never have my dedicated GPU ever activated when i'm on battery since that is a huge battery killer, and any very demanding tasks like file transfer, gaming, or content creation i tend to only do when i'm charging.

[Astarlessnightsky]

Have you looked at the cpu usage? How much the CPU is working?

Thats what happens to my laptop, when the powersaving mode doesn't work, the cpu for some reasons powers at max capacity, which does use up a lot of power and and heats up rapidly.

[bingbongbangbung]

yeah i always look at usage when i open up task manager, and i do try to close background processes that are useless as well as closing/restarting Edge (Chromium). seems now my laptop battery is finally back to normal after i restarted Windows, used it like usual, recharged it and left the cooling pad running for several hours while i was out eating.

[alice55]

Maybe it's not your battery the problem but something else? My laptop overheat too but my battery is completely new (my laptop is super old though more than 10 years old).

I think the safest things to do it take it to a specialist who can tell you what's wrong with your computer.

[bingbongbangbung]

yeah it was just Windows being Windows; after a reboot, everything went back to normal

[alice55]

sometime computer are just being weird, one time my computer refused to open so I took it to the specialist and my computer opened directly and he told me it was just my computer being a computer sometime they're weird without reasons;

[bingbongbangbung]

yeah sometimes my laptop just does stupid shit that doesn't happen if i try to intentionally replicate the conditions that led to it

[exitseven]

Check your BIOS settings. Maybe the temperature or fan setting need to be changed.

[bingbongbangbung]

my BIOS is updated to the latest version according to Acer, and i can check my fans from NitroSense software; i already have CoolBoost enabled.

this problem was resolved a few days ago when i simply rebooted my laptop

[exitseven]

More often than not that does the trick

[bingbongbangbung]

yeah now it's gonna get as hot as it did a few days ago, but my battery hasn't drastically decreased like it did then

[exitseven]

Nice. I always had good luck with Acer.

[bingbongbangbung]

well i'm never gonna use nor buy Acer laptops (and other shit from them) ever again due to the multitude of problems i've had to deal with

[exitseven]

I never bought a laptop but I purchased quite a few desktops. They came in at a really good price and I had good luck with them.

[Sammy786]

Buy a Chromebook.

[bingbongbangbung]

Chromebooks are garbage, even the newer Ryzen-based ones (they're decent, but still kind of suck); i'm not gonna use a computer that lacks dedicated graphics

[bingbongbangbung]

i don't think i'll ever use a laptop ever again after this (unless i'm forced to). my future computers will either be desktops or tablets.

[Anonymous]

I never stop unplug it

[bingbongbangbung]

leaving a laptop constantly plugged in will permanently destroy battery life over time

[Opinion Owner]

I unplug it after it reaches 97%

[bingbongbangbung]

then why did you write you never stop?