Why does a laptop say it’s at 6-8% charge, and then it dies, but when it’s at a higher charge, going from 60% to 59% takes a while?
In: Technology
There are other explanations, but I also know that windows allows you to change the shutdown percentage, I dont know what the minimums and maximums are, but that is ine reason.
It’s because the charge isn’t accurately measured, sometimes even just generated based on average usage. Phones do this heavily, which is why it seems to drain down to nothing for heavy phone users, then sit there at almost nothing for a very long time.
If you click on the battery icon on your laptop, click on more power options, then change plan settings (for whatever plan you want), then advanced power settings. Then under the battery setting you can change what % is considered critical, low, medium, etc… Also what the computer should do at each stage. Could have your laptop force shutdown at 5% or 10% or whatever amount you like.
Has to do with battery chemistry and the discharge curve of a Li-ion battery.
Voltage is all you can really read off the battery. The difference between 10 and 20% is a lot of volts, 30 and 60% very few volts, and then 90 and 100 is a lot of volts.
That’s why it drops from 100 -> 70-ish super fast, stays there for a while, then immediately tanks from 25 -> 0
It depends on your settings. Laptops automatically shutdown or hibernate with a certain battery level.
I have mine set to 5% but you can change it to whatever setting you want
Don’t forget that it’s an estimate, this information is provided to you by the chip in the battery itself (in most, if not all, modern laptops), then further processed by the operating system. The battery (chip) can be calibrated to provide more accurate information, this is often done in the factory, but over time, as you use the battery, that initial calibration information becomes less useful because the battery degrades.
Your operating system also further processes that battery information and tries to estimate how long the battery will last on the current load, however, it can’t predict what you’re going to do next, whether you’re going to close all the applications or open something that requires lots of power.
Lastly, it’s unhealthy for batteries to completely run out of charge, so what you see isn’t the true battery charge level, so the operating system and your motherboard will usually try to protect the battery and kill your laptop before the battery itself fully runs out of charge.
I’m not an engineer, but there’s the whole issue with voltages, which further contributes to the problem.
N.B. a lot of this is based on my own experience, my computer science degree and some quick research, please forgive any inaccuracies.
Batteries aren’t perfect in the way they charge and discharge. Lithium batteries, like the ones in almost all portable devices, are very delicate, and require special care in order to charge and discharge properly. Your phone never fully discharges, because if a lithium battery fully discharges it will never charge again because something inside the battery changes chemically. Your phone or laptop is constantly monitoring the exact voltage of your battery, and the voltage tends to be more consistent when the battery is above 10-15%, but when it drops below that, the voltage becomes inconsistent and often dips below and above the acceptable range, causing the software to shut off your computer
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