TIL my laptop battery lasts longer when I stop believing the percentage

My 3-year-old Dell XPS 13 showed 15% battery at the coffee shop yesterday, so I plugged it in for 20 minutes and it jumped to 68%. Now I just ignore the number and run it until it actually shuts off - has anyone else noticed the gauge is completely lying to you?

3 comments

3 Comments

holly_reed5522d ago

My 2015 MacBook has 98,000 charge cycles and still gets 7 hours, so your battery is probably just dying.

wendy13121d ago

But why would you trust a battery gauge that clearly has its own agenda? My old HP Pavilion would sit at 5% for a solid 45 minutes browsing YouTube, then suddenly drop to 1% if I even looked at a video wrong. It's like they program these things to panic us into plugging in early so we don't actually see how much life is left. I've literally watched my percentage go up while playing games because the voltage fluctuates that much. Windows does this thing where it recalibrates after a full discharge, so if you never let it die completely the gauge just makes stuff up. Honestly your Dell might just need a good full drain to reset its lies.

wadew5121d ago

Yeah that actually makes a lot of sense. I used to just trust whatever Windows told me about my battery without thinking twice about it. But after reading your explanation about the voltage fluctuating and the gauge basically guessing when you don't fully drain it, I get why mine was always so unreliable. My old laptop would show 10% for like an hour doing nothing then just shut off. I always figured it was just wearing out. Now I realize I probably never let it calibrate right because I kept plugging it in at like 20%. Gonna try a full drain on my current one and see if it fixes the guessing game.