I own a Lenovo Y500 series laptop. The battery being an year old lasts only 1 hour. But the strange thing is that, when the charge comes down to 25-20 it drops to 6%(critical battery level) in a moment.
Please suggest some solution (other than replacing the battery).
P.S. : I do many battery saving things already, like lowering brightness, switching to power-saver mode, turning off 'aero' on windows, etc.
Sorry to say it, but I don't think there's another answer to be had; what you are experiencing is usual for a battery that needs replacing.
Their expected life-span is only about 1 year (according to the manufacturers).
The reason the readings act weird is because when the battery becomes old and faulty it can't properly gauge the total capacity or current charge, so the gauge readings are based on inaccurate numbers.
There is some problem with the Lenovo Battery/UEFI Firmware. The Battery Manager on Window or tp_sampi module under linux is usually configured to extend the batteries life by only charging it to 85%.
But discharging the battery from 85% (eventually somehow related to hibernate) can cause the batteries charge counter to drift off more and more over time. The result is a sudden drop of battery life at some point (in my case, at around 45% it suddenly drops tp 6%). The battery reports 85% way too early.
People reported that setting the thresholds to 100% mostly resolved the problem after a few full charge cycles.
I know this is an old issue, but I've had the problem myself and the solution was to charge it fully, then leave it plugged in at 100% for about 2-3 days. After that, it discharged normally without any sudden % drops.
The issue I was having with Arch linux using TLP's battery re-calibration: the battery percentage would suddenly drop from around 60% down to 6% during the re-calibration itself. I didn't try discharging it normally, previously. The problem occurred after an extended period of leaving the laptop plugged in at around 50% capacity.
I've reset the charge thresholds on my Thinkpad now, and I'm going to observe how it works. If the problem re-appears, I can simply re-calibrate it the same way again.
I had same issue as yours. I posted question saying that notification is not showing up in Windows7. After posting the question here, I did try to find the problem and I found that even my battery life jumps same as yours from 25%-6%. After looking at your question, even I thought my laptop battery life is over. But, somehow I wanted to retest it again by changing some settings in the Balanced power mode and surprisingly it started working fine after changing couple of settings. If you look at my question Brian suggested some finding on net about this issue, so I tried to modify settings to get the notification after that it never jumped from 25%-6% again. Now, my laptop is working fine and notifying me when it reaches 10% and hibernates when it is at 5%.
As the answers you got from techie007 and others I'm not sure whether they should be accepted as is. I'm saying this because as soon as I shifted from XP to Windows 7 this problem started. I was bit lazy in finding the problem so I let it go for a month or so without investigating. But yesterday when put up a question all these findings have come out. Since then I was continuously testing my battery with full charge to completely dry out, it never jumped again. I'm not sure about your case, but in my case above answers doesn't apply to me and it might be a bug in the Windows7 OS. May be to get more clarity I need to switch back to XP, but I cant to do that at this moment.
One more addition to this reasoning is I've got 3 same laptops bought at the same time and all are having XP on them, they are still working fine only my laptop got this issue by switching to Windows 7.
May be I can check this by switching other laptop to Windows 7 in couple of weeks. I'll update it after that. Hope it works well.
I know that this is an old question. But I wanted to answer to this question because I disagree to many of the answers here. Although there is a chance that battery life has ended, it is mostly because of something else.
I also had the same problem. TLP was the culprit. It was because of this, the calibration was screwed up. I fixed it by setting the battery threshold to 100% and charging the laptop for about a day. Refer this. Try this before buying a new battery.
You could check your computer's documentation to see if it mentions anywhere battery calibration.
How often did you let the battery drain all the way? Since you said it's 1 year old, there is a good chance that it's lithium-ion battery, and you shouldn't let them go below 20% charge because if you do, they will wear out much faster than they normally do.
Just as techie007 said, the battery need to be replaced
In my experience on my laptop, at higher loads, the battery will drop from higher percentage levels down to about 7%. However, under lighter loads, the battery might get to 15-20% before it abruptly drops the percentage.
The reason for this is internal resistance. As batteries age, their internal resistance rises. While this affects battery life at all load levels, it affects heavier loads more than it does lighter loads. A new battery may be able to deliver 6 hours of operation under a particular light load and 3 hours under a particular heavy load. An old battery might be able to deliver 5 hours of operation under the same light load, but 90 minutes or less under the same heavy load.
Battery fuel gauges tend to assume that the remaining battery life and the amount of power drawn from them are inversely proportional. However, because internal resistance causes disproportionately more energy to be wasted as heat with heavier loads, this assumption fails to hold when the underlying cells have aged and the battery is under load. As a result, the battery reports that it has more power than it really does, then abruptly drops the reported state of charge when it realizes that it does not really have that much battery life left.
To monitor the status of the battery, you can use the free BatteryInfoView software. Most laptop batteries report their designed and current full charge capacities, which indicate the degree to which the battery has degraded. You may want to replace the battery if it holds less than 60% of its original capacity; heavily-aged batteries are more likely to completely fail and stop accepting charges altogether.
undercharging the battery then setting the threshold to 100% for couple of days worked for me. now i've put it back to 90% and I'll see if the sudden drop the charge will reappear again.
This problem about Lenovo (various models) battery charge suddenly dropping from a moderate charge level (~40% in my case, ~20% in this thread, dropping to ~6% or 7%) has been plaguing me since acquiring 4 NEW batteries, two from a third party provider (returned) and two from Lenovo-Encompass.
I FINALLY SOLVED THE PROBLEM!. It is caused by the power manager in Lenovo Vantage. Now I am again getting 3 hours battery life instead of 1 hour, in my ThinkPad E560.
The successful solution depends on: 1) restoring the max. charge level to 100%, in Lenovo Vantage, instead of e.g. 95%; and 2) doing three steps to completely uninstall Lenovo Vantage. You should know how to do part #1 already.
Part 2, step #1: Uninstall Lenovo Vantage from Win10's Apps list (you won't find it under Programs).
Part 2, step #2: Using an administrator command prompt, execute this command (without quote marks): "c:\windows\system32\imcontroller.infinstaller.exe -uninstall".
Part 2, step #3: In Device Manager, expand the System devices category. Right-click System Interface Foundation V2 Device, and then choose Uninstall. (Step 2 should have removed it, but in my case didn't.)
A further note - I bought my E560 in late 2017. For many months I was regularly having blue-screen crashes, sometimes several times per day. Finally, uninstalling Lenovo's battery utility of that time (Power Manager) solved the problem once and for all. (And many others had had this exact same problem, and it continued over many updates to Power Manager.) It seems Lenovo still has not figured out how to do battery management right (so rely on Windows battery management instead!), and may even have carried the same buggy part of the code over into Lenovo Vantage.
I used the battery calibration routine in Lenovo Vantage for all four of the new batteries, and ran it on some of them multiple times. It didn't fix the problem.
After restoring the two new batteries I still have to a max charge setting of 100%, battery performance is now how it should be. I did not need to recalibrate the batteries after removing Lenovo Vantage, in order to get the restored performance.
I should note that the first time I tried uninstalling Lenovo Vantage, I still had that "sudden drop" problem. On a cue I saw in another forum, it seemed my 95% max charge setting (still functioning then) may be the problem. I had to reinstall Lenovo Vantage to reset it to 100%, and then uninstalled it as I described earlier. Presto!! 3 hours battery life again, at the Low Battery warning with 15% left - just as it should be.
