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Feedback needed for a guide

Before you read the rest of this post or the guide: I used a battery that is near the end of its life. I am not wasting a usable battery for this specific guide.

Why am I doing this?

  • Creative freedom
  • More character headroom in the originating guide
  • No more 60 line limitation problems since it's independent of the guide intro :-)
  • The process is not unique to the originating guide
  • It’s helpful for more people this way
  • I no longer have to worry about hitting the character limit

Another benefit to this approach is it allows me to discuss things like working around HP’s 15% soft stop where the laptop refuses to turn on without the charger plugged in, just to name one example. While I want to discuss how to defeat these protective measures, I could not do it before because of the line/character limits and I need to make some things clear:

  • The battery CAN BE DAMAGED if they are abused
  • These procedures are for calibration only
  • They are only usable for the duration of the calibration
  • UEFI and Legacy BIOSes have to be tackled differently (Spoiler: UEFI is easier)

I did not implement this information yet because I want to focus on perfecting how I am going to go about it. This means I'm going to use methods that meet this criteria:

  • Only useful for calibration purposes
  • Are not practical for everyday use
  • Least likely to cause battery damage

I know my first iteration will not be correct, but I can improve it as I go and get it right. I know battery damage isn't my fault, but I'd like to avoid a rewrite because I made a serious mistake.

Anyway, I’m looking for some feedback on the separated battery calibration steps. The link to the guide can be found here: battery recalibration guide

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Good write up.

I would suggest incorporating Windows 10's battery report to troubleshoot a battery.

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/gener...

If it drops up suddenly you know the battery is bad.

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4 Comments:

While I can't stand Windows 10 (and have very little time using it since we adopted it rather late here), that tool predates Windows 10. I've known about it since Windows 7.

While it's an old tool, it looks like the Windows 10 version is actually useful. That's why I didn't incorporate it - I considered it useless in 7 and 8.x because of how limited the reported data is. I'll put it on the to do list, but my priority is making my HP battery protection countermeasures as safe as I can for end users. UEFI is easy since it runs independent of the OS, but Legacy BIOS HP's don't have firmware level diagnostics that ignore the battery level. I need to make the calibration settings go away once the battery dies.

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The problem with this stance though is, how many people specifically use HP? How many people use Windows 8? If you noticed in your screenshots, the battery is a Dell. I would say widen the scope of the brands this can cover. I've never actually seen any questions about HP laptops in the Answers forum. I've seen a lot of Toshiba, Acer, Asus, and Dells.

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The main thing to remember right now is this guide is new so it still has problems that will be fixed over time. When a guide is new I focus on the issues I think should be covered first and work my way down. Generally speaking, more important problems come first before I work on other issues that need to be fixed.

You'd be surprised how popular HP laptops are in the consumer space in general. They aren't commom in business situations but they're very popular with everyday buyers. When it comes to Toshiba, Acer, Asus and Dell and having to work around BIOS imposed battery rundown limits these problems don't exist since they don't feel the need to use the BIOS to protect the battery. This is why there's no content on these laptops targeted towards them; the standard procedure can be used and does not require special attention. However, this is NOT the case with HP and Lenovo.

With that being said I do agree with you; I am going to add laptops with these problems as I get experience working around the problem but I don't plan on taking educated guesses that work with each manufacturer; I want to test and verify the procedure I am going to use. I'm working on diversifying the pool on protection measures like the ones used by HP and Lenovo (Lenovo is going to be finished once I finalize the HP procedure).

Generally you don't see many HP questions because the owners know the problem is probably expensive.

Where I am it's Dell or HP, generally speaking. I will never recommend HP because they suck for service, still insist on whitelisting wireless cards, have terrible hardware reliability and regurarly deny known defects but people still buy them. Historically I have liked Dell since they check more good boxes.

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@avanteguarde I've implemented the instructions for this recommendation, but I have not gotten on a Windows 10 machine to take pictures for this step. I will do this sooner rather then later.

It took longer then I wanted, but I had to worry about the HP procedures first and finalizing the Lenovo bypass. Yes, I see HP laptops in the wild. Mostly low end ones, but they do show up. You never really see anything from HP Z but those are a lot more expensive.

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Nick will be eternally grateful.