Running at 0% battery... for 2 hours...?

Huh? My friend has a laptop that is running pretty well. She wants me to put Win7 on it for her, so i'mma do that Sunday... i noticed something odd though. She freaked out cause i didn't take the charger upstairs (they don't have wifi) to use the computer. She said that the battery died in like 5 minutes. Well, it went from 100 to 25% in five minutes, then Windows went into standby.

I figured the battery was just screwed up, so i charged it up, then disabled ALL power management, and drained the battery to 0% with Prime 95... it did this for two hours before the battery actually cut off power to the computer... uh... huh? Is there any way i can reset the battery and let it know that there is, in fact, power left? It's reporting 0% to the OS, so it's making it hard to configure the OS. It droppes from 100% to 0% in about 15 or so minutes now, and then sits at 0% chugging away for a good while longer. I don't get it. If figured charging it up, and then draining it a few times would work, but it's still doing it... any ideas anyone? Is there a program or something i can use to reset the battery's internal computer?

It's about 5 years old, and it's spent most of its time plugged in. It might have gotten drained to about 50% then plugged back in... the owner said that she maybe had it die on her about 3 times.. i assume it's a Li-ion battery, but i didn't have a chance to check. It's also charging just as fast as it's discharging....

Any input is welcome... i'm stumped :/

On some laptops there is a battery recalibrate in bios, good luck.

wingman99 said:

On some laptops there is a battery recalibrate in bios, good luck.

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I have one on my IBM laptop from 10 years ago...

Sadly, this is a HP, so useful features like that are missing

Try updating the bios.... or at least looking at the history fix, i have fixed a number of laptops by updating the bios.

imposter said:

Try updating the bios.... or at least looking at the history fix, i have fixed a number of laptops by updating the bios.

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Will do. Could probably use a BIOS update anyway.

EDIT: My friend just told me that it's taking it a while to charge up now. About 1% every two minutes or so, and that if she unplugs it it's discharging pretty slowely too... maybe just charging it and killing it a few times was all it needed?