MS Rejects Claims that Win7 Causes Faulty Batteries

Late last week, a number of Windows 7 users lit up Microsoft's TechNet forums with complaints that they were experiencing a dramatic decline in the battery lives of their laptop computers after upgrading from XP or Vista to Windows 7. In a recent statement, however, Microsoft denies the charge and has stressed that these issues are strictly hardware-related.

Windows 7 Not Poisoning Batteries

In some cases, un-tethered notebook PCs were going into hibernation or shutdown mode after an incredibly short period of time, leaving recent Windows 7 adopters wondering if the operating system (OS) was somehow poisoning their systems.

Reacting to the issue last week, Microsoft initially explored the possibility that a firmware problem in some PC models was causing an error message related to battery life, which then resulted in the PCs being shutdown. However, now that this possibility has been reviewed, Microsoft is convinced the issue has nothing to do with software or Windows 7, and is now pointing its finger squarely at user hardware.

Battery to Blame "In Every Case"

"To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning [users that batteries] ... are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state," said Microsoft's Windows division president, Steven Sinofsky in a recent blog posting on the matter. "In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement." (Source: windowsitpro.com)

In other words, Microsoft claims that in just about every case where someone has experienced a steep decline in battery performance after making the switch to Windows 7, the issue has had nothing at all to do with Windows 7.

Sinofsky added that the error message related to battery life is a new message exclusive to Windows 7, and that people might have received the same warning message in XP or Vista, but the feature did not exist at that time.

"We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 'causing' the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case," Sinofsky added. (Source: cnet.com)