Microsoft said on Monday that users experiencing battery warnings from Windows 7 are by design.
Last week BlogoFlux revealed reports of users receiving notifications that they should replace their laptop battery. The warning is triggered when a laptops BIOS detects a battery replacement is required. Windows 7 provides the following alert: “Consider replacing your battery. There is a problem with your battery, so your computer might shut down suddenly.” Some users claimed their laptop battery’s had gone from two hours battery life to 30 minutes whilst others threatened class action lawsuits assuming the software giant had “permanently damaged” their laptop battery.
Microsoft officials confirmed on Monday that the company looked into the issue fully and found no problems with Windows 7. “In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement,” said Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft President of Windows. In a company blog posting, Sinofsky also stated “To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that 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.”
Microsoft has received 20 customer service incidents and states none of these have shown anything other than degraded batteries. “The notifications appear to be working as they were designed to do from what we’re seeing” said a Microsoft Spokesperson. From the reports that Microsoft has seen across the Internet they “seem to be from people who don’t realize that this is new functionality in Windows 7 that just wasn’t available previously,” the spokesperson confirmed.
