Have I destroyed my battery?!

[jamess]

I've gone climbing for the weekend and forgot my laptop unpluged. It was on stand-by when I left it. When I attached the power cord and powered it on, the battery capacity was 0%. Totally empty. Does this mean I've just radically shortened the life of my battery? Why hasn't the computer gone into some really deep hibernate state at 5%? Vista is acting crazy with this "ever-draining" hibernate mode.

Thanks for help.

[iamdmc]

This isn't necessarily a huge problem. Let me explain.

Vista "sleep" draws power - a lot, actually. It's normal that your battery drained completely.

Vista might not go into hibernate by itself, since the power settings you have set may not allow it. For example, on my High Performance setting, I have the computer go into standby after around 10 minutes of idling, and set hibernate to "never" or 1080minutes. The battery will surely die before 1080minutes is up, so the computer will not have a chance to go into hibernation.

Note also that hibernation, while it doesn't necessarily draw power (you can take your battery out altogether after it's done its hibernation process and the computer will still be in hibernation mode) it does take a considerable amount of charge to put the computer into hibernation mode and then to resume from hibernation mode to normal. You may lose 2-3% of the battery time in the process.

My advice: Charge the battery to full, change your power settings/options, and don't worry. If you still feel like there might be a problem, monitor the battery life during your normal usage.

GL

[Xtal]

If you're able to successfully recharge the battery then there's no harm done. The battery has built-in circuitry to prevent it from over-discharging. Obviously this isn't something you want to happen all the time but there's no cause for alarm. Normally you want to keep the charge level above 20% if possible.

[jamess]

Many thanks for explanation/help.