Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The crappy Battery levels on the BenQ E72

Did you notice that some report a bad battery life for this device? I did as well and there are several reasons possible for that - the most important one imho is the crappy battery level indication on the device (at least on mine - the BT-Fusion branded Version):

If you watch the Battery-Level in Windows, it reaches 100% already with a battery voltage of only 39xx mV - far less than a fully charged battery. Always watch for the green LED to indicate a full charge - this comes at 42xx mV as it should be.

This problem applies as well for the dis-charge: Any battery voltage above 3906 mV is reported as 100%. So you think the battery lasts forever - just to give you a bad surprise below that voltage. The Tornado is way below 80% here...

I still hope that this is due to a crappy battery.dll which may be a special version for the BT-Fusion device. In its intended use, it will eat more power than a normal device as it will scan for WIFI to connect a VOIP call via Internet if possible.

If you want to contribute your observations for a non BT-Fusion device - you can get the Voltage and Charge Percentage from the registry anytime at: HKLM\System\State\ or simply use the well known CeleTask option "Power Status".

If you know of a working(!) Batterymonitor that logs data to a file please tell me. My current idea is to create a MortScript that polls the registry and writes data to a file - yet no time to do that actually.

Edit 20090104:
In the meantime I have seen that the charge-level may not only depend on the batteryvoltage alone - see especially this link. When scanning the extracted files from the ROM dump, I have also found a huge bunch of possible registry entries in the battery.dll module. I will not try to debug their influence, so my only hope is that some other ROM contains a better charge-level calculation.

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