Reading laptop battery EEPROMs

[tiker]

Can HWiNFO read the recharge cycle counter from laptop batteries?

I've got a couple laptops which suddenly started reporting battery wear issues but I'm quite certain the batteries are fine.

I'm wondering if this information can be read through software and if HWiNFO can read the data. I haven't been able to see it so far.

The laptops are: Dell Latitude D830 and Dell Latitude D630.

 

[Martin]

Well, I don't know what exactly information do you need.
Please have a look here if you see such information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa372698(v=vs.85).aspx
or here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa372699(v=vs.85).aspx

 

[tiker]

Well, I don't know what exactly information do you need.
Please have a look here if you see such information:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa372698(v=vs.85).aspx
or here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa372699(v=vs.85).aspx

Found it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa372661(v=vs.85).aspx

CycleCount
The number of charge/discharge cycles the battery has experienced. This provides a means to determine the battery's wear. If the battery does not support a cycle counter, this member is zero.

It seems Lenovo laptops have this showing in their battery software (shown in the image at the end of this thread - http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and...arging-and-Orange-Light-Flashing/td-p/1072645) but I haven't found anything similar for Dell yet.

A colleague found that if the ACPI service is disabled in Windows, it will stop reporting the battery needs replacing, resumes charging the battery and the system runs as it did before the flag was tripped.

It looks possible to reset the counter value as well (http://sbworkshop.com/ as an example using custom hardware) but I'm sure that's beyond the intended functionality of HWiNFO.

If it's possible to read this value for now with HWiNFO, it would be great.

Thanks.

 

[Martin]

HWiNFO reports the Cycle Count in the main window with detailed battery information.
If you don't see this entry, it means the battery doesn't support reporting it.

 

[tiker]

Ok, thanks for the information. I didn't see a red X icon and "not supported' in any of the battery windows for charge cycles like I see in the motherboard section so I thought HWiNFO wasn't checking for this.

I know the battery has this chip. I've opened the battery casing on one of them to verify. I'll keep looking for other ways to read the information.

Thanks.

 

[Martin]

It's most probably that the firmware in the notebook doesn't support reporting this.

 

[bg17aw]

It's most probably that the firmware in the notebook doesn't support reporting this.

Hi Malik,

Just to confirm this is not working on a Lenovo T420. As you know, Lenovo T series display this information in their Power Manager software, so the firmware is not the issue.

Dell Latitude E5540 and E5550 also do not display this.

 

[Martin]

There's a standard ACPI interface to report battery status, which is passed to Windows and reported by HWiNFO as Smart Battery status.
If HWiNFO doesn't show this information on a particular notebook then it probably doesn't pass this information using industry-wide standards, but rather something proprietary.

 

[bg17aw]

There's a standard ACPI interface to report battery status, which is passed to Windows and reported by HWiNFO as Smart Battery status.
If HWiNFO doesn't show this information on a particular notebook then it probably doesn't pass this information using industry-wide standards, but rather something proprietary.

We're talking about a LEnovo T420 though.
Given the number of laptops I tested this on, from various manufacturers, seems like something could be done better.
At least for Lenovo laptops, that we know for sure are able to report cycle count