HP Power Manager is broken

[nuGenTio]

I have an HP Probook with a 53Wh battery

The HP Power Manager offers the option to "Maximize My Battery Health".
This reduces the available battery capacity from 100% to around 80%.

This can be seen by looking at the HWInfo stats:


It shows that the available capacity is 43.209Wh, which is around 80% of the 53Wh battery.

However, both Windows and HP Power Manager both report the battery as 100% charged:

This is misleading.

Yes, it's 100% of the available capacity, but it's only 80% of the *original* capacity.
In my view this is misleading and it creates a lot of confusion.

HP should fix it and show 80% (which is much clearer and is what other manufacturers do).


The second issue, is that once you enable "Maximize My Battery Health", there's no way to force the laptop to charge back up to 100%.

There is another option, "Let HP Manage My Battery", which is supposed to "intelligently" charge the battery, but you still cannot manually set it to 100% charge.

So, right now, I'm stuck at 80% of the maximum battery capacity, and the displayed battery percentage is wrong.

[banhien]

@nuGenTio 

What is your machine ? Is it a Business class machine ?

Regards.

[nuGenTio]

Hi,

yes, it's a HP ProBook 635 Aero G8.

I would appreciate your help with this issue.

Thanks

[banhien]

@nuGenTio 

I think the tool is having a bug. I actually do not really care about battery because I use AC power nearly 100% of all my notebooks (Dell, HP, Surface, Asus and Lenovo). Today, I look at HPSA and it reprts battery on my 840 G5 machine which I  bough on early July 2018, warranty expired yesterday (15Jul2022) , looks like system sees my battery has totally out of nowhere, I set limit is 80% from day 1

      

Regards.

[nuGenTio]

Is there anyone from HP that can help?

I have a business class laptop and HP Power Manager is severely faulty.

My previous laptop (a Huawei), did not have this issue.

its own power manager correctly displayed the battery capacity and I was able to switch between profiles easily.

Thanks

[IT_WinSec]

Hello,

HP Power Manager is not faulty but working as designed.
Please, check this article here >> https://support.hp.com/nz-en/document/ish_5180936-5180983-16

If you use Windows 11, it will show an extra icon to indicate you are on this special mode.

If you uninstall HP Power Manager, the current settings are preserved and controlled by the BIOS - Battery Health Manager -> You can also review this article >> https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_4449597-3519507-16

Microsoft also have an article >> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/2db3e37f-5e7d-488e-9086-ed15320519e4

[nuGenTio]

Hi and thanks for your reply.

I understand that HP has decided to display 100% battery SoC even when only 80% is used:

"Before this update, Maximize My Battery Health caused the Windows icon tray to display a maximum charge of 80%. After the update, the Windows icon tray displays a maximum charge of 100%. This change was made to create a more user-friendly and consistent customer experience."

IMHO, this is not more user-friendly.

The reason is that it's quite easy to forget that the "100%" charge is in fact only 80%.

If I want to take my laptop on a long day trip, I will look at the battery charge, see the "100%" and assume it's fully charged.

In reality, it's only 80% charged, so that's misleading.

I appreciate that this is addressed in Windows 11:

"After this update, if you are running the Windows 11 operating system, a small heart icon is displayed in the Windows icon tray. This heart icon indicates that a battery health feature has been enabled."

But, the majority of your users are running Windows 11, at the time of writing.

The second issue is that there isn't a simple "one-click" on/off switch.

HP's Intelligent Charging is inconsistent, at best. No program can accurately predict charging patterns, particularly for business laptops, where demands can be unpredictable.

In my view, it would be really helpful to have a simple on/off switch.

Now, if I manually want to fully charge my battery to 100% before a long trip, I have to:

(1) Uninstall HP Power Manager

(2) Boot into BIOS

(3) Ensure Power Management is off

(4) Reboot

And when I'm back, I have to do all those steps in reverse.

All of this could be avoided by having a simple on/off switch (like other manufacturers).

Thank you