Sudden shutdown despite > 50% battery

[syrom]

My Spectre x2 (to be precise: HP_Spectre_x2_12_a001ng) seems to have a problem with its power management.

It regularly shuts down completely despite the battery having roughly 40-50 % of its capacity.

Furthermore, it's not a regular shutdown, but rather a crash.... several programs complain that they were not properly terminated when rebooting after such an occurance,

I checked the advanced power setting: "low" is defined as 10%, "critical" as 5%.

For whatever reason, these levels are never reached. And it is unlikely that Windows is tricked to believe that the level is that low: I can restarted the system without further ado after connecting the device to the power supply - and the battery settings immediately show the high level of 40-50% of remaining power after the system comes up.

Furthermore, I ran the HP battery test - and it tells me the battery is just fine.

Last info: I'm running in the "balanced" energy mode.

Very annoying to practically loose half of your battery life in spite of the fact that the power actually is there...... 

[Huffer]

That is just it. The power is not actually there. Can you do a deeper dive into the advanced battery diagnostics and post the results that show how many cycles and the charge capacity of each cell? If a battery is going bad it can often put out misleading information to the monitor program.

I might also suggest a calibration but that is difficult if the battery just cuts out like that. How old is the computer and how old is the battery?

[syrom]

Is this what you mean ?

Sorry, system language is German - but I assume you'll be able to make sense of this 🙂

If this is the case: do I correctly presume that I have a problem with the cell 4 of my battery pack.... it shows 0 mV cell tension, whereas the other 3 cells show tension in the 4.100 mV area. I'm not an electrical engineer.... but having a dead cell in a pack of 4 can probably trigger this kind of behaviour, can't it ?

I hadn't noticed that there was more detailed info available ... so thanks for pointing this out.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

I do happen to read a little German (badly). Actually it probably just means you have a 3-cell battery. The 0% on one cell is normal. The battery only has 78% of its design capacity, however, which is not great but not fatal in and of itself. Have you tried removing and reinstalling the battery drivers? Go into device manager and remove the devices under the battery category and reboot. The drivers will reinstall. This is a bit of a longshot but easy so worth a try. When you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras and when the battery is over a year old and misbehaves the most likely answer is it needs to be replaced. Any other explanation is an outlier in terms of probability. 

[syrom]

Thanks ! Did do as suggested and deinstalled the driver.... now I will have to observe if this helps.

Otherwise, I'll go with your other explanation and will blame it on the  > 2 years of age of the battery pack.

Still leaves me a bit uneasy, though: 2 yrs.  is not THAT old and I think I can claim that I used the device "responsibly" in terms of battery care (regular depletion; no endless charging etc. etc.).

But a big THANK YOU for being so supportive !