Limit charging to 80% on an omnibook

[trashcan4u]

I have an omnibook Ryzen ai. There is a tick in my BIOS "adaptive battery optimizer", however, it doesn't limit battery charging being 80%

If the answer is that ticking the setting limits the charge percent. I want to know how to verify this. Because windows reports 100%. Why would it not report 80% like a normal laptop?

Both my cheaper Acer and Lenovo laptops allow me to set charge percents. Lenovo is the best. I can set it as low as 45% even. It also gives start and stop range setting like allowing to start charge at 45% and stop at %70 etc. So flexible... So I wonder why HP seems so much behind the curve? I didn't buy HP for long time since their Pavilion series because they were so bad. I won't be sorry for buying this laptop. 😭 and sorry for the rant, but it is annoying to not have this simple feature working properly in 2025!

[banhien]

@trashcan4u 

I believe it is a business class machine. Please use section 3 of the following document

                  https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_2268927-1713329-16

Regards.

[trashcan4u]

Hi,

The device product ID is B12E9EA - HP Omnibook Ultra Laptop 14-fd0xxx. It does not have the options mentioned in section 3 of the link you provided in the BIOS. The only option I saw was the adaptive battery optimizer. It is unclear what adaptive battery optimizer does. Because HP does not have any explanation of it anywhere. 

I do not understand what difference it being a business class machine should make? it is not like having this feature would make the laptop more expensive to produce, or require huge development budgets. Almost all, new laptops (and phones) from other manufacturers have this feature. Thinkpads had this feature since early 2000s afaik.

Also, why from BIOS? I can set this both on acer and lenovo from the app they provide. Very weird if even in very expensive business laptops, people will need to enter the bios to set settings, in year 2025 :)))

Before you tell me that I have to contact local HP support. Can you also tell me how? Do they have a free phone number to call? or a place to go? I reside in Finland. I find it is easy to say that one should contact the HP support but contacting it and reaching somebody who can help is not as easy as it seems.

Thanks,

[trashcan4u]

Well, it seems not possible to force activate the adaptive battery optimizer on this laptop.

I also bought an EliteBook and it is able to limit the battery full voltage. Albeit it is from bios (requires reboot to change) and windows still shows 100%(so there is no easy way to know if feature is turned on or off) which is very very poor design choices. (compared to Acer, Lenovo etc.)

This whole experience reminded me why I did not buy an HP laptop for a long time. 🙂 but at least HP had decency to make semi decent AMD Ryzen AI laptops. At least from the choices in my area, although HP was a bit expensive for giving me so much grief with the bad management apps pre-loaded 🙂

[96Mystic]

Many thanks for your original question and this follow-up post.  I also have a Ryzen-based Omnibook Ultra 14 (AA3B5UA), and wanted to limit the battery charging to 80%.  Microsoft's Windows support page on that feature indicates that it's wholly up to the device manufacturer to implement this capability.  I don't know why that's the case, but even so, I don't know why any manufacturer would intentionally prevent its customers from using this feature.  However, like you I have concluded that is indeed the case with HP and these Omnibook laptops.

This is very frustrating.  I have reasons to leave my laptop on 24/7, so it stays plugged in all the time.  I know this behavior is unnecessarily harsh on the battery, and it would cause less degradation if the system would manage the battery to an intermediate charge level during this continuous operation.  Ugh.

[trashcan4u]

Thanks for signing up to comment 🙂  It is the business logic of HP I think.  Like some car companies selling subscription for seat heaters 🙂 HP seems to be selling this feature as a premium feature.

Unfortunately I think Windows does not have access to the hardware in a way that it can limit or stop charging. It is up to the manufacturer of the laptop to have the necessary software. That sounds logical.

That said, Lenovo is the best in this area. I have laptop which I keep plugged in and I always keep battery between 40% and 45% range. It is now roughly 5 years old and battery design capacity is 45.73Wh and it can still take 38.65Wh according to the Lenovo app. That's 84% of the original capacity still retained after 5years. Not so bad...

I have Acer Swift Go 14 AMD Ryzen and it allows limiting to 80% only. But that laptop has build quality of Elitebook for half the price. I have to say it feels better than my Lenovo E495 which is about 5 years old now.

[96Mystic]

"Unfortunately I think Windows does not have access to the hardware in a way that it can limit or stop charging. It is up to the manufacturer of the laptop to have the necessary software. That sounds logical."

I guess I didn't really think about that, but you may be right.  That said, Windows does know that the battery *is* or *is not* charging, so it seems like it would be a trivial step in PC design to allow the OS to go one step further and control the charge state in addition to being able to monitor the charge state.