[John D]

Thanks for the replies.

I’m not sure how I would go about getting a replacement battery that’s the same type.

I did try a live USB linux with no change. And I did toy with the idea of opening the battery up on the off chance that there might be something obvious like faulty wiring. But my daughter had to head back to University in another city so I figured she could take it with her and at least have a working laptop as long as she had access to a power outlet.

I did use the refund to buy a replacement Pro version4 which I have now recieved. It is working perfectly. So the plan is to give the new one to my daughter the next time she is home and then I can get a bit more adventurous with the old one.

[John D]

Final update. Long story short, all evidence indicated a faulty battery. I complained to GearBest and the options were return it to China or they would give me a $35 refund. I took the refund option as returning to China is too expensive. Everything else is fine. It’s just not portable anymore.

Unfortunately that’s the risk when buying from these Chinese sellers.

[John D]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I couldn’t believe that your discharge rate was so low Norg. BatteryBar regularly sits between 13,000 and 20,000 mW on my laptop. This was the first clue that the problem looked like something causing some serious drain on the battery.

So I checked task manager and found from time to time something called “Windows Modules Installer Worker” would run the cpu up to high levels. A bit of googling seemed to indicate that I could disable this service without any serious system effects. But disabling that didn’t seem to make that much difference.

So I continued tinkering around the system and as soon as I disabled wifi the battery drain reduced back to more normal levels. Ok, I thought. Surely it can’t actually be the fact that wifi is on that’s the problem. It’s more likely to be something that’s using the wifi for something. So I restarted wifi and to cut a long story short, as soon as I disabled OneDrive the battery drain once again dropped back to more normal levels. Once again, a bit of googling seemed to indicate that OneDrive can be a bit finicky about the way it’s setup and has been known to be a power drain. The sinister thing is though that there’s no indication in task manager of anything out of the ordinary.

Anyway, I’ve only just discovered all this so I’m still investigating and observing to see if I’m onto something or it’s just a coincidence. I’ll update when I have more convincing data.

[Author]

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