Is this battery damaged?

Hi!

Is there a simple method to test a laptop battery?

Scenario: NEC Packard Bell laptop with AMD Sempron processor. After recharging the battery to its maximum level (which takes only about half an hour), the meter displays 100% and 2 hours of estimated time to run.
Then after two minutes, the level becomes 98% and surprisingly the time is 45 minutes!
Another 5 minutes and it becomes 70% and 30 minutes.

Then I feel it runs the last half with decreasing level till it reaches 6% and only 2 minutes.
So, the overall running time is between 40 and 35 minutes!
This battery is damaged, isn't it?
And another question here, is it normal to spread so much heat from the side (as it uses AMD processor).

Amjad!

 

sounds damaged i would recommend checking the specs of how long the battery should last by contacting Packard Bell. But a 45minute life span is rather short for a laptop also you may want to check wether or not it is running in a power saving mode you can check this by the power options. And about the heat issue i dont think its a problem i have a 1.8ghz AMD Turion64 in my Laptop and they only way for the heat to get out is thru the side or rear vent on my laptop since it only has two ways of dispersing heat.

 

Just sounds like a bad battery.

How old is it? My laptop batteries only last about a year and half at most.

 

Yes it's using the "Prtable/Laptop" power scheme.

Thanks for the explanation. It's good to hear that it's a normal behavior.

 

I can't tell exactly how old this laptop is. I think it dates back to 2005 (The year when this model was released)

 

I checked with Packard Bell Support and they listed the specs there.
They said that the charging time for this battery is between 2 and 5 hours depending on computer activity.
And the running time is about 1.3 hours (max) also depending on computer activity.

So, there is a problem, isn't there?

confused